Rachel Stevens is an artist, writer, and educator working with moving images, material ecologies, and the archival. Her research has taken her to residencies at Casa GIAP’s Creative Ecologies and Decolonial Futures in Chiapas, iLAND’s collaborative research residency, and NEH’s Space, Place and the Humanities at Northeastern University. As part of Oyster City, a collaboration with Meredith Drum, she co-created an Augmented Reality walking tour about oysters in NYC and developed a public project for Paths to Pier 42, culminating in the Fish Stories Community Cookbook.
She is currently developing Place of the Big River, a research and documentary film project about the St. Lawrence River, and making work with the experimental video publishing cooperative Temp.Files.
Her writing has appeared in Afterimage, Flash Art, and Millennium Film Journal, where she was a contributing editor from 2018–2022. She teaches at Parsons and in Hunter College’s IMA MFA program and has also taught at Brown, RISD, Brooklyn College, and Queens College.
Stevens has exhibited internationally at Socrates Sculpture Park, ISEA, i-Docs, and others. Her work has been supported by Casa GIAP, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, LMCC, Puffin Foundation, Signal Culture, and Works on Water. She holds an MFA from UC San Diego and a BFA from RISD.
Teaching
Parsons School of Design
School of Art and Design
History and Theory
- Sustainable Systems
- Time
Hunter College
Film and Media Studies
IMA MFA Program
(Integrated Media Art)
GRADUATE COURSES
- Activating Archives
- Advanced Studio (independent projects)
- Spatial Narratives
- Psychogeography
- Nonlinear Storytelling
- History and Theory of Emerging Media
- Interactive Expressions (web projects)
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES
- Introduction to Media (production)
Queens College
Department of Visual Art
- Introduction to Video Editing
Brooklyn College
PIMA MFA Program
(Performance + Interactive Media Art)
- Teaching Practicum
Brown University
Modern Culture and Media
Department of Visual Art
UNDERGRADUATE
- Introduction to Digital Media Production
- Intermediate Digital Media Production: Network, Context, Distribution
- Digital Media I (Vis Art)
- Digital Media II (Vis Art)
UNDERGRADUATE/GRADUATE
- Soft Cinema: Digital Media and Moving Image Systems (production seminar)
Rhode Island School of Design
Photography Department
- Trends in Contemporary Photography
- Photography I
UC San Diego
Department of Visual Art
GRADUATE STUDENT TEACHING
Introduction to Computing in the Arts with Lev Manovich (x5), Natalie Bookchin, Adrien Jenick, Tim Nohe; History of Art and Technology with Norman Klein; Western Art History II with Jack Greenstein; Post-Photography with Tim Nohe; Structure of Art with David Antin; Introduction to Art Making with Patricia Patterson.