Vanessa Holyoak

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary writer and artist and a Ph.D. student in Comparative Media & Culture at USC, where she is also a participant in the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate. She holds a BA summa cum laude in French Literature & Translation (minor in Philosophy) from Barnard College and a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from CalArts. She writes fiction and art criticism and makes installations involving photography, video, performance, and language, often with her collaborator, Antoine Chesnais. Her work has been supported by multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Vanessa’s art writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (CARLA), East of Borneo, eflux Criticism, Frieze Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. Her visual art has been shown in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City. Recent L.A. exhibitions include AU PAIR, Eastside International, Harkawik, Human Resources, and LA Artcore, and recent residencies include Casa Lü in Mexico City and Cove Park in the Scottish Highlands. Her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023.

Vanessa’s research interests include memory, sleep, and dreams in 19-21st century Franco- and Anglophone literary and visual art practices, photography and writing as tools for rememorialization, the aesthetic mediation of time consciousness and phenomenological perception, the liberatory implications of darkness and illegibility, parallels between constraint-based literature and conceptual art, ecocriticism, new materialism, and intermediality in performance practices.

• M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts, 2019
• B.A. French, Barnard College of Columbia University, 2017