Our Virtual Visit series takes a behind-the-scenes look at what our community members are up to through studio tours and conversations about their creative practices. Join us twice a month on Wednesdays 7pm EST on IG Live.

Heather Renée Russ works across photography, projection, installation, sculpture and bio-art. She blends organic marine materials with queer femme signifiers to engage with themes of grief and displacement. Her work also celebrates the vibrant activist and art communities artists have historically created in cities by the sea. Heather Renée draws from a rich history of stewarding and participating in underground art spaces. She co-produced Club Feral, a raucous art, dance and mutual-aid club in San Francisco and the queer collaborative space in Brooklyn known as Lair Fera. She also served on the Board for MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival. Heathe Renée used her merit awarded residency at Vermont Studio Center to develop work for Intersecional Cyber Feminism, at Satellite Art Show in Miami in 2019. In 2020, she completed a residency at MASS MoCA and created work for Futureless, an exhibition about the precarity of queer feminist futures at SomoS in Berlin. She also showed at Ethan Cohen’s KuBE gallery in New York in “Darkest Before Dawn,” an exhibit about art in a time of uncertainty.  In 2021 she completed a residency at ChaShaMa North. Heather Renée has an upcoming solo show at Unison Arts in New Paltz and has been invited to participate in an alumni residency at MASS MoCA in 2022.