Ms. Colette Copeland’s artistic and pedagogical practice is critically engaged with a symbiotic, diverse range of aesthetic and cultural values which emphasize interdisciplinary and collaborative work. As an established visual artist, her work has been featured in 28 solo exhibitions and 155 group exhibitions/festivals spanning 35 countries over the past 30 years. Her work as a visual artist and cultural critic/writer examines issues surrounding gender, identity, death, and contemporary culture. She sources personal narratives, historical texts, and popular media, utilizing video, photography, printmaking, performance, dance, text, audio, sculptural installation, and community activism to question societal roles, gendered violence, and the pervasive influence of media and technology on communal enculturation. She is interested in artists, including the conceptual kind, whose work deviates from traditional disciplines and training and who use non-traditional materials and processes in their work, such as in sculptural installation, performance, video, relational aesthetics, and social practice/collaborative activism.

Ms. Copeland received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA from Syracuse University. She has taught at six institutions over the past 20 years, each with diverse, global student populations. At the University of Pennsylvania, she developed and taught a new interdisciplinary visual studies major that incorporated visual arts, critical theory, humanities, and social sciences. Currently at the University of Texas at Dallas, she teaches an interdisciplinary “Fluxus-inspired” contemporary practices studio course, digital photography, and performance art.

Since 2001, Ms. Copeland has been writing for a variety of art publications and institutions like The Photo Review, Fotophile, Afterimage, Exposure, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Arteidolia, Glasstire, and Eutopia. She has 116 published articles to her credit. Most recently, she published two catalog essays – “Avery, A Family Legacy” and “Re-emergence: Women AbEx and Color Field Artists”. She is a long-time member of AICA-International Association of Art Critics.

Ms. Copeland’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on qualitative research about underrepresented female visual artists from India, whose work explores themes of boundaries – physical, emotional, real, imagined, geographical, virtual, convergent, divergent, and transformative – using conceptual and contemporary multimedia art practices.