Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Amber Hawk Swanson is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Through performance, her work explores care, animacy, and desire as they function in the context of queerness and disability. Her complementary scholarly interests focus on investigations of enabling objects and actions; technologized, roboticized, and transpeciated bodies and selves; animacy and animal intimacy; and worldmaking in the online forums and livestream channels that have served as the primary platforms for her work. Her practice has embodied these concerns through a material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. She has exhibited internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with recent venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). She is the creative director and one of three cocreators of The Harmony Show and has taught in the sculpture department of Rhode Island School of Design.

Photo by Elena Bulet i Llopis