Christina Seely

Courtesy of the artist.

The arc of Christina Seely’s multifaceted practice maps our increasingly tenuous relationship to the non-human living world. Based on two decades of field experience working alongside climate scientists at the far reaches of the planet, Seely’s work encourages new ways of sensing the self within the realities of climate collapse. By pointing to the perceptual limits of photographic and recorded media, the work meaningfully brings attention to humans’ positionality within increasingly fragile global systemics. Many of her images center on re-bridging the human and non-human realms, and address the need to more fully metabolize the complex emotions that accompany our presently fraught ecological time. 

Seely has been artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin County, California, and Lightwork in Syracuse, New York; a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; a participant on the Arctic Circle Program; and a recipient of a year-long public arts commission from the city of San Francisco. She received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2014, and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship in 2017. Her exhibition Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction Through An Artist’s Lens opened at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2017 and connected to her 2020 environmental humanities fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Seely’s solo exhibition Dissonance and Disturbance debuted in 2021 at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, among other institutions, and she is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.