Biography
Allison Leigh Holt (b. Fairfax, VA, 1972) is a multidisciplinary artist/scholar living and working in Oakland, California. Her research-based work uses Light and Space Movement and expanded cinema techniques to model divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information. Among her numerous honors, Holt is a J. William Fulbright Scholar (Indonesia), and is the recipient of awards 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. She has been a resident researcher at Sanggar Perbakayun in Sukoharjo, Central Java, and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Holt’s work has exhibited, screened, and performed 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 2019 Open Fields Conference in Riga, Latvia; After Agency 2019 at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Mickiewicz University, Poland; and the 2020 College Art Association Conference. At the 47th University of North Dakota Writers Conference, she was a speaker and panelist alongside science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene.
Her work is in the collection of UC Santa Barbara’s Denise Montell Laboratory, which has also commissioned it, as have the David Bermant Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Pro Arts Gallery, and the Zero1 Biennial.
Holt has taught interdisciplinary courses as visiting faculty at San Francisco State University and Massachusetts College of Art, 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 article The Conversation: Feedback Systems, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence is in the current issue of PUBLIC Journal: Interspecies Communication.
Artist Statement
I create research–based projects that explore divergent ways of perceiving, comprehending, and interacting with our world. These projects use diagrams, videosculpture, sound, light, and/or performance to illustrate the frameworks embedded in consciousness.
By developing relationships of trust over time—with Javanese shamans, autistic individuals, and astrophysicists—I interpret the core structures I find within sometimes endangered worldviews into diagrams. These become prints and/or blueprints for works in glass, plexiglass, or resin. When activated by video, the latter reveal delicate, powerful moving images, resulting in three-dimensional forms that convey 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 sophisticated ways of orienting oneself in reality. 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.