Judith Leemann

Judith Leemann is an artist, educator, and writer. Through material, textual, and social inquiry, her practice tracks an urgent curiosity about how form does, how habit makes and breaks, and how we carve out conditions for sustained collective study. Judith was DS4SI’s first artist-in-residence back in 2007, and after almost twenty years of parallel play, she has taken on the role of Ecologies of Thought Lead. In this position, she continues to develop protocols for inquiry and reimagination: hack a diagram, question bending, close reading, and more!

Recent solo projects include a commissioned performance for the 2019 exhibition goat island archive—We Have Discovered the Performance by Making It at the Chicago Cultural Center, and a site-responsive work for the 2019 Even thread [has] a speech exhibition at the Kohler Art Center. Her writings have been included in the anthologies Beyond Critique (Bloomsbury, 2017), Collaboration Through Craft (Bloomsbury, 2013), as well as in several publications of the Warren Wilson MA in Critical Craft Studies program.

In 2017, she convened the Retooling Critique Working Group—a community of practice committed to studying studio critique’s relation to educational equity. She is in her final year as a student in the Boston Conservatory Alexander Technique Teacher Training and serves as a professor in the Fine Arts 3D department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.