Sarah Kanouse

Sarah Kanouse (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer examining the political, colonial, and racialized ecologies of landscape. Migrating between video, photography, sound, and performance, her expanded nonfiction media projects shift the visual dimension of landscape to allow hidden stories of transformation to emerge.

Sarah’s most recent solo project, My Electric Genealogy (2022-2023), is a performance lecture that considers the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles through her own family’s involvement in extractive infrastructure. Collaboration, co-creation, and social engagement are often hallmarks of Sarah’s practice. Native Spaces (2024-ongoing) is a platform co-designed with Elizabeth Solomon of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag for sharing artful, place-based narratives of Indigenous presence, pasts, and futures in the traditional homelands of the Tribe.

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. Her essays on performative and site-based contemporary art practices have appeared in the journals Art Journal, Forty-Five, Panorama, Acme, Leonardo, Parallax, and Cultural Geographies, as well the edited volumes Toxic Immanence; Ecologies, Agents, Terrains; Critical Landscapes; Art Against the Law; and Mapping Environmental Issues in the City. With Nicholas Brown, she explored landscapes of settler commemoration in the Midwest in the photo-text book Re-Collecting Black Hawk (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). With Shiloh Krupar, she co-edited the digital humanities platform A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado (2021).

A 2019 Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Kanouse is Associate Professor in the Department of Art + Design in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University. She is a member of the advisory board of the Northeastern Humanities Center, core faculty with the Center for Transformative Media, and affiliate faculty with the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences.