Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas was born in New York City in 1936 and continues to live and work there. A pioneering figure in video and performance art, she earned a BA in art history from Mount Holyoke College, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and received an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Emerging from New York’s experimental art scene in the late 1960s, she developed a distinctive visual language that brought together performance, sculpture, drawing, and—beginning in the early 1970s—portable video. Jonas gained international recognition for her pioneering "mirror pieces" and performances involving alter egos, including Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972). In 2015, she represented the United States at the 56th Venice Biennale with They Come to Us without a Word, an installation addressing ecological fragility, storytelling, and the relationships between humans and the natural world. The project received a Special Mention from the Biennale jury. Her practice spans performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation, frequently drawing on literature, mythology, ritual, and the spatial and narrative possibilities of the "off-screen." Throughout her career, Jonas has developed a distinctive vocabulary involving masks, props, mirrors, and live-feed video "loops" that challenge the viewer’s perception of space, time, and identity. Her process often involves "re-enacting" or layering earlier works, as demonstrated by Vertical Roll (1972) and Mirage (1976/1994). By combining gestural drawing, live performance, and projected images, she investigates the "politics of the gaze," the fluidity of identity, and the relationship between ritualised gesture and mediated experience. Jonas has been the subject of major surveys at institutions including Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which presented Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning in 2024—the most comprehensive retrospective of her work in the United States to date. She has participated in documenta six times and is represented in prominent museum collections worldwide. Jonas has received numerous honours, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2009), the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2018), and the Nam June Paik Prize (2024). Professor Emerita at MIT, she continues to explore the intersections of geography, memory, ecology, and interspecies relationships through an experimental practice that continually reconfigures its own history.