Santa Fe Art Institute

Sharon Siskin

Sharon Siskin is an interdisciplinary, relational, community collaborative artist whose work addresses environmental and social justice issues, and solidarity, through the lenses of memory, loss, grief, and survivance. She is the recipient of awards including a Creative Work Fund Grant, and Berkeley Civic Arts Grant for social practice projects, Service Works, in collaboration with long-term survivors of AIDS, and Berkeley Rising, for investigating climate crisis and ecological grief in Berkeley. Others include a California Arts Council (CAC) Individual Artist Fellowship, 12 CAC Artist in Residence Grants for projects in the AIDS and homeless services communities, and an Artist Residency at Recology (the SF dump). Her work has been featured in Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists, and Outside the Frame: Teaching Art for Social Change. She is faculty at Goddard College MFA-IA Program, Berkeley City College, and Laney College, teaching Artist as Citizen: Introduction to Community-based Arts Practices, and EcoArt Matters, studio art courses, and taught at San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, John F. Kennedy University’s MFA Program, as Assistant Professor at University of San Francisco, and at Vacaville Prison. She is the founder of Positive Art, 1988-present an art project in the Bay Area AIDS services community and is a founding board member of WEAD (Women Eco Art Dialog) 1996-present. Her education includes a BFA, Tyler School of Art; MA, University of New Mexico; and MFA, UC Berkeley, and co-parenting her twin daughters.