Lecturer III, Art & Ecology
Kaitlin Bryson is an ecological artist, educator, and community scientist with practice and research rooted in reciprocity, relationality, transdisciplinarity, and queer/feminist frameworks. Across her work, she engages environmental justice, multispecies wellbeing, and ecocultural regeneration through collaborative projects developed with artists, scientists, students, Indigenous coalitions, water protectors, and local communities. These multisystem projects typically incorporate fungi, microorganisms, plants, and seeds embedded with/in textiles and installed at sites of ecological concern. To implement human audience participation, the projects also include participatory performances, educational workshops, video, sound, and writing. Together, these multilayered systems contain parts that interact, unfold in nutrient-generating biological processes, and bring human and nonhuman audiences/agents together to develop ecocultures. Bryson’s work positions art not as a representation of ecological crisis, but as a living participant within global systems and cultural transformation. Through collaborative research, regenerative installations, and long-term community engagement, she investigates how artistic practice can contribute to ecosystem recovery while also interrogating the social, historical, and epistemological conditions entangled within environmental harm.
Bryson received an MFA in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico in 2018, where she concurrently studied art and mycology with research in ecotoxicology. Currently, she is a Lecturer of Art & Ecology at the University of New Mexico and Co-Director of the RAVEL Program. Bryson’s transdisciplinary teaching facilitates/cultivates ecologically relational creative practices informed by queer and critical ecology, traditional ecological knowledge and emplaced social practice to enroot decolonial, interconnected, contemporary environmental art practices.
She has worked on multiple land and bioremediation projects with Tewa Women United and Communities for Clean Water in New Mexico, USA. She has received notable grants for her ecologically remediative artworks nationally and internationally. She a recipient of the 2026 Monument Lab Re:Generation Grant, the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Arts Grant, the 2022 Future Art Award: Ecosystem X from Mozaik Philanthropy, and a 2022/2023 Fulcrum Fund from 516 Arts. Bryson has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, and in Mexico, Ireland, and Nepal as well as in notable festivals such as Ars Electronica (AT) and Politics of the Machine (DE). Her artwork and activism have been featured in books such as “In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms”, by Doug Bierend and The New Farmer’s Almanac “The Grand Land Plan” and in the Autumn 2022 Edition of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. In 2023, she was selected as one of the “12 New Mexico Artists to Know” by Southwest Contemporary.