Connie Zheng and Rachelle Reichert on Art, Environment, and Tikkun

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and filmmaker based out of xučyun/Oakland, California. Projects such as large-scale maps, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making workshops, and experimental films about sentient seeds are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, severe ecological transformation, and polyvocal articulations of hope from an environmental justice perspective. Zheng's work pays particular attention to the speculative possibilities offered by a nonlinear sense of time and the plant world. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally, through venues such as The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the IMPAKT Festival in the Netherlands. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, among others, and was the inaugural recipient of the Joint Space Award. Her written work has appeared in publications such as Errant Journal and SFMOMA’s Open Space, and she recently published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University, an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.