Based in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, A.L. Steiner serves on the MFA Faculty in Visual Arts at Bard College, Yale University, and the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She works in photography, video, installation, collage, and performance, often in collaboration; she also lectures, writes, and curates. A self-described “skeptical queer eco-feminist androgyne,” Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, a member of the musical collective Chicks on Speed, and co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (WAGE), which advocates for the payment of fees for artists exhibiting in nonprofit art institutions. Steiner’s artworks are irreverent, humorous, personal, perverse, and political. Most evident in her large-scale installations of collaged digital photographs is Steiner’s expansive network of queer friends and lovers. Her installation in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, More Real than Reality Itself/Cost-benefit analysis, for example, investigates sociocultural, biopolitical, and familial constructions through the lived practices of activists and artists Rita “Bo” Brown, Carla Cloer, Ericka Huggins, Miya Masaoka, and Laurie Weeks.
Steiner’s work is featured in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Hammer Museum, and Museum of Modern Art. She is represented by Deborah Schamoni Galerie (Munich) and Koenig & Clinton (New York), and is the recipient of the 2015 Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2017 Grants to Artists award.
