Artist Statement/ Biography

Janna’s practice is a confluence of art-making, curating, and writing, informed by play, rhymes and riddles, conversations, mathematics, linguistics, and the concerns of poetry, experimental psychology, and photographic theory concerning perception and truth. Through drawing, photography, cross-stitch, writing, installation, and video, her work poetically navigates how we strain meanings through the matter of experiences.

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Janna lives and works in New York, where she is an artist and independent curator. In 2015 she received a MFA in Photography/Combined Media from Hunter College, after continuing studies in Photography at the School of Visual Arts (New York), and Literature and Spanish Linguistics in undergraduate. A 2016 Rema Hort Foundation ACE Grant recipient, she has exhibited work and participated in residencies in the United States, Lebanon, and China. Recent exhibitions include Unravelled (2016) at the Beirut Art Center, To Tell You (2015), and Shall We Talk or Will We Just Gaze (2014), both at 205 Hudson Street (New York). Janna is the 2015-16 curatorial fellow at Booklyn Artist Alliance. Her cross-disciplinary work negotiates a variety of subjects: psychology, linguistics, remembered dialogue, poetry, mysticism, perception, and truth. Select curatorial projects include Reverse (2012) and [ON SILENCE] (2012) at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, OPEN CAGE: NEW YORK (2012) at Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology; Strange Labor (2015), Cottage Industry (2015), Hard to Place (2016), Family Portraits (2016), and Valid From Until (2016) at Booklyn. She is editor of A House Without a Roof, a trilingual artist book by Adam Golfer. Her art and curatorial projects have been reviewed in The Curator, SEEN, ArtForum, Art in America, the NY Times, and Hyperallergic.