Departments
Art + Design
Education
- MFA Studio Art, University of Illinois
- BA in Art, Yale University
Awards
- Northwestern University, Kaplan Humanities Institute, Artist-in-Residence (2023)
- New England Foundation for the Arts, Collective Imagination for Spatial Justice Grant (2021-2022)
- Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society Fellow (2019-2020)
Sarah Kanouse is an interdisciplinary artist and critical writer examining the politics of landscape and space. Migrating between video, photography, and performative forms, her research-based creative projects shift the visual dimension of the landscape to allow hidden stories of environmental and social transformation to emerge. She is currently touring “My Electric Genealogy,” a performance-lecture that considers the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles through her own family’s involvement in extractive infrastructure.
Sarah Kanouse has contributed to exhibitions, festivals, and creative research platforms mounted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, the Cooper Union, the Minneapolis Museum of American Art, the Clark Art Institute, the Smart Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, as well as film festivals and academic institutions worldwide. She is also the author or co-author of thirty peer-reviewed or invited publications, largely on the politics of landscape, ecology, and public memory, including the photo-text book Re-Collecting Black Hawk (co-authored with Nicholas Brown, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
A 2019-2020 Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Kanouse is Associate Professor of Media Arts in the Department of Art + Design. She holds an MFA degree from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an undergraduate degree from Yale University.
