A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.

Katie O'Neill

Lecturer

Bio

Education: BFA, 2017, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia; MFA, 2019, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; MS, 2021, The University of Illinois at Chicago, IL; Exhibitions: Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; The Plant, Chicago; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; The Fountain House, New York; Brick Lane Gallery, London. Awards: AHS Achievement Award, University of Illinois at Chicago; Lightbox Performance Space Residency, Detroit.

Artist Statement

To trace the origins of her madness, O’Neill channels her lifelong passion for archiving into a creative practice based on memory, research, and translation. Using her invented movement system Symptom Notation, O’Neill pulls from Labanotation’s sign methodology, kinesthetics, and her lived experiences as a Mad child and woman to create videos and performances that articulate negotiations of visibility, the mental as physical, and the paranormal as crip metaphor. She queers space/time through crafted environments of multimodal seating, projection, and layers of material, to elicit a spoken curation of fractured poetry, statistics, and memoir. O’Neill aims to capture the complex and ephemeral peculiarities of madness to critically destabilize the rapid, compulsory able-bodied/minded mythologizing of hidden disabilities.

Vimeo

Border (2017)
Process score (2019)

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This course will explore madness and its construction as a site of pathology and deviance in our current society as well as important challenges to this construction. Utilizing an intersectional and interdisciplinary disability studies and mad studies critical lens this course will address how madness is constructed in relation to colonialist, white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal notions of rationality, linearity, and unity.

Readings will cover foundational texts in the anti-psychiatry movement as well as crucial texts to the development of mad studies. Many texts specifically address the relationship between race and madness. Artistic representations, as well as film and television representations will be utilized regularly.

Course work will consist of weekly reading responses, short presentations, one 2-3 page analysis paper, and a final creative project that includes a 5 page analysis paper

Class Number

1256

Credits

3