Vanessa Holyoak

Vanessa Holyoak is an interdisciplinary writer and artist and a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at USC, where they also received their MA and the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate. They hold a BA summa cum laude in French Literature & Translation (minor in Philosophy) from Barnard College of Columbia University and a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from CalArts. They also write art criticism, lyrical nonfiction, and hybrid fiction, and make photo-poetic installations and performances that explore questions of diasporic and ecological memory, loss, and opacity. Their 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, e-flux, frieze, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. Their research has been published or is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal and TURBA: The Global Journal for Live Arts Curation. Their 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 the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Oregon, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada, Casa Lü in Mexico City, and Cove Park in the Scottish Highlands. Holyoak’s first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023, and the second edition and ebook were released in 2025.

Vanessa’s research interests include performance studies, media studies and visual culture, Asian American studies, French & Francophone studies, ecocriticism, and queer of color theory. Their dissertation, titled Opaque Subjects, Oneiric Senses: Queer Franco-Asian Dreams of Night, explores the liberatory potential of nocturnal states of indeterminacy across contemporary Asian diasporic, Francophone, and queer performance, image-based art, and writing. Their research posits intermedial aesthetic manifestations of sleep, dreams, and opacity as sites of alternate, embodied knowledge production that elude and contest the hegemony of the visual register and its ideologies of capture.

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