A b o u t
A n y a
G l e i z e r
A r t i s t
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My practice is conducted at an interface between art and science. The first half of my academic career unfolded as a conservation biologist working in Alaska and Siberia. In 2013, I decided to change the way I articulated the boundary between myself and the ecosystems I was studying/participating in; I decided to be an artist, changing my methods but not my study. Since then, I have been interested in the different methodologies that allow one discipline to claim scientific nature and another an artistic one, and the affordances of both. In clarifying the affordances (of the scientific vs. artistic method) we inch closer to understanding our relationships with our “natural” and “socio-cultural” environments, and why we insist on articulating them as separate. At the centre of this questioning, the boundary that allows the nature/culture binary to persist begins to slip. In my art practice, I explore themes of interior and exterior wilderness through performances and installations that question our assumptions about art and science.
Born in Russia, and brought up in New York City, I have travelled extensively for my research, working with indigenous communities across Russia, with genomics labs in the American Museum of Natural History, with film-makers in Japan and with wolves and moose on Lake Superior. I have chased a 17th century haiku poet around the coastlines of Honshu and a 19th century anthropologist up the Yenisei River. I have circumnavigated lake Baikal and monitored arctic shorebirds in Chukotka.
Faced with the dwindling of wilderness and wildness in watersheds, collapsing ecosystems or in our own human minds, I work towards a radical reframing of our relationship to the natural world. My performances search for the ritualistic and the absurd in the everyday repetitions of our normalised socially-constructed madness, in the ethos of roadside BurgerKings, the trappings and tatters of the cities - centres of our chaotic civilisations.
From 2020-22 I acted as the Director of the Art, Biodiversity & Climate Research Network (ABC Network) for TORCH, University of Oxford. As part of this role, I organised 8 new artist-in-residence programmes across the University of Oxford labs, ran a series of workshops for artists and scientists, and organised an exhibition of works in Paris, Oxford's Natural History Museum and for the COP26 in Glasgow.
I am the founder of the Art & Ecology platform Flute & Bowl whose dual goal is:
To facilitate collaborative projects between the arts, humanities and sciences that would "act as a flute for the natural world," i.e. act as an instrument through which the natural world can communicate itself.
To facilitate collaborative projects between the arts, humanities and sciences that would "act as a bowl for the natural world," i.e. to hold, protect and conserve the natural world, sharing of it sustainably within our More-than-human communities.
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E d u c a t i o n
2020- DPhil University of Oxford, School of Geography and Environment
2018-2019 MFA University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Art
2013-2016 BFA University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art
Awards/Grants
2022 Nomination for Bertha Foundation Artivism Award £10,000
2022 Sheffield DocFest Alternative Realities Invited Artist
2022 Oxford-UdK Berlin Seed Fund for Creative Partnerships Award of €7000
2021 Be Still Media 2nd place Artist Award of $3000
2019 Mansfield-Ruddock Prize
2019 TORCH Heritage Seed Fund Grant (University of Oxford)
2019 Royal Geographic Society Geographical Field Work Grant for filming in Native Siberia
2019 European Cultural Foundation Award
2019 Santander Travel Award for art initiative in Native Siberia (University of Oxford)
2019 Michael Pike Award (University of Oxford)
2019 Culture-ActionS Grant, Le Centre Culturel du Crous de Paris
2019 Paris Sciences et Lettres, AIE Award
2018 Marie de Paris, APIE Award
2018 Erna Plachte Award (University of Oxford)
2016 SSA Invited Graduate Award
2015 Nasu Film Festival Award for short-film; collaboration: Naho Ogawa
Collections
Pitt Rivers Museum Collection
The Ruddock Foundation for the Arts
Mansfield College Private Collection
Publications
2020 Gleizer, Anna. "Wandering in Other Worlds, Talking with the Spirits: Choreographing a Performative Anthropology." Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo 7.1 (2020): 35-54.
2019 Oku no Kurogawa: Black River to the Deep North. Artist Novel. Culminating result of In Basho’s Footsteps Project.
2013 Gleizer, Anya. “A Superior Adventure.” Woodsmoke Magazine. (2013): 3-24.
2012 Pineda-Catalan, O. et al. “Conservation genetics of harvested river turtles: All roads lead to Iquitos.” Mitochondrial DNA. 23.3 (2012): 230-38. (Co-author).
Selected Residencies
2022 Artist in Residence at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.
2022 Residency at Alchemy Arts Center, Friday Harbor, WA, USA.
2021 Artist in Residence at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, UK.
2021 Artist in Residence at UrbanBioLabs, NICHE Project, Oxford, UK.
2019 Studio Lab at La Ménagerie de Verre, Paris, France.
2019 Centre d’Animation Tour de Dames, Movement Residency, Paris, France.
2019 Espace Citeaux Residency, Paris, France.
2018 École Normale Supérieur Performance Art Residency, Paris, France.
2015 Kurodohara Creatives Residency, for project The Bard & the Banana Tree, Nasu, Japan.
Solo Exhibitions
2022 Evenki Reconciliation Ritual performance and exhibition with indigenous Evenki artist Galina Veretnova, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK.
2019 Granny’s Bones, Mansfield College, Oxford, UK.
2019 Anthropometamorphosis, St. Luke’s Chapel, Oxford, UK.
2019 Anthropometamorphosis, Dolphin Gallery, Oxford, UK.
2017 Dionysus : Tristeria, Tricaud & Pigasse, Paris, France.
2016 Black River, 51 George Square, Edinburgh, Scotland.
2015 In Basho’s Footsteps, Edinburgh Fringe, Coburg House Gallery, Edinburgh, UK
Selected Group Exhibitions
2022 Boundary Project Lopez: Local Foodsheds on an Island, Alchemy Arts Center, Friday Harbor, WA, USA.
2021 Among the Garbage and the Flowers, Centre d’Art Contemporain 6B, St. Denis, France
2021 Emptiness: Ways of Seeing, Rīga Stradinš, Riga, Latvia and Digital Exhibition.
2020 Personal Places // Archival Spaces, VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. Moscow, Russia.
2019 Granny’s Bones Ruskin School of Art Degree Show, Oxford, UK.
2016 Dionysus Lives, National Galleries of Scotland, SSA Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh.
2016 Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, ECA Degree Show, Edinburgh, UK.
2016 Rites to Rave, Glasgow International Festival, Circus Between Worlds, UK.
2015 The Narrow Road to the Deep North, short-film, Nasu Short-film Festival, Japan.
2015 Archipel, Theatre de La Bastille, Paris, France.
2015 Leaf Storm, En Dehors Festival, Paris 3, Sorbonne, Paris, France.
2015 Leaf Storm, Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh, UK.
Curated Exhibitions
2022 Boundary Project, an exhibition of collaborative art-science works dedicated to respecting planetary and local boundaries. Barn Gallery, St. Johns Oxford, UK.
2021 Cop26 Creative Climate Conversations with Artists and Scientists, Museum of Natural History, Oxford, UK.
2021 Among the Garbage and the Flowers, Centre d’Art Contemporain 6B, St. Denis, France
2019 Diffracting Matters, North Wall Arts Center, Oxford, UK.
2017 Dionysus : Tristeria, Tricaud & Pigasse, 4 Place Denfert Rochereau, Paris, France.
2012 Art | Biology, Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA.
Selected Professional Experience
2020-22 Director of the Art, Biodiversity & Climate Research Network (ABC Network) TORCH, University of Oxford. As part of this role, I organized 8 new artist-in- residence programmes across the University of Oxford labs, ran a series of workshops for artists and scientists, and organized an exhibition for the COP26 in Glasgow, UK.
2017-23 Teacher of Art, Ecology & Drama at Oxford Lyceum, primary school for bilingual learners.
2018-22 Founder and director of Flute & Bowl, Oxford University Art & Science Society.
2022 Co-directed the Boundary Project, an Universität der Künste Berlin and Oxford University collaboration. This project brought together 40 international and interdisciplinary scholars, artists, dancers and scientists in a series of workshops aimed at the creation of an art-science teaching curriculum for undergraduates that would teach and celebrate living within planetary boundaries.
2021-22 Teaching Assistant leading tutorials in Indigenous Epistemologies and Institutional Bodies in Geography to Oxford University undergrads.
2020 Senior Methodologist and course designer at Yaizy Online Learning platform, creator of Digital Art Course
2019 Tutor of art for Williams College students at Ruskin School of Art.
2012-18 Co-founder and Artistic Director of La Malle des Indes Artists’ Collective
2015 Ran the The Bard and the Banana Tree project, an international-exchange teaching program of Art, literature and poetry between rural schools in the UK and Japan.
2014 Invited artist for Adopt an Artist, an education-through-art program in collaboration with the George Heriot’s School and the National Galleries of Scotland. Teacher of English.
2014 Project Placement with Jabuti Theatre’s production My City (environmental story-telling theatre for children). Vision Mechanics and Imaginate of Creative Scotland.
2014 Internship in Natural History museum strategy, research and curation in the Ashworth Laboratories – the Natural History collections of the University of Edinburgh (responsibilities included: display design, research, data management, exhibition writing).
2013 Employment, Wildlife Conservation Society Beringia Project in Eastern Chukotka, Russia. Work in a joint American-Russian ornithologists’ camp in Chaun Bay on the Chukotka Peninsula.
2012 Editor, Layout Artist, Photographer and Graphic designer for Alaskan Landtrust Newsletter.
2012 Employment in Ichthyology lab for the USGS Alaska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Institute of Arctic Biology of University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
2012 HHMI Fellow at the Institute of Arctic Studies, Environmental geology, Dartmouth.
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