Meghan Moe Beitiks was the 2013 School of the Art Institute of Chicago Awardee of the Edes Foundation Prize.
Moe works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that interrogates relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.
She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.
As part of her year as an Edes Awardee, within which she sought to develop her practice according to Karen Barad’s concept of “Intra-Action,” Moe spent several months at a SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, in Perth, Australia. She trained with scientists at La Trobe University in Melbourne regarding the proper care and handling of anerobic bacteria, then returned to Perth to build her own anerobic facilities and perform with them. This was for a piece called A Lab for Apologies and Forgiveness v.5, part of a larger series within which Moe looks at what it means to apologize to a site that has been altered or contaminated by human use. She was also a fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art and Arts Residency, and presented work at the World Stage Design conference and the Out of Site Festival in Chicago. Documentation of work from her Edes year was later displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
She has presented work in California, Connecticut, Chicago, Nevada, Michigan, Brooklyn, Wales, London, Latvia and Russia. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow in Theater to Latvia and received a MacDowell Colony fellowship from the Leon Levy Foundation following her Edes award year, as well as residencies at the Kala Art Institute and the I-Park Foundation.
