ABOUT

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Museum of Arts and Design; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Mint Museum; the Philbrook Museum; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. 

Her films and artwork have been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, Art in America, Cabinet, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Der Standard, and on NPR and Bloomberg News, among other media outlets and scholarly publications. 

She has been awarded residencies at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS, 2009), the Museum of Arts and Design (2009), Wave Hill (2012), and MacDowell (2004, 2007, and 2016). She received a 2019 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship and a 2020 Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award.

She has lectured on her artwork and on themes of feminism, handcraft, film, and textiles at art schools and universities in the US and abroad including Harvard University; Rhode Island School of Design; Maryland Institute College of Art; Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts; Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London; Museum of World Culture, Sweden, and the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, among many others. She has taught courses in video, fine art, writing about art, craft theory, and textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons the New School for Design, New York University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

From 2002-7 she edited and published the 'zine KnitKnit, which is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University.

Gschwandtner was born in Washington D.C. in 1977 to an Austrian father and American mother. Her last name is pronounced "Gish-wandt-ner." She received a BA with honors in art/semiotics from Brown University, where she studied with media artist Leslie Thornton. She studied video with VALIE EXPORT in Salzburg, Austria, and she received her MFA in film/video from Bard College. She lived in New York City from 2000 - 2015, and currently lives in California with her husband and child.