“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
- Baba Dioum
Heather Bird Harris is an artist, education leader, and independent curator. Her interdisciplinary practice bridges critical ecology and reparative history, drawing from communal and more-than-human archives. Through painting, social practice, film, and, more broadly, curation, writing, and teaching, her work brings together alternative ways of knowing that make emergence, cooperation, and systems change more possible.
Harris holds a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and M.A. in Education Leadership from Columbia University. She has served as the principal of a turnaround school in New Orleans and as a learning consultant for school leaders nationwide, focusing on anti-racist history curriculum. Recent exhibitions include NADA Curates, New Mexico State University Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, SC), Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA), Stoveworks (Chattanooga, TN), SITE (Atlanta, GA), and apexart’s Plastic, the New Coal at the Descendants Project (Vacherie, LA). Recent projects include Resonancia Naturale with musicians and ecologists at Arizona State University and Hope Springs Eternal in collaboration with activist group RISE St. James. Harris’s practice has been featured in Burnaway, ART PAPERS, Garden & Gun, ArtsATL, and on NPR and her writing has appeared in Brink Literary Journal, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, Burnaway, and Scalawag. She is the recipient of fellowships at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (Hudson Valley, NY), The Hambidge Center (Rabun Gap, GA), and the Art & Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University (Atlanta, GA). Harris is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she lives with her partner and their two children.
Heather Bird Harris’s work explores climate crisis, activism, and grief through cross-sector collaborations and use of natural materials. Much of her artistic practice involves in-depth research of specific places and vegetation, as well as partnerships with historians, ecologists, and botanists to further ‘map’ and reveal the relationships between ecosystems and histories of industrialization and colonization. Her site-specific materials include watercolors made from clay and coal, walnut ink, and more recently weathering rind—a material that involves weathering off the ‘rind’ of the soft clay surrounding a hard rock, such as granite. ... Poetic and dreamy, but with an underlying acknowledgement of the climate grief and capitalistic violence that permeates the world today. Harris’s work is as poignant as it is joyful, an emotionally complicated journey into hanging on and letting go.
- EC Flamming, curator and writer
Heather Bird Harris enmeshes her work with soil to expose the inherent affordances of the material and invoke memories held by it. Her large-scale works of earth pigment and ink demonstrate how the use of the land has the potential to call forth both the present and predicted effects of sea-level rise through invoking the entangled and oftentimes indistinguishable boundaries between earth and sea. The substance which has born witness to it all is the land itself.
- Ada Evans, "Art of Waning Spaces: The Role of Materials in Imagining Coastal Climate Change"
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
2026 MFA, Painting, Georgia State University,
Atlanta, GA (expected May 2026)
2017 National Principal’s Academy Fellowship, Relay
Graduate School of Education, New York, NY
2014 M.Ed, Education Leadership, Columbia
University, New York, NY
2009 BA cum laude, Art History and Studio Art,
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
S. Michael Eigen ‘87 Prize in Art History
Periclean Honors Society
SOLO + TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2026 Field Notes with Joel Silverman, curated by EC Fleming,
Swan Coach House, Atlanta, GA, Feb 26 - Mar 26
How to Hold the Weather, Ernest G. Welch Gallery, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, Mar 30 - Apr 4
2025 love as large as grief demands, Spalding Nix, Atlanta, GA
2022 Where the Water Goes, SALON Gallery, New Orleans, LA