Judy Natal

Judy Natal is a Chicago based artist and photography professor at Columbia College Chicago. Author of EarthWords and Neon Boneyard Las Vegas A-Z, the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno established an Archive of her work in 2012. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited internationally at Projects International, Photograph Gallery and Jack Hanley Gallery in New York City, the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Kathleen Ewing Gallery, Washington, D.C., Circuit Gallery in Toronto, The Front Gallery, New Orleans, and the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, among others, and her work resides in permanent collections at the California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago among others.

Natal has received commissions from the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) Houston, Burlington City Arts Vermont, and the Hyde Park Art Center Chicago. Her awards and fellowships include the Fulbright Travel Grant, Polaroid grants, New York and Illinois Foundation for the Arts Photography Fellowships. Natal has also been awarded numerous artist residencies nationally and internationally in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, the Robotics Institute and Biosphere 2, Arizona where she helped design and establish an artist residency program that invites artists to create art at this man-made wonder of the world.

Natal`s creative practice is environmentally focused, and imagines the future to hopes of illuminating the present, understanding that choices we are currently making writes our future now. She sees ourselves as nature, not separate from it. She also explores the visual narratives landscapes hold, particularly landscapes that have been altered by scientists, engineers, designers, and utopians that In addition, she has ventured into the world of robotics to examine our complex relationship to machines built in our own image, which ultimately raises questions of what it means to be human. Her most recent project: The Weather Diaries, weave a complex narratives among the island nations of Iceland, Faroe Islands, Hawaii and Nova Scotia. The Weather Diaries continues Natal’s exploration of global warming while cultivating a broad-based audience that crosses disciplines & genres. It aspires to put a human face on statistics, bringing an immediacy to the dramatic weather events we witness around the globe, honoring powers of observation as profound sources of knowledge interpreted through image and narrative that are impossible for statistics to depict. The goal of the project is to bring attention to the personal & emotional dimensions of climate change, inviting people to participate through their own stories, expanding notions of the climate change “expert”, while interpreting weather cycles written on the land, sea and sky.