I am a Chicago-based artist and writer, curator and cultural producer, and educator with expertise in cross-disciplinary collaboration, public engagement, and research.

As an artist and writer, I respond to issues including migration, displacement, and the relationship between domestic life and disaster. In the process, I mine personal and political histories, texts, and archives to find the allegorical possibilities and poetics of people, places, and materials.

With roots in Jewish, Mexican, and Eastern European diasporas, I continually engage hybridity and the multiple in my work—hybrid identities and forms; multiple histories and perspectives. My projects have ranged from a happening staged on a seismic shake table to engravings on kitchen table tops, and from town hall meetings to drawings made with my breath. My collaborators have included rodeo cowboys, bus drivers, a barbershop quartet, military veterans, choreographers and engineers.

Recent and forthcoming residencies include Chicago Artist Coalition (IL), Grand Central Art Center (CA), Ox-Bow (MI), Ragdale (IL), and Rogers Art Loft (NV). My work has been collected and exhibited widely, including by the International Print Center, Museo Tamayo, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and Walker Art Center. My visual art and writing have been published in Art Papers, Poetry Magazine, and New American Paintings, among others. I received my MFA from the University of California San Diego. I frequently make work with Fred Schmalz in the collaborative Balas & Wax.

As a curator and cultural producer, I have more than fifteen years’ experience with institutional leadership in the arts. This has included directing arts initiatives, artist projects, public programs, pedagogy, and partnerships at organizations including the Block Museum at Northwestern University, Walker Art Center, and Arts Midwest, and consulting with Eighth Blackbird and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

As an educator, I have taught across contemporary practices, drawing and painting, installation, museum studies, social practice and theory at Northwestern University, University of California, San Diego, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Minnesota—including using archives, civic spaces, and museums as classrooms. I situate my teaching in our current social and political environments and remain responsive to students and the contexts in which we are working. I am currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Lake Forest College.

Contact me for projects, exhibitions, commissions and bringing creative vision and expertise to organizations of all sizes.

 email: susybielak (at) gmail.com

instagram: @susyluck