Biography
Allison Leigh Holt (b. Fairfax, VA, 1972) is a neurodivergent artist / scholar living and working in Oakland, California. Her multidisciplinary research-based work uses techniques of expanded cinema and the Light and Space Movement to model divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information. Holt is a Fulbright Scholar (Indonesia), and is the recipient of numerous 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, among others. 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 been exhibited 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 presented alongside science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene.
Her work has been commissioned by the Ford Foundation, the David Bermant Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, 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, as well as 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 article The Conversation: Feedback Systems, Ways of Knowing, and Neurodivergence is featured in PUBLIC Journal: Interspecies Communication, and serves as the basis for her forthcoming PhD at the University of Edinburgh.
Artist Statement
I create research–based projects that explore divergent ways of sensing, processing, and exchanging information. 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 resilient 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.