BIO
Of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Jahn is an artist whose work explores, constructs, and intervenes natural and social systems. Ranging in practice from deeply personal to highly participatory, her work often relies on the collaborative authorship and distributive intelligence of surrounding people and situations. She writes, “I am interested in the way that collective authorship shifts the production and interpretation of art towards an appreciation of process, context, and re-invention.”

Jahn has presented and exhibited work in museums, galleries, and spaces at venues such as The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The American Embassy in Serbia (Belgrade, Serbia), ISEA/Zero One 06/08 (San Jose, California), MoKS (Estonia), Vroom (Istanbul), Mama (Zagreb), the Moore Space (Miami), the Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami), the Western Front (Vancouver), the MassMOCA (North Adams, MA), the Sonoma County Museum of Art (Santa Rosa, CA), and in San Francisco at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, the Asian Art Museum, and in public places in Tokyo, Honduras, Estonia, and Taiwan.

Since 2000, Jahn has co-directed Pond: art, activism, and ideas (www.mucketymuck.org) , a non-profit organization dedicated to showcasing experimental art. Recent projects include: Invisible 5, an experimental audio tour of California’s I-5 Highway in collaboration with Amy Balkin, Tim Halbur, and Kim Stringfellow; OneTrees, an ongoing collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko that involves the planting of pairs of genetically-identical trees throughout the Bay Area’s radically diverse microclimates; Kits for an Encounter, an exhibition of artists’ kits; and ShopDropping, an exhibition of reverse shoplifting (art inserted into public places of commerce). Upcoming projects include the publication of 2 books: ‘Byproducts’ (eds. Joseph del Pesco & Marisa Jahn; publisher: YYZ Books, Toronto, Jan 2009) and ‘Recipes for an Encounter’ (eds. Berin Golonu, Candice Hopkins, Marisa Jahn; publisher: Western Front, Fall 2008).

Jahn’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Frieze, Punk Planet, NY Arts Magazine, Clamor, San Francisco Chronicle, the Fader, Artweek, Cluster (Italy), Metropolis, the Discovery Channel, NPR, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She has received awards and grants such as the Robert & Colleen Haas Scholarship (2000), MIT Department of Architecture Fellowship (2005-8), Travel Grant awarded from the American Embassy in Serbia (2007), Artslink (2005), and is an artist in residence at the MIT Media Lab (2007-9) and at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2008). She graduated with distinction from UC Berkeley in 2000 with a double major BA in Fine Art and Interdisciplinary Studies (focus on Cultural Geography) and received her MS from MIT’s Visual Art Program in 2007.

As an art educator working with mostly underrepresented youth, Jahn has partnered and worked with organizations such as BreakArts (US/Honduras), Moks (Estonia), Zero One (San Jose), NEXMAP (SF), Meridian Gallery Teen Internship Program (SF), and was recognized by UNESCO in 2006 as a leading art educator.

She lives between Boston and New York, where she works with Reverend Billy &, Savitri D., and The Church of Stop Shopping on various art-activist campaigns regarding the preservation of free speech, sustainable consumption, and most currently, the privatization of public space around New York's Union Square Park (click for more campaigns against the Union Square Partnership).