Tanya Marcuse

Associate Professor of Photography

Primary Academic Program: Photography

Biography: Tanya Marcuse began making photographs as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. She went on to study art history and studio art at Oberlin College and earn her MFA from Yale. After Oberlin, she lived in the Venezuelan rainforest with a small group of indigenous people on a year-long Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, photographing and writing. Her photographs are in many collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the George Eastman Museum. In 2002, she received a Guggenheim fellowship to pursue her project Undergarments and Armor. In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, 14-year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 14 feet. Fueled by the Biblical narrative of the fall from Eden, these related projects use increasingly fantastical imagery and more elaborate methods of constructions to explore cycles of growth and decay and the dynamic tension between the passage of time and the photographic medium. Professor Marcuse is a student of martial arts and boxing as a method of cultivating mental and physical concentration and discipline. Her work is represented by Julie Saul Gallery in New York City. Her books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies, (Nazraeli Press, 2012) and Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019).

AA, Bard College at Simon’s Rock; BA, Oberlin College; MFA, Yale University School of Art. At Bard since 2012.
Website: https://www.tanyamarcuse.com
Email:
Location: Woods Studio
Office: Woods 212