Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Art
Stephanie J. Woods is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she serves as an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Art at the University of New Mexico. Originally from Seneca, South Carolina, and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, Woods creates work deeply rooted in the preservation and celebration of her cultural heritage.
Her practice spans installation, sculpture, video, photography, and sound, often merging these elements to create immersive, liminal spaces. Within these installations, material operates as both medium and message. Woods employs culturally resonant substances such as Carolina red clay, gourds grown in her mother’s garden, okra, rice, watermelon, and her own hair to construct narratives of place, memory, and ancestry.
She earned her MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2015 and has since built a dynamic career. In 2021, Woods was selected for the Black Rock Senegal artist residency in Dakar, Senegal, and that same year, she was honored with the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art by the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. Woods has been awarded several other prestigious residencies and fellowships, including the Harpo Prize, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the ACRE Residency. She has also spent time at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists Residency, and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, among others.
Her work has been featured in major exhibitions, including at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as part of Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, and the Dakar Biennale. Woods’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Gibbes Museum of Art, and the Mint Museum, among others.