“I’m all for creativity and imagination, but when someone lives in a fantasy world and expects other people to go along with it, I have a problem with that.”

-Lisa Hansen, Michigan mother addressing a school board on the topic of alleged “furry identifying” students using a litter box as a bathroom, a claim determined to be false. 2022

I am a NY-based artist born on Long Island. My father is a deacon in the Catholic church, and my mother works for a corporation that makes Halloween costumes. I graduated with a BFA from the Purchase School of Art and Design in 2015, and since then I’ve shown my work both locally and internationally. I’ve had solo shows with Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh, PA and the James Black Gallery in Vancouver, BC, and have shown recently with Deli Grocery Gallery, Field Projects, The Bellevue Art Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, YNGSPC, LVL3, and SPRING/BREAK ART FAIR. I currently live and work in Brooklyn NY with several houseplants (no dogs yet).

I make paintings and fiber-based work centered around the anthropomorphic dog. I feel deeply connected to this canine hybrid figure as a conduit for exploring the queer body, in both its prevalence in art historical tradition and through my participation in trans-human queer spaces like puppy players and the furry community. I utilize fluorescent paints and craft materials like glitter, burlap, and UV aquarium rocks to bring my visual language informed by internet saturation and kink subculture into radically tactile media.

My most recent body of work has turned towards the autobiographical. As a sufferer of long COVID with permanent damage to my sense of smell, I’ve embraced the furry tradition of projecting an ideal self onto an animal/human form, aka a “fursona”, to comment on my own body awareness, body trauma, and body euphoria. When I cannot sniff, my dog can sniff for me.