Lisa Bulawsky

Lisa Bulawsky’s artistic practice is driven by questions concerning the nature of time as evidenced in the natural world, through public histories, and the lived experience of individuals. She’s interested in vast and intimate timescales, the marks we make on the world and those made on us. Her work is rooted in printmaking and manifests in a range of activities including works on paper, participatory projects, and temporary public art.

Bulawsky’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum in Roanoke, VA, the Dalarnas Museum in Sweden, and the Print Center New York, among many others. Books featuring her work include Printmaking at the Edge (A & C Black, 2006 and American Print Makers (Shiffer, 2014). Bulawsky has received numerous grants and awards including an individual M-AAA NEA Fellowship for painting and works on paper, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Marvin Bileck Artist-in-Residence award at Bowdoin College, and the Francis Niederer Artist-in-Residence award at Hollins University. Her prints are in many collections including the Spencer Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp, Belgium.

In addition to her ongoing practice creating unique printed works on paper, Lisa Bulawsky is the founder of Vertigo Press enacting temporary projects in the public sphere that exploit the democratic multiple inherent to printmaking and is a co-founder of the Fifty-Fifty art collective negotiating cultural tensions through participatory art practices.

Lisa received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA with honors from the University of Kansas. She is Professor of Art and has taught in the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis since 1996. She has received significant recognitions throughout her academic career including an Emerson Teaching Award in 2005 and a Founder’s Day Award for distinguished faculty in 2013 among other honors. She has been the Director of the Sam Fox School’s Island Press since 2011 and recently served a four-year term as chair of the MFA in Visual Art program.