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About

  • Woman with strawberry blonde hair and red lipstick, dressed in black, standing on front of a three-channel video installation showing a rocky landscape with a hand caressing the rock on the left-hand video image.

    Portrait of Lucy Cotter/Laoiseach Ní Choitir by Mario Gallucci with Channel (2017) by Christine Howard Sandoval, as installed in Unquiet Objects, 2021.

Lucy Cotter/ Laoiseach Ní Choitir (she/her) is a writer, artist, curator, and educator. She sees art as a form of material, conceptual, spatial, and choreographic thinking and a poetic means into the unknown and the unknowable, past and present. She embraces art's dynamic engagement with other fields, foregrounding how its multi-sensory nature creates possibilities to transform, queer, decolonize, re-indigenize, and de-ableize knowledge.

Cotter/ Ní Choitir holds a PhD in cultural analysis, engaging with the agency of curating in a post/colonial world. Her curatorial accolades include being the curator of the Dutch Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017, and co-curator of Here as the Centre of the World, a transnational project in six global cities. She has curated exhibitions, performance, and events internationally at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam; e-flux, New York; The Kitchen, New York; the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland; Oregon Center for Contemporary Art, Portland, and Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans.

Cotter/ Ní Choitir has published over 100 texts on contemporary art, highlighting its entanglement in social, cultural, and political questions. She has also written about experimental and cross-genre practices in dance, theatre, architecture, sound, music, and design. Her work has been published in journals such as Frieze, Flash Art, Third Text, Artforum, Mousse, and Hyperallergic. Recent and upcoming book chapters appear in Estado Vegetal: Plant Thinking (University of Minnesota Press); The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures (University of Edinburgh Press), The Routledge Companion to Irish Art, and catalogues such as Haegue Yang: The Great Forgetfulness (National Sculpture Factory). Her book Reclaiming Artistic Research (Hatje Cantz, 2019, expanded edition 2024) engages in dialogue with artists worldwide to foreground art as a form of material, embodied, spatial, and choreographic thinking.

Cotter/ Ní Choitir exhibits her artistic work intermittently in tandem with experimental cross-genre writing. She is currently working on a new body of video and mixed media work engaging with embodied (disappearing, diasporic, minor) language and a related experimental creative nonfiction book entitled Between Language– A Love Song. Forthcoming exhibitions include a 2026 solo exhibition at Suli T. Go gallery at Kahilu Theatre, Hawai’i, that will explore shared values and imaginaries in Gaeilge (Irish) and Ōlelo Hawai’i. She has recently presented, screened, or staged readings of her work at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Otis; Concordia University, Montreal; Tin House Books, Portland, and the Public Nature series at Ramona Art Farm, Portland (all 2025). Following her year-long project residency at Stelo Arts and Culture Foundation, Portland (2024–2025), she will be a 2026 resident at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

Cotter/ Ní Choitir was the inaugural director of one of Europe’s first MAs in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and has taught at several art institutions in Europe and the US, including the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, Willamette University, and Portland State University. As a public speaker, Cotter/ Ní Choitir is acclaimed for her ability to bridge artistic and academic discourses. Irish-born, she is currently based in Portland, Oregon, a city built on the ceded and unceded village sites and stolen land of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Watlala bands of the Chinook, the Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and other Columbia River tribes whose contemporary resilience carries forward a legacy of ancestral stewardship.

Contact

Please reach out with queries about collaborations, guest lectures or workshops, curatorial and artistic projects, commissioning texts, or consulting. You are also welcome to connect if you have any questions about my work or just wish to say hello. Email: info [at] lucycotter [dot] org

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I send out an occasional newsletter and make e-announcements about larger projects. Please email to subscribe if you wish to be kept up to date: info [at] lucycotter [dot] org

ACCESS

Please email (info [at] lucycotter [dot] org) to request alternative formats of books or texts for use with assistive technologies, or to ask any further access-related questions about my work. I am keen to support venues hosting my work in any capacity to create broad access to my work.

In an ideal world, the word “art” would be a verb. I experience writing, curating, art-making, speaking, and educating as interrelated forms of practice, involving process-led, research-engaged, speculative, and experimental ways of being in the world. I’m interested in the (conceptual-material, spatial-choreographic, and embodied-theoretical) thinking that emerges in and through artistic practice. I seek to make space for what is not easily accommodated, supporting art’s tendency to move towards the unknown and unknowable, the poetic and the abstract, and respecting all artists’ right to equity and opacity.

I am drawn to art that seeks to re-constellate ancient, misplaced, marginalized, and actively forgotten knowledge; to imagine forward, and to harness new technologies for collective agency. I champion artists who engage with other disciplines on artistic terms, creating new questions. For me, decolonization, sustainability, re-indigenization, and embodied-material-site-responsive ways of being in the world go hand in hand. I embrace the multiplicity of exhibitions’ sensory, emotional, bodily, and intellectual entry points, which can hold open competing time-space conceptions, and make space for neurodiverse, anti-ableist, genderfluid, and multiversal forms of intelligence. Stuart Hall once asked artists to “make art as if the world mattered.” This feels more important now than ever.