Biography
Allison Leigh Holt (b. Fairfax, VA, 1972) is a neurodivergent artist / garage-academic based in Northern California. Her multidisciplinary work uses techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to model divergent epistemologies. Holt is a Fulbright Scholar (Indonesia) whose honors include residencies from the Djerassi Resident Artist Program (two-time), the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Indonesia), the Experimental Television Center (two-time), the North Dakota Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology, among others. She has been a resident researcher at Sanggar Perbakayun in Sukoharjo, Central Java, and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Holt has exhibited nationally and internationally at SFMOMA, Stanford University, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Cemeti Institute for Art + Society (solo, Indonesia), The North Dakota Museum of Art (solo), the Boston Cyberarts Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, Axiom Gallery for New and Experimental Media (solo, Boston), the Urban Screens Conference (Melbourne), and the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival. She has presented at cellsBUTTON(s) and Video Vortex conferences in Indonesia; the Cultural Studies Association Conference; the 20th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference; Imagining the Universe: Cosmology in Art and Science at Stanford Arts Institute; UN/GREEN: the Open Fields Conference (Riga, Latvia); After Agency at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Mickiewicz University, Poland; and the College Art Association Conference. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference she presented alongside science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene; and was plenary faculty in the Mind & Life Institute’s 2022 Summer Research Institute: Othering, Becoming, and Belonging.
Her work has been commissioned by the Ford Foundation Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, the David Bermant Foundation, the Zero1 Biennial, Pro Arts Gallery, and Denise Montell Laboratory at UC Santa Barbara, where it is also included in the collection.
Holt has taught interdisciplinary courses as visiting faculty at San Francisco State University, Massachusetts College of Art, and numerous arts organizations; and has developed Neurodivergent Media, an experimental media art pedagogy for autistics. She studied at The Evergreen State College (BA) and Massachusetts College of Art (MFA). Her published writing for peer reviewed journals includes The Conversation: Feedback Systems, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence, which featured in PUBLIC Journal: Interspecies Communication, and serves as the basis for her film, Stitching the Future with Clues.
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.