Elizabeth McTernan
Visiting Assistant Professor
Biography
Elizabeth McTernan is an artist and writer based in Iowa City and Berlin. Starting in fall 2025, she is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Iowa. McTernan earned her MFA from Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD, USA. Working regularly with scientists and scholars across fields, she is co-director of the interdisciplinary project "Meandering River" in Iowa City, and she is a core member of the research group "Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting" (EER), an art-science collaboration led by artist Olafur Eliasson and anthropologist Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University in Denmark.
McTernan's work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, and her academic texts have been published in the MIT Press Leonardo Journal and ScienceOpen. She has been granted numerous awards across Europe and the US, including a Big Field Fund grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation (Iowa City, US); nomination to the Long List of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) Grant; and residencies such as Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.
“I often describe my work as a practice of mapping. Through a research-oriented process and multi-modal forms, I explore the ways that acts of observing and measuring an environment are always mediated by embodiment. In this way, my works operate as ‘anti-maps,’ records of my own fleeting experience of place and phenomena. Rather than providing a fixed image of a landscape, they resist completion and are entangled with time. Through this interdisciplinary practice of (anti)mapping, I problematize and play with methods of empiricism and media ecologies, accessing the subjectivities from which knowledges are produced. This research manifests in a variety of forms: drawings, performance scores, field guides, printmaking, electronics and sensors, soundscapes, sculptures, impractical tools, lyric essay, and performative actions across landscapes. I have the most fun with my work when I can find complexity in a seemingly straightforward idea, or play with methods from non-art disciplines, importing them into artistic space.”
McTernan's work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, and her academic texts have been published in the MIT Press Leonardo Journal and ScienceOpen. She has been granted numerous awards across Europe and the US, including a Big Field Fund grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation (Iowa City, US); nomination to the Long List of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) Grant; and residencies such as Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.
“I often describe my work as a practice of mapping. Through a research-oriented process and multi-modal forms, I explore the ways that acts of observing and measuring an environment are always mediated by embodiment. In this way, my works operate as ‘anti-maps,’ records of my own fleeting experience of place and phenomena. Rather than providing a fixed image of a landscape, they resist completion and are entangled with time. Through this interdisciplinary practice of (anti)mapping, I problematize and play with methods of empiricism and media ecologies, accessing the subjectivities from which knowledges are produced. This research manifests in a variety of forms: drawings, performance scores, field guides, printmaking, electronics and sensors, soundscapes, sculptures, impractical tools, lyric essay, and performative actions across landscapes. I have the most fun with my work when I can find complexity in a seemingly straightforward idea, or play with methods from non-art disciplines, importing them into artistic space.”
Research areas
- Painting and Drawing
