A.K. Burns

A Smeary Spot is the first in a cycle of multimedia installations, that uses science fiction and queer politics as a foundation to explore five interrelated elements: land, water, the body, power and the void. Completed and first exhibited in 2015 at Participant Inc., the 4-channel video was shot in the deserts of southern Utah and in a black box theater.

The Poetry Parade is a series of live events that are an ongoing collaboration between Burns and Hubbard. As a feminist intervention into permanent collections, the artists gather a group of readers, pair texts with works, then read aloud, resulting in a recontextualization of their historical narrative. The Poetry Parade has taken place at the Museum of Modern Art (2012), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2015), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015).

Burns co-founded and edited Randy Magazine with Sophie Mörner, an annual trans-feminist arts magazine from 2010-2013. Published by Capricious, they released an anthology of the magazine in June 2016. Additionally, Burns has collaborated with LTTR and RIDYkeulous.

A.K. Burns is a co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) a New York-based activist group founded in 2008. W.A.G.E. is a New York-based activist group and non-profit organization whose stated advocacy mission is "currently focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a sustainable model for best practices between artists and the institutions that contract their labor."

From 2007 to 2010, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner composed Community Action Center. It is a feature-length work that they refer to as a ‘socio-sexual’ video, which utilizes erotics to express the personal sexual and political lives of the people in their community, with a largely queer focus. The video was filmed in New York State and Los Angeles. In 2013, Burns and Steiner took the film on a fourteen city, ten state screening tour entitled Community Action Center or BUST!: The X-Cuntry Tour. The tour culminated in October 2013, with an evening performance at The Kitchen, New York. The video was accompanied by live performances of artists from the Community Action Center soundtrack.

A.K. Burns (born 1975, in Capitola, California) is a New York-based interdisciplinary visual artist, working with video, installation, sculpture, collage, poetry and collaboration whose works address trans-feminist issues. Burns is currently a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She graduated from Rhode Island School of Design and went on to receive an MFA in sculpture from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Burns has been full-time faculty at Hunter College's Graduate Department of Art and Art History from 2015-2016 and a mentor at Columbia University. She has also taught at Parsons the New School for Design, Cooper Union and Virginia Commonwealth University. Burns was a 2015 Creative Capital Awardee in the Visual Arts category and is represented by Calicoon Fine Arts, Galerie Michel Rein and Video Data Bank.