Susannah Hays

Susannah Hays (born 1959) is an American artist and educator practicing in the fields of philosophy, ecology, technical processes in historical and contemporary photography and the book as art. She first gained recognition for her work in 2000 when she joined Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions there as well as at Seager/Gray Gallery in Marin, California and Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While she is especially known for cameraless and 19th Century processes, her creative work expands to realms of experimentation in all visual media. Her seminar courses focus on the practice of art and ecology, embodied mind cognition, space constructions, topologies and visual autobiography.

Life Hays was born in Boston Massachusetts (twin brother John Hays) and lived in Connecticut until 1978, when she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to attend Mills College. While earning her MA, she was awarded the Eisner Prize for Photography. At the Art Institute, she studied with Doug Hall and Ann Chamberlain. At U.C. Berkeley she studied with philosopher Alva Nöe, poet Lyn Hejinian, painter Tony Dubovsky, filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha and digital media artist Greg Niemeyer. In 2012, she moved from Berkeley to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she currently resides. In 1996, she curated the national exhibition Science Imagined for the Berkeley Art Center and in 2007 Zero In Zero Out for Donna Seager Gallery. She joined the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute from 2002 to 2012 and has also taught at California College of the Arts, Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and featured in various articles and reviews such as the New Mexico Museum of Art, Directly from Nature; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Verniciatura; None-Such Space, Nature Word ~ Verbe Nature; Townsend Center for the Humanities, Everyday Constellations; and Artists Television Access, Penumbra.

Collections

Hays' work is in the permanent collections of the following institutions: Mills College Library Heller Rare Book Room Oakland, California Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas Prentice and Paul Sack Trust San Francisco, California Santa Barbara Museum of Art Santa Barbara, California Stanford University Cecil H. Green Library Stanford, California (major acquisition) University of California Berkeley Environmental Design Library Yale Art Gallery New Haven, Connecticut Yale Haas Book Art Collection New Haven, Connecticut Yale Beinecke Library of American Literature New Haven, Connecticut Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Santa Monica, California