About
Artist Lynn Book (b. 1957, TX) has been active since the late 1970s, producing interdisciplinary, transmedia projects that escape and expand boundaries across fields, genres and cultural spheres. She has lived in Memphis, Chicago, New York and North Carolina in the US. Internationally, her work has circulated in the form of live performance, video, audio and online. Book’s critically recognized work springs from long standing investigations into bodies, otherness, reinvention of social encounters and radicalizing public imagination. Always experimental in form and approach, she is known as a performance maker and vocal artist within contemporary art and experimental music spheres and has created notable, large scale exhibition and site-specific installation projects in the US, Slovenia, Greece and Australia. Since 2010, Book has been deeply involved in producing a body of work titled, “Unreading for Future Bodies” that works across video art, publication, performance and exhibition projects.
“Unreading…” asks what bodies are in the entanglements of digital, material and sustainable worlds. Book makes proposals for performative knowledge making that animates the crucial need to reinvent life at every turn from the self-body to complex sociopolitical bodies in relation to evolving planetary body-forms.. Individual projects from this corpus draw from research into Baroque opera, Greek tragedy, and narrative voice, as in the multimedia performance collaboration, “FROTH – Or Future Archeologies of Love and Power” (2010), or “Escapes” (2012-14), a video book of poems that stages liberatory moves from captives states. In the ongoing “Derangements” projects (2014-present), she reworks mythological, scientific and cultural ideas about chimeras to respond to urgent contemporary challenges.
Video works from “Unreading…” have been shown at the London Biennale and Manila Pollination in 2016, and also Hong Kong, the UK, Berlin, Naples, Budapest and Australia. Text-scores and video and images have been published in print and online art and scholarly journals: ELSE (Transart), Synthesis (University of Athens), Anglistica (University of Naples), Abrigo Portatil (Brazil). “Instructions for Deranging”, a 2022 solo exhibition of visual works and performance, and which featured a video projection, premiered at Art Stays International Festival of Contemporary Art, Ptuj, Slovenia. In 2025, Book created an exhibition work, “Bodies Go Everywhere – an open book project”, as well as a concert performance for voice, cello and projected video called, “Unreading for Ancient Future Bodies” as the culmination of a 2 month residency in Crete and Kavala, Greece.
Book has received fellowships and grants from among others, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacArthur Foundation for a project residency to produce “Gorgeous Fever: the radio drama”, two individual artist fellowships from Illinois Arts Council, Chicago Cultural Affairs, Franklin Furnace Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Contemporary Art, Somos Art Haus Berlin, and in Turkey, Greece and Hong Kong, in addition to support for teaching residencies and institutional research grants.
In 2017, Book was awarded Mellon Foundation funding to develop her archive as a pilot for the Humanities Institute and the Digital Scholarship Center, Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. The Lynn Book Projects Archive launched its online portal in 2022 with over 2000 digitized items and artifacts out of over 10,000. This ongoing effort has received essential support from students, alums and institutions or organizations where her work is also archived. The site uses the OMEKA software making it a searchable database that accords with national and international standards. See the Archive page for more information.
Lynn Book’s teaching practice has long been entwined with her art making practice. This creative work emerges from her commitment to experiments in self/other relationships, especially unlikely partnerships that invite participation from the 'non-expert', the marginal or otherwise invisible acts of extraordinary living into future possibility. See the Teaching page for more information.
Recent interviews with Book include:
ASAP/Review Journal, Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A., 2023
Espoarte Contemporary Art Magazine, Milan, Italy, 2022
WomenCinemakers Biennale, Berlin, Germany, 2018