Susannah Sayler, associate professor of art photography in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Department of Film and Media Arts, is one of five artists to be recognized with a 2024 JGS Fellowship for Photography.
Susannah Sayler
The $8,000 unrestricted cash grant, administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts, is open to New York State photography artists living and working anywhere in the following regions of New York State: Western New York, Finger Lakes, Southern Tier, Central New York, North Country, Mohawk Valley, Capital District, Hudson Valley and Long Island. The support for this funding is provided by Joy of Giving Something (JGS), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the photographic arts.
“Edifice II” by Susannah Sayler, 2023. This work is drawn from a series of photographic collages that consider how to represent the Amazonian rainforest. It is part of a larger body of work titled “The Crystal Forest” (2019-2024), that also includes a video essay.
Sayler works with a variety of media including photography, video, writing and installation—often in collaboration with others, to deepen our understanding of ecology and the poetics of relation. Her work has been exhibited in diverse venues from art museums to public spaces and interdisciplinary institutions such as science museums, history museums and anthropology museums, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; The Momentary @ Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas; Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Netherlands; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; and The American Writers Museum and Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), New York Artist Fellowship (2016), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2014), the Center for Art and Environment Research Fellowship (2013) and the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2008).
In 2006, with her longtime collaborator, Edward Morris, Sayler co-founded The Canary Project, a collective project to produce art and media that cultivate emotional understanding of the climate crisis. In 2020, she co-founded a new long-term project in Hudson, New York, called Toolshed, which gathers and shares tools that empower individuals and communities to live ecologically. Sayler/Morris’ archives are collected by The Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada.
