Kaitlin Bryson
Art + Ecology
Kaitlin Bryson is a queer transdisciplinary ecological artist and educator based in Santa Fe, New Mexico [USA] concerned with environmental and social justice and multispecies thriving. She primarily works with fungi, plants, microbes and biodegradable materials to engage more-than-human audiences, while also facilitating human communities through ecosocial practice. Her practice is research-based and most often collaborative, highlighting the potency of working like lichens to realize radical change and justice. In 2019, Bryson co-founded The Submergence Collective, an environmental art collective focused on multidisciplinary projects that imagine more collaborative, creative, hopeful, and ecologically connected futures for our human species and the rest of the living world.
Bryson received her MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico in 2018, where she concurrently studied art and mycology with research in ecotoxicology. Currently, she holds a Lecturer III faculty position in Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico and is the Field Coordinator for the Land Arts of the American West Program. Bryson’s transdisciplinary teaching focuses on facilitating ecologically relational practices informed by queer and critical ecology and traditional ecological knowledge, to enroot decolonial, interconnected, contemporary environmental art practices.
She has worked on multiple land and bioremediation projects with Tewa Women United and Communities for Clean Water in New Mexico, USA. She has received support from the Lannan and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation(s) to create ecologically remediative artworks nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of the 2022 Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Arts Grant, as well as the 2022 Future Art Award: Ecosystem X from Mozaik Philanthropy, and a 2022 Fulcrum Fund from 516 Arts. Bryson has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and in Mexico, Ireland, and Nepal as well as in notable festivals such as Ars Electronica (AT) and Politics of the Machine (DE). Her artwork and activism have been featured in books such as “In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms”, by Doug Bierend and The New Farmer’s Almanac “The Grand Land Plan” and in the Autumn 2022 Edition of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. In April of this year, she was selected as one of the “12 Artists to Know In New Mexico” by Southwest Contemporary.