Mandy's profile
My life has been shaped by constant movement—growing up with multiple relocations across the U.S., from the East Coast to the Midwest to the West. Each place was a new beginning, where I had to navigate the feeling of being "new" all over again. Art became a kind of refuge and a language I could carry with me from one place to the next. It was always there as a default home, and it allowed me to process the world I was experiencing. For me, every place I've lived in or visited holds its own unique story and energy, a personality I try to understand through the lens of my work. What is this place telling me? How does it make me feel? What makes it distinct and worth reflecting on?
After studying at RISD, I moved to New York City and spent several years working as a designer in the women’s fashion industry. My role was to create patterns for printed fabric, and this experience became an unexpected bridge in my work. I began to see connections between the repetitiveness of printed fabric designs—repeated patterns on cloth—and the repetitive motions of the body as we move through different spaces and social roles. It was an awakening, realizing how repetition in both design and movement could carry meaning, emotion, and even resistance.
Living in the Midwest from 1989-1997 was another pivotal chapter in my journey. It was here that I encountered performance and video artists who profoundly influenced my practice. These interactions nudged me toward video and performance as primary mediums, shifting the way I thought about art. At the same time, working at a Chicago newspaper, I became increasingly aware of how my daily motions—my repeated trips and routines—shaped both my physicality and my sense of self.
In 1997, I returned to New York City, where I created projects combining video and live performance, staying there until 2016. During that time, I felt the urge to deepen my inquiry into the shifting landscape of technology and its impact on human experience. This led me to pursue an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at UMBC in Baltimore, where I focused on the intersection of movement, social class, in the looming age of artificial intelligence. Much of my research involved collaborating with the Dance Department to explore how physicality and social structures shape the way bodies move through space.
In January of 2021, my six-channel video installation work Spirits of Promise and Loss was part of a group exhibition "Codex" at the Center for Visual Art, Culture and Design, UMBC’s gallery space in Baltimore, and in early 2023, I had a solo exhibit of my work at the Peale Center, in Baltimore,“Journey of the Invader Spirit” (generated during an artist residency in Brazil). During that residency I worked with the staff and a local Capoeira group to create the project for the show.
In the summer of 2024, I had the privilege of being in residence at the artist-run residence Foundation B.a.d. in Rotterdam, where I was exposed to a broader spectrum of work from Northern Europe. This experience inspired me to consider more community-based, participatory elements into my projects. I realized that the work I was creating could be a vehicle for connection, a way to bring people together and invite them to be part of the conversation.
In late 2024, as the lead artist working with curator Aleem Allison, we began the initiative for the creation of the video installation “A Media Quilt Project", a collaborative work that will be created from an open call of video clips, to be shown at the 410 Lofts Gallery in downtown Baltimore in February 2025. The project has received funding from the Deutsch Foundation and from the Maryland state Council on the Arts,
These explorations continue to nourish my curiosity, driving me to question how bodies, spaces, and movements can be transformed by collaboration and shared experiences.
