[biology]

Kaitlin Bryson is a lifeform participating within and sustained by a metabolic, planetary body called Earth. A result of time, genetic encoding, immense/complex biochemical and microbial assemblages, and a specialized metabolism ((evolved into energetic precision)) this lifeform (kaitlin bryson) occupies what is commonly thought of as a human body. Though, a more practical analysis reveals that Bryson, like all life within Earth, is a queer, multispecies consortium. Bryson is transcorporeal, hungry, energetic, tired, enmeshed, interdependent and will be eventuated into soil. She lives as a guest in the ancestral and unceded homelands of Tewa and Pueblo Peoples, known as Oga Po’geh or White Shell Water Place, referred to more widely by its colonial nomenclature, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[biography]

Kaitlin Bryson relates to and engages with the world through transdisciplinary, ecological art, research, and pedagogy. Oriented towards environmental and social justice and multispecies/multi-futures thriving she emphasizes the processes, actions, queerness, and criticalities of the microscopic, the saprotrophic, the generous multiplicities who consume what is gone and make sustenance for what’s to come. Her life/art/teaching practices align with actions of reciprocity for the present world and deep futures. Bryson works most closely with fungi, soil, seeds, plants, microbes, fibers, and biomaterials to engage and privilege more-than-human-audiences, while also working with/in human communities through eco-social and bioremedial art practice. Most often, she works in collaboration and in 2019, Bryson co-founded The Submergence Collective, an environmental art collective focused on multidisciplinary projects that imagine more collaborative, creative, hopeful, and ecologically connected futures for our human species and the rest of the living world. She is a member of the Communities for Clean Water Coalition which works to protect New Mexico’s waters by holding major polluters accountable through direct community actions, policymaking, and community messaging.

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 focuses on facilitating ecologically relational 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.