Dakota Gearhart is an artist, animator, and educator who seeks to make the familiar strange—and sometimes the strange familiar—and through that inversion articulate a more robust and less oppressive future. Her current animated video project, Life Touching Life, invites scientists, researchers, and caretakers to share their observations on consciousness and its relationship to biodiversity.
In this series, Gearhart performs as a half-woman half-algae creature who introduces viewers to fictional species, like pixel bacteria. Color, humor, sound, and playful spaces of maximalism are common features of her collage-based aesthetic. Gearhart has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fellowship for her work on Life Touching Life, as well as a National Endowments for the Arts US-Japan Creative Fellowship which brought the series to Japan in 2023. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Queens Museum, NY; Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Horse Hospital, London; Xanadu, Berlin; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China; and I-House, Tokyo, Japan. Gearhart is based in New York, where she is a Creative Science member of the New Museum’s NEW INC program and an adjunct professor at New York University and The New School.
