About my practice.

Zibby Jahns is a site-specific multimedia sculptor and performance artist. Their somatic sculptures investigate the motions of emotion, and invite others to collaborate when the artist is not present. After focusing their practice on creating public grief spaces and expressions of late capitalism-induced anxiety, Zibby's current experiments with armatures aim to find solutions to reorient private and public space towards opportunities for collective happiness, resilience and reckoning. In 2021, Jahns was awarded the Maharam Fellowship to research destigmatized ways of visually depicting people who use drugs. That same year they erected a steel public grieving sculpture/site on the campus of Wheaton College responding to the overdose epidemic. Zibby has been teaching multiple disciplines of art to a wide variety of ages for the past twenty years, including at Amherst College, RISD, University of Taipei, Renew Cultural Arts Academy in New Orleans, Muraviovka Park in Siberia and Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Zibby Jahns worked as a designer, performer, fabricator, producer, director, and writer in New Orleans for over a decade prior to attending graduate school where they melded various creative disciplines into theater arts. They hold an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.