Alfred University alumnx Sondra Perry ’12 chosen to participate in 2022 Venice Biennale

ALFRED, NY – Alfred University alumnx Sondra Perry ’12 has been selected to participate in the 2022 Venice Biennale.

Perry is one of just 213 artists from 58 countries invited to participate in this year’s Venice Biennale, which will run from April 23 through November 27 in Venice, Italy. The event was originally planned for 2021 but was postponed for a year due to the COVID pandemic.

Established in 1895, the Venice Biennale has for more than 125 years been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world, with exhibitions in art, architecture, cinema, dance, music, and theater. The art exhibition alone draws more than 500,000 visitors. Cecilia Alemani is curator for the Biennale’s 59th International Art Exhibition—titled “The Milk of Dreams”—which has a pre-opening April 20-21.

Perry, who earned a B.F.A., from Alfred University in 2012, is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist from Perth Amboy, NJ. She studied expanded media and three-dimensional studies as an undergraduate at Alfred University and went on to earn an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University in 2015. The artist’s work is critically acclaimed, and has earned Perry numerous awards.

In December 2019, Artnet News listed a piece of Perry’s video art among the top 100 most influential pieces of art of the last decade. Ben Davis, an art critic from Artnet News – the world’s first dedicated 24-hour global art market newswire – wrote a piece titled “The 100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade, Ranked,” and placed Perry’s piece, “IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Game for Vitrine of Projection (2017)” as No. 82 on his top 100 list.

In the fall of 2018, Perry received the Nam June Paik award at a ceremony at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. The award is given biennially to an artist working with moving images and new technology. Earlier that year, Perry was named the winner of the inaugural Toby’s Prize, a $50,000 award given to a contemporary artist by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. In 2017, the Seattle Art Museum awarded Perry its Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which is given biennially to an emerging black artist. Perry was also a recipient of a 2017 Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.

In February 2020, Perry’s work, “FLESH WALL,” was the subject of a month-long digital art exhibition in New York City’s Times Square. “FLESH WALL” was displayed nightly as part of the Midnight Moment exhibition series hosted by Times Square Arts, the city’s largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts.