Julie Anand

“An interdisciplinary thinker and desert lover, I studied natural sciences before looking for new languages and communities in the arts. Having replaced the burden of proof with the celebration of subjectivity, my mixed-media and photographic artworks question conventional boundaries including those between disciplines and between bodies and their environments.”

Julie Anand is associate professor of photography in the School of Art and senior sustainability scholar in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Her projects, informed by a background in ecology and geology, often explore material culture, body/land relations and issues of interdependency/boundary. Material Histories, large montages of artifacts collected on walks that act as socio-environmental mirrors, were featured in the exhibition Nowhere to Hide: Three Artists in the Desert at the ASU Art Museum in 2009. This work was recently published in the text "Art & Politics: A Small History for Social Change after 1945" (Mesch, 2013). Anand’s honors include Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability Research Grant (2013) for a collaborative children’s art project in Honduras, Evelyn Smith Endowed Professorship for the School of Art (2010), Katherine Herberger Faculty Enrichment in the Arts Grant (2010) for Common Ground—a collaborative public art/landscape design, the Institute for Humanities Research Fellowship (2007) to explore ecological art, and an Artist Grant from the Contemporary Forum of the Phoenix Art Museum (2006). She has lectured at the Geological Society of America, the Art Institute of San Francisco, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Phoenix Art Museum among other contexts. She enjoys developing courses that bring people from diverse backgrounds together including Experimental Film and Art and Ecology, both open to all majors.

Parallel to her solo art practice, Anand sustains a collaborative art practice with her partner Damon Sauer. Both artists received their master's of fine art degrees in Photography from the University of New Mexico in 2005. They use an interdisciplinary, haptic approach to lens-based media to interrogate boundaries and to explore the body as a site of perception. Art New England favorably reviewed Anand and Sauer’s first formal collaboration in 2004. Their ongoing collaborative work has since been exhibited at venues including RayKo Gallery in San Francisco, the LA Center for Digital Art, School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, the El Paso Museum of Art, Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago, and Museo de Arte, Cuidad Juarez. They received an Artist Project Grant by the Arizona Commission on the Arts for their shredded and hand-woven works investigating boundaries, Between. They have co-lectured in contexts including the University of Oklahoma, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Rhode Island College, and the Southwestern/Western Regional SPE Conference on Collaboration held at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ in 2007. Their current project, Ground Truth—Corona Landmarks, is in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It was awarded a Herberger Institute Collaborative Research Seed Grant in 2013 and a Land Arts Mobile Research Center/ Mellon Foundation Grant in 2017. This contemporary archaeology investigates the remains of Cold War satellite calibration targets in the Sonoran Desert. It was recently featured in Wired magazine, Hyperallergic, Places Journal, National Geographic magazine and Politken (print newspaper of Denmark). They look forward to a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. in 2018.