Lucy Raven joined the Cooper Union School of Art as assistant professor in 2016. She holds a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. With Victoria Brooks and Evan Calder Williams, she is a founding member of the moving-image research and production collective 13BC. Primarily grounded in animation and the moving image, her multidisciplinary practice also incorporates still photography, installation, sound, and performative lecture. Raven encourages the viewer to “slow down the process of looking” and interrogates global industrial systems and technologies. Her teaching explores possible relationships and synergies between distinct artistic disciplines, such as sculpture and film or drawing and video.

In summer 2017, Raven performed a new work called Subterrestrial Cinema in the below-ground theater of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The work weaves animations and other materials from the museum’s archives together with new text, film, and sound to explore the museum’s unrealized original plans to devote that space to non-objective film. In another recent work, a commission from the Calder Foundation, she used a technique of photographic animation combined with sound to capture a rare performance of Chef d’Orchestre, a collaboration between New York composer Earle Brown and Alexander Calder, performed by four percussionists and the mobile itself, which is made to be both conductor and instrument; the musicians hit its petals at intervals throughout the piece. Raven’s work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2016–17); Centre vox de l’image contemporaine, Montreal (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012-13); and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2010), as well as in numerous group exhibitions around the world.