About Trisha Donnelly
Born 1974. Trisha Donnelly is an American artist, draftsperson, conceptual artist, video artist and performance artist.
Trisha Donnelly (born April 22, 1974) is an American contemporary artist who is particularly well known as a conceptual artist. Donnelly works with various media including photography, drawing, audio, video, sculpture, and performance. Donnelly is also a Clinical Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California. Trisha Donnelly is represented by Galerie Buchholz, Matthew Marks Gallery, and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.
Early life Trisha Donnelly was born on April 22, 1974, in San Francisco. In 1995, Donnelly received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the University of California in Los Angeles. In the exhibition, "she was after 'striking voices'" she couldn't let go of, "'paths of encounters and building poetic structures... images that go beyond images themselves."' The exhibition included works by artists such as Eliot Porter, Joe Goode, Gertrude Kasebier, Wendy Carlos, and John Whitney. The audio guide provided for the show was art historian Robert Rosenblum discussing MoMA's 1989 Picasso retrospective. Donnelly explained, "The feeling when listening to these audio guides was, this was a great work of art... or work of whatever, work of another entity, or another state and dimension, existing... [They] are so beautiful... It's like the Taj Mahal of languages, building it himself. By the end, I don't need the exhibition at all. I'm awash in this ocean of his funny, brilliant voice." Air de Paris, Paris, France (2002) Casey Kaplan gallery, New York, USA (2004) The Wrong Gallery, New York, USA (2004) Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2005) Art Pace, San Antonio, USA (2005) Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2005) Trisha Donnelly, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2007) The Renaissance Society, Chicago, USA (2008) Bologna Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, Italy (2009) Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2010) Casey Kaplan gallery, New York, USA (2010) Air de Paris, Paris, France (2010) Les Rencontres d'Arles, France. Exhibition and Discovery Award laureate (2010) Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Switzerland (2013) Artist's Choice, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2013) San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2013) Serpentine Galleries (2014) Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2015) Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2016) 2017 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2017) Galerie Buchholz, Cologne (2018) The Shed, NYC (2019) The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2025)
Select group exhibitions The World as a Stage (2007) Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013) Life Itself: On the question of what it essentially is; its materialities, its characteristics…, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2016) Less Than One, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA (2016) Galerie Buchholz, Berlin (2017) In Tune with the World, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2018) Other Mechanisms, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2018)
Public collections Donnelly's work can be found in a number of public collections, including:
Museum of Modern Art, New York Tate Walker Art Center Marciano Art Foundation (private collection open to public) Julia Stoschek Collection (private collection open to public) Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi (private collection open to public) Fondation Louis Vuitton
Recognition In 2010, Donnelly was awarded with the LUMA Foundation Photography Prize.
In 2012, Donnelly was awarded the inaugural Faber-Castell International Drawing Award by the Neues Museum.
In 2017, Donnelly was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Museum Ludwig. Suzanne Cotter, director of Mudam Luxembourg, said of Donnelly in recognition of the award: “Trisha Donnelly is without doubt one of the most compelling artists of our time whose work offers entirely new ways of experiencing and thinking about form, at once synaesthesic and disruptively transporting."
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Important facts
People in Trisha Donnelly's life
Named in this biography and alive at the same time
Contemporaries
People whose lives overlapped Trisha Donnelly's
Frequently asked questions
Who is Trisha Donnelly?
American artist (born 1974)
When was Trisha Donnelly born?
Trisha Donnelly was born on 22 April 1974 in Los Angeles, San Francisco.
What is Trisha Donnelly's occupation?
Trisha Donnelly is an artist, draftsperson, conceptual artist, video artist and performance artist.
What nationality is Trisha Donnelly?
Trisha Donnelly is American.
Sources & further reading
Cite this page
APA: Biography.guide. (2026). Trisha Donnelly. https://biography.guide/trisha-donnelly/
MLA: "Trisha Donnelly." Biography.guide, https://biography.guide/trisha-donnelly/.
Chicago: "Trisha Donnelly." Biography.guide. https://biography.guide/trisha-donnelly/.
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