Biography
Allison Leigh Holt (Fairfax, VA, 1972) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Upstate New York and Northern California. Their work uses techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to model diverse manifestations of mind. Holt is a Fulbright Scholar (Indonesia), a current Lucas Artist Fellow (Montalvo Arts Center), and a first generation high school graduate. They have been a resident artist at the Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred U.), Djerassi, the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Indonesia), Bullseye Glass Co., and the Experimental Television Center; and a resident researcher at Sanggar Perbakayun, the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Holt has exhibited at Eye Filmmuseum (NL), EMPAC, The Ford Foundation Gallery, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMPFA, Stanford University, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium, Gray Area, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (solo, Indonesia), The North Dakota Museum of Art (solo), the Boston Cyberarts Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Axiom Gallery for New and Experimental Media (solo). They have presented at cellsBUTTON, Video Vortex, and the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival (Indonesia); the American Anthropological Association, Cultural Studies Association, and College Art Association Conferences; the Science of Consciousness Conference; FEMeeting (Canada); RIXC Art-Science Festival (Latvia); After Agency (Poland), and Imagining the Universe: Cosmology in Art and Science at Stanford Arts Institute. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Holt was in dialogue with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene. They were plenary faculty in the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute: Othering, Becoming, and Belonging.
Their work has been commissioned by The Ford Foundation Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, the David Bermant Foundation, the Zero1 Biennial, Pro Arts Gallery, and UC Santa Barbara’s Denise Montell Molecular Science Laboratory, where it is also included in the collection.
Holt has taught at San Francisco State University, Massachusetts College of Art, and developed Neurodivergent Media, an experimental media art pedagogy for autistics. Their writing features in Yale’s Theater Magazine, Public Journal, Panorama Journal, and Leonardo Journal. They studied at The Evergreen State College (BA), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where they are a Ph.D. candidate in Electronic Art. They acknowledge their settler colonial history with membership in Daughters of the American Revolution.
Artist Statement
My research–based work explores divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information. Combining moving image and sculpture, diagrams, performance, and sunlight, my projects illustrate frameworks embedded in consciousness.
While investigating different epistemologies in dialogue with experts—Javanese shamans, autistics, astrophysicists—I interpret the core structures I find within these worldviews into diagrams. These become prints and/or blueprints for works in glass, plexiglass, or resin. When activated by video or sunlight, the latter reveal delicate, powerful moving images, resulting in three-dimensional forms that convey, for example, higher-dimensional phenomena, or alternate concepts of time.
I am interested in the interrelatedness of human knowledge, natural systems, and spirituality that is endemic to resilient ways of life. My work describes perspectives that propose radical shifts in cultural, anthropocentric, and Earth-based biases, at a time when human behavior determines our planet’s survival.