Amanda McDonald Crowley is a contemporary art curator, cultural worker, and educator who makes situations that include exhibitions, public art programs, residencies, and other opportunities that bring artists together with their audiences to actively engage in issues and concerns of our times. Amanda’s work has largely been at the intersection of art + technology, and her experience and interests often revolve around working with artists and groups who have a research-based practice. In her curatorial work, she is interested in developing platforms to generate dialogue, bringing together professionals and amateurs from varied disciplines, and creating space for social change and audience engagement.
Amanda is the curator of Daily Ritual currently on view at the Center for Book Arts in NYC. Public Art Action is currently the international program partner on Pixelache (FI)’s Nature as Magic initiative, and Amanda is additionally on the jury of the AAvistus component of the initiative.
Amanda also currently works with Mary Mattingly and colleagues of Swale, a floating food forest in NYC and land-based initiatives in Concrete Plant Park on the Bronx River and on Governors Island, NYC; and with artist duo LigoranoReese on the School of Good Citizenship, initially proposed for Charlotte, NC during the RNC in 2020, but which primarily took place online due to the Corona19 epidemic. She additionally has advisory roles on other artist-run projects including Vibha Galhotra’s S.O.U.L Foundation, Delhi, India; Juanli Carrión’s Outer Seed Shadow, NYC; Shu Lea Cheang’s CycleX, upstate NY; Di Mainstone’s Human Harp (UK); and in summer 2019 curated Amy Khoshbin’s TinyScissors pop-up tattoo parlor in a hotel room for Detroit Art Week in a project that addressed gun violence in America.
A recent key curatorial research focus has been food + art (#arttechfood / #growfoodmakeart), as evidenced by recent projects such as Agrikultura, a major public art event in Malmö, Sweden in 2017; the exhibition food nostalgia, at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City, NYC, 2016; Circuit of the Senses, a celebratory meal and participatory event conceived by artist Emilie Baltz at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Nebraska in 2014; GastroLabs, a program series developed with New Media Scotland for the Edinburgh Science Festival 2014; and the exhibition CONSUME at Gallery gallery@calIT2 at the University of California, San Diego in 2012.
Other organisations with which Amanda has recently developed programs include Kulturföreningen Triennal (southern Sweden); New Media Scotland and the Edinburgh Science Festival (Edinburgh); Pixelache and the Finnish Bioart Society (Helsinki); Gallery CalIT2 at the University of California, San Diego (San Diego); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha); and in New York City: with PointB, Cluster Gallery (Brooklyn), Radiator Arts (Queens), Longwood Gallery, YMPJ (Bronx), Austrian Cultural Forum, Spring Break Art Show (Manhattan).
Amanda has held executive leadership positions with Eyebeam art + technology center in New York, Australian Network for Art and Technology, and the Australia Council for the Arts. She has also worked on several international art festivals – for which she curated and produced programs of significant artist residencies, symposia, and exhibitions – including ISEA2004 (International Symposium of Electronic Art) in Helsinki, Finland, Adelaide Festival 2002, and the Australian Video Festival.
Amanda has had articles published in journals such as Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA), ArtLink, Art Asia Pacific, and in Social Media Archeology and Poetics (edited by Judy Malloy and published by MIT Press). She has done curatorial residencies at Helsinki International Artists Program (Finland), Santa Fe Art Institute (USA), Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), Sarai New Media Institute (India), and Banff Center for the Arts (Canada) a.o.
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