Biography

Ashley Hunt is an artist, writer and educator whose artworks address questions of power and resistance. His primary work of the past two and a half decades have focused on the U.S. prison system — its growth, ecologies, its continuation of genocidal histories, and the abolition that is imagined by the communities it targets.

A recent fellow of the Art for Justice Fund, his works have included short and feature length documentaries, video installations, maps, performances, photography, and an experimental dance school, often in collaboration with community organizations, including Critical Resistance, Californians for a Responsible Budget, the Underground Scholars, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Release Aging People in Prison, Southerners on New Ground, Project South, Citizens for Quality Education, the Youth Justice Coalition, Mass Liberation Arizona, and Friends and Family of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. 

Hunt is the recipient of the 2019 Creative Capital and Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the 2018 Graham Foundation Exhibition Grant, and the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, among others. His works have shown in venues ranging from community centers to prisons to museums, including P.S.1/MoMA, the ASU Art Museum, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Project Row Houses, the Made in LA Biennial of Hammer Museum, the Tate Modern, Documenta 12, and Sinopale Biennial in Turkey, and Woodbourne State Correctional Institute in upstate New York and Green Haven State Prison in Indiana. His writings include the book, Notes on the Emptying of a City, and the forthcoming Degrees of Visibility, a series of nine free newspapers, and they have appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and multiple edited volumes on art and politics. He has taught in the Photo and Media Program of CalArts’ Art School since 2008, which he co-directed and directed from 2010–2019.

For full CV, please request it through the contact link.