Rachel Sussman

Rachel Sussman (born 1975) is an American contemporary artist and photographer based in Brooklyn. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a BFA, studied at the Bard College MFA program, and began a practice-based fine arts PhD at Central Saint Martins in London. Sussman is a Guggenheim and MacDowell Colony Fellow, spoke about her work at the TEDGlobal conference in 2010, and was a 2016 TED Resident. Sussman's interdisciplinary project "The Oldest Living Things in the World," has been featured in the media all over the world, including the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Guardian, NPR's Picture Show, New Scientist, as well as publications in China, Brazil, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. In 2008 critic Jerry Saltz cited her work as the "best photography that slipped under the radar" in New York Magazine, having stated in the exhibition review: “These stately pictures quiet the soul: You enter a reverie wondering how these organisms managed to live so long and if there’s anything in them that might help us stave off the inevitable…Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet” Sussman continues to make artwork about connecting personal time to cosmic time through new installation-based works. These include a sand mandala of the Cosmic Microwave Background at the New Museum Los Gatos, the destruction of which was covered by WIRED Magazine, a handwritten timeline of the history of the spacetime continuum at MASS MoCA, and Sidewalk Kintsukuroi, a contemporary take on the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, at the Des Moines Art Center.Sussman is a 2016-2017 artist in residence with the SETI Institute. 2Oldest Living Things in the World From 2004 to 2014, Sussman researched, worked with biologists, and traveled all over the world to find and photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older. Sussman says "The project is part art and part science. There's an environmental component. And I'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescal