ARTIST STATEMENT

My fluid and highly collaborative practice reflects contemporary restlessness and blurred boundaries. I am particularly drawn to projects that fuse physicality and time with technology, connecting what we hold onto and what we let go. 

Sculptural objects, live performances, installations, video portraits and social orchestrations explore vulnerability and augment humanity through technology. A machine wants to be a priority in someone’s life; light is drawn on a dancer's body; portraits reveal enduring age; light becomes a rain shower of memory. Artists and technologists speed date; shadows fill an empty space; and a social discovery app brings civilized flirting to the dating space. 

Each work ultimately shapes the ephemeral and intimate energy between people in a voice that is introspective, conceptual, and relentlessly generative.

CV

BIO

Susie Lee is a practicing artist based in Seattle. Born in Hershey, Pennsylvania, she then spent her formative years in Grand Forks, North Dakota; the community connection and Plains approach to life profoundly informs her perspective and minimalist aesthetics. Her work explores intimacy, time and connection through technology, fluidly embedding new media across many platforms. Recognized as Emerging Artist of the Year for the “intelligence, emotion and sensuality” of her work, Lee is committed to the amplification of authentic human connection through technology. 

Lee is a graduate of Yale, Columbia and UW with degrees in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, education, and fine arts. In her undergraduate years, she researched Type II diabetes in transgenic mice and e.Coli surface protein structures. After receiving her Masters at Teachers College, she chose to teach chemistry at an alternative, all-Black and Hispanic public high school in NYC.

As an artist, she continued to tutor high school students privately in math and science, and also helmed teen art classes at the Frye Art Museum and Centrum in progressive arts education programs. A number of those students continued to seriously pursue arts as a career. She viewed teenagers as "sculptures in time," and this mindset has been an effective, incremental approach to meaningful learning. 

Her unique background as scientist, educator, and artist feed into a rhizomatic and restless intellectual curiosity that is ultimately grounded in a strong sense of vocation to impact the world positively and concretely. She cared for patients at a long-term care facility during a residency that resulted in the award-winning Still Lives portraits. She explored the world of fracking to shine light to the small-town, blue-collar stories of oil workers who wondered out loud why anyone would care about their stories. 

Her recent endeavor, Siren, tackles business and entrepreneurship as mediums, and gained significant attention in the public imagination and press, including The Guardian, front page of the Seattle Times , CNN, Cosmopolitan, Geekwire, The Stranger, Engadget, Crosscut, and ThinkProgress. She discussed Siren with a group of Pakistani women on the issue of gender rights, presented at the Grace Hopper conference, partnered with Durex on a 37M view campaign about technology and intimacy, won Geekwire's App of the Year (over Starbucks and Alaska Airlines), and spoke about fluidity and possibility at TEDx Rainier. And Siren directly created numerous real connections, including long term relationships and marriages.

Lee practiced Shotokan Karate for over 16 years, and in 1988 was the youngest female to receive her black belt in her home state. She placed 7th in the World Championships in Osaka, Japan as a 2nd degree black belt. She is a voracious eater and a good shot with handguns; she walks like a fighter yet gets pushed around by her Shiba Inu; she believes in the complex, joyfully inconsistent, non-reductive, passionate and intelligent identity of a feminist.  She is now starting the second half of her life with an infant, the bold Hana Inza Edmonds-Lee