“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”
- Baba Dioum
Heather Bird Harris is an artist, education leader, and independent curator.
Her work explores the throughlines between history and ecological crises, engaging with communities, scientists, and place-based research to investigate possibilities for emergence and systems change.
Working with living and ephemeral elements, Harris creates the conditions for her materials to behave according to their own ecological logics, exploring ideas of control, reciprocity, and affordances of matter that defy and undermine imperial logic. Through painting, video, participatory projects, and relationship-centered learning, her work blends abstraction with communal and non-human archives, bridging the poetic and the political.
Harris received her B.S. in art history from Skidmore College and master’s degree in education leadership from Columbia University. She has served as the principal of a turnaround school in New Orleans and as a learning consultant for school leaders nationwide, focusing on anti-racist history curriculum. Recent exhibitions include Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, SC), NADA Curates, the New Mexico State University Museum, SITE at the Goat Farm (Atlanta, GA), Stoveworks (Chattanooga, TN), the Barnes Ogden Gallery at Louisiana State University, and apexart’s Plastic, the New Coal at the Descendants Project (Vacherie, LA). She has been an artist in residence at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (Hudson Valley, NY), The Hambidge Center (Rabun Gap, GA), and was selected for the Art & Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University in 2023. Harris’s practice has been written about in Burnaway, NPR, Art Papers, ArtsATL, and Steinauer Scudder’s book Mother, Creature, Kin. Recent projects include Resonancia Naturale with musicians and ecologists at Arizona State University and Hope Springs Eternal in collaboration with activist group RISE St. James and New Orleans-based artists. Harris is an MFA candidate at Georgia State University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, Josh, and their two children.
Heather Bird Harris’s work explores climate crisis, activism, and grief through cross-sector collaborations and use of natural materials. Much of her artistic practice involves in-depth research of specific places and vegetation, as well as partnerships with historians, ecologists, and botanists to further ‘map’ and reveal the relationships between ecosystems and histories of industrialization and colonization. Her site-specific materials include watercolors made from clay and coal, walnut ink, and more recently weathering rind—a material that involves weathering off the ‘rind’ of the soft clay surrounding a hard rock, such as granite. ... Poetic and dreamy, but with an underlying acknowledgement of the climate grief and capitalistic violence that permeates the world today. Harris’s work is as poignant as it is joyful, an emotionally complicated journey into hanging on and letting go.
- EC Flamming, curator and writer
Heather Bird Harris enmeshes her work with soil to expose the inherent affordances of the material and invoke memories held by it. Her large-scale works of earth pigment and ink demonstrate how the use of the land has the potential to call forth both the present and predicted effects of sea-level rise through invoking the entangled and oftentimes indistinguishable boundaries between earth and sea. The substance which has born witness to it all is the land itself.
- Ada Evans, "Art of Waning Spaces: The Role of Materials in Imagining Coastal Climate Change"
CURRICULUM VITAE
EDUCATION
2026 MFA, Painting, Georgia State University,
Atlanta, GA (expected May 2026)
2017 National Principal’s Academy Fellowship, Relay
Graduate School of Education, New York, NY
2014 M.Ed, Education Leadership, Columbia
University, New York, NY
2009 BA cum laude, Art History and Studio Art,
Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
S. Michael Eigen ‘87 Prize in Art History
Periclean Honors Society
SOLO + TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS
2026 Two-Person Exhibition, Swan Coach House, Atlanta, GA
(curated by Liz Fleming) (with photographer, Joel Silverman) (forthcoming)
Solo Exhibition, Ernest G. Welch Gallery, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA (forthcoming)
2025 love as large as grief demands, Spalding Nix, Atlanta, GA
2023 Landscape as a Living Historical Record, project, Emory
University, Atlanta, GA
Land Memory Project, project, Science Gallery, Atlanta, GA (curated by Floyd Hall)
2022 Where the Water Goes, SALON Gallery, New Orleans, LA