Education:
After receiving my MFA from the University of Arizona, I moved to the Netherlands where with the support of the Dutch American Funds and the VSB Funds, I was an artist resident at the Rijksakademie. This was followed by two years as a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. With an interest in online writing, I pursued a second Master’s degree in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University (Leicester, GB) with a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology. Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate at LUCA’s Intermedia Research Unit: Deep Histories Fragile Memories.
Past & Present Research Practice:
From 1996 until 2012, I collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. When we started, we were influenced by our time together at the Jan van Eyck where art, design and theory co-existed. We were also fascinated by the emergence of the internet, the popular vernacular of the web and the DIY sharing culture made possible by networked connectivity. Our practice took on various forms and combined art, design, coding, theoretical enquiry, and ongoing dialogue with others. Our projects were funded by the Mondriaan Foundation, the Amsterdam Funding for the Arts and Mama Cash. Next to national and international exhibitions at De Appel, Manifesta, and the Bienal de Valencia, De Geuzen’s work has been featured in Rhizome, Mute, and Thames and Hudson’s Internet Art.
Building on my collaborative work with De Geuzen, I continued with various visual forms of research, writing, and collaborating with others to explore female identity, narratives of the archive, media ecologies, and co-learning spaces. These projects have taken place within different academies and cultural organisations. From 2015 to 2018, I received a Start-Up Grant from the Creative Industry Funds and a Stipendium for Established Artists from the Mondriaan Foundation to work at Herengracht 401 (H401). It was there that I developed The Warp and Weft of Memory, a project exploring the wardrobe of Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht, a Dutch artist who once lived at Herengracht 401 in Amsterdam. Although she passed away in 2013 at the age of one hundred, traces of her figure can still be sensed through the shape and wear of her clothes. Spanning decades, the range of garments amassed over the years illustrates her fascination with travel, textiles, and design. There are Greek woollen vests, a Chinese silk jacket, and several dresses fashioned by the renowned Dutch designer Dick Holthaus. All were meticulously itemised in Gisèle’s own wardrobe inventories, and many are represented in her photographic archive. That body of research resulted in an exhibition, different publications, public events, and an online narrative archive reflecting on her closet and photographic archive contents.
Parallel to my current research within the Deep Histories Fragile Memories unit, I am a Fellow at V2 Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. Within this context, I’m exploring a range of topics from AI to natural intelligence through a slow reading approach.
Work within Art Education:
Simultaneous with these activities, over the past years, I have taught art, design and theory at the BA and MA level at different institutions such as the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (Bergen, NO) and St. Joost Academy (Breda, NL). I have also been a PhD supervisor for the PhDArts programme at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague. For several years, I have worked at the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning, Hogeschool Rotterdam. I was a Core Tutor in the MFA programme and later became the Course Director of the Master Media Design and Communication Course. From 2011-2015, I served as the Director of the Piet Zwart Institute. Currently, I am a Senior Research Lecturer, a graduation supervisor at the Master Education in Arts and a researcher within the Rotterdam Arts and Science Lab (RASL), a transdisciplinary consortium between the Willem de Kooning Academy, Erasmus University, and Codarts. In this respect, the borders between education and my practice as an artist have always been porous.