Connie Zheng

About the artist:

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of Oakland, California. She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her projects frequently include participatory scenarios and seek to diagram dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, as well as the interplay between memory, culture, and place. Projects such as maps of toxic sites and environmental remediation, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making kits, mooncake design workshops and improvisational pseudo-documentaries are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, the continued weight of history, and possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing and future ecological transformations.

Zheng’s projects have been exhibited and screened internationally and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. Zheng graduated with bachelor’s degrees in economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.