Saya Woolfalk

Woolfalk’s work has exhibited at galleries and museums around the United States and abroad, including PS1/MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Studio Museum in Harlem, Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She participated in PERFORMA 09.

Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics within her work. The Empathics are a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. “Because I’m mixed race, I have this idea that to leave the conversation ambiguous is interesting,” she says. The Empathics were first on view in Woolfalks first solo show at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012.

This work has been included in the shows Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Centers and Mental Maps of Himalayan Buddhism at the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco) in 2014 and Disguise: Masks & Global African Art at the Seattle Art Museum in 2015 and the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. She has cited sowei helmet masks produced by the Sande society in Sierra Leone as inspiration for this work because of how the female-centered community used these masks in masquerades and female initiation rituals.

In an interview for Huffington Post, she described her attitude towards cultural hybridity: "Although cultures do have important political utility, the idea that cultures develop in vacuums is false. Cultures really build on each other. American culture is a serious hybrid—an agglomeration of all of the different immigrant groups and nationalities. It’s [sic] history of European colonialism, slavery, and Native American history made our culture what it is today."

She has received a number of prestigious awards including a Fulbright for research in Maranhão, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant in 2007 and has been an artist-in-residence at the Newark Museum, University at Buffalo, Yaddo, Sculpture Space and Dieu Donne Papermill. With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition, "The Institute of Empathy," ran at Real Art Ways Hartford, CT from the fall of 2010 to the spring of 2011. Her first major solo exhibition at a North American museum opened at the Montclair Art Museum in October 2012.

She has an art studio in Manhattan. Woolfalk was educated at Brown University (B.A. Visual Art and Economics 2001) and earned her M.F.A. in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Woolfalk moved to New York in the 2006, to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem from 2007-2008. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, the anthropologist, Sean T. Mitchell and their daughter Aya Woolfalk Mitchell.

Saya Woolfalk (born 1979, Gifu City, Japan) is a New York-based artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses science fiction and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.