A woman with long, light brown hair, wearing a black shirt and a colorful beaded necklace, is against a black background.

Colleen Plumb

Colleen Plumb works in photography, video, books, installation, and public video projection. Her work examines relationships between humans, nonhuman animals, and the living world, exploring questions of captivity, coexistence, ecology, and justice. Plumb has published two books with Radius Books, Animals Are Outside Today (2011) and Thirty Times a Minute (2020). Through long-term projects that often involve collaboration with conservation and advocacy organizations, she investigates how cultural values shape our relationships with other species and the environment.

Plumb has projected videos in hundreds of public locations across the US and Europe, and recently at Art on The Mart in Chicago. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo, NYT LENS, Time Lightbox, Psychology Today, Oxford American, PDN, and Orion. Her 2021 installation, Surveilling Snow Lily, was a must-see in ARTFORUM gallery guide.

Plumb's work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Blue Sky in Portland, 21c, Oolite Arts in Miami, Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Jen Bekman Gallery NY, Edelman Gallery, Historic Water Tower Gallery, and Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Plumb teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.