A.K. Burns is an trans-disciplinary artist and educator, working at the nexus of language and materiality, to trouble systems that assign and maintain hierarchical relationships with criticality and humor.
Burns has exhibited internationally at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Julia Stoschek Collection in Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, Germany. Burns was awarded the 2023 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship; an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2021 Art Purchase Program; a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.
A frequent collaborator; Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) in 2008—an artists’ advocacy group that remains active as a non-profit certification organization for Arts Institutions nationally. Working in collaboration with artist A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center, a video re-imagining pornographic cinema for queer womxn, trans and non-binary community was released in 2010 and has screened widely including at The Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and TATE Modern, London, UK.
A.K. Burns is a Professor and MFA Co-Director at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History. Burns is currently represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels, and Video Data Bank, Chicago.
*since you asked… Burns is gender non-conforming, and has no preferred pronoun but identifies with female subjectivity, hence using ‘she/her’ as needed*
CONTACT: studio@akburns.net