Mara Adamitz Scrupe

Mara Adamitz Scrupe serves concurrently as Lance Williams Resident Artist in the Arts & Sciences, University of Kansas/ Lawrence, and Dean and Professor Emerita, School of Art, University of the Arts, Philadelphia.

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Mara Adamitz Scrupe is a visual artist, poet and essayist, documentary filmmaker and the recipient of creative grants and fellowships including MOZAIK Ecosystem Art Prize, National Endowment for the Arts/CEC ArtsLink Fellowship, District of Columbia Individual Fellowship, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship and Virginia Individual Artist Fellowship. She is a two-time Pushcart Poetry nominee, a fellow of MacDowell Colony and Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and she has been awarded residencies by the Montalvo Arts Center, Irish Museum of Modern Art Residency Programme and USF Verftet-AiR/Bergen, Norway, among others. Her environmental site installations have been commissioned for permanent installation in Asia, Europe and the United States and she has had over one hundred solo and group exhibitions of her visual art projects in museums, galleries and sculpture parks worldwide. Her cross-disciplinary creative practice explores a terrain of psychic, emotional and physical kinship with the natural environment while reflecting on the many paradoxes of human nature in our interactions with nature and one another. Her installations, artist books, sculptures, drawings, poems, and essays investigate the ways in which nature serves as a locus for human ecology: how societies express – through the use and treatment of land, plants, and animals – crucial attitudes and valuations as cultural marker, and how we as thinking animals are shaped and changed – emotionally, socially, politically, and spiritually – by our interdependencies with biotic systems.