Amy Elkins
2025 Eureka Fellow
Amy Elkins is a visual artist working in photography, installation, and sculpture. She has spent more than 15 years researching, creating, and exhibiting work that explores the complexities of identity and gender and the psychological and sociological impacts of systems of power, such as those found in prisons, the military, and colonized spaces. Her research-based practice is borne from familial experiences with incarceration, vulnerability, and resilience and oscillates between formal, conceptual, and documentary.
Elkins has work in permanent collections at venues such as The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA; Newcomb Museum of Art in New Orleans, LA; North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC; Light Work in Syracuse, NY; Aperture Foundation in New York, NY; and more. Publications include monographs Black is the Day, Black is the Night in 2016 and Anxious Pleasures in 2022, a book that culminated out of a 377-day pandemic performative portrait project. She received an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York City. Awards include the Aperture Portfolio Prize, Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, Cadogan Award, and more.
Recently, Elkins has been exploring her complex history as an 8th-generation born on Tongva land in the greater Los Angeles area using family archives to trace the land loss, assimilation, and fortitude of her Indigenous and Chicanx ancestors in Southern California for a project titled A Place Where We Are In The Sun.
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