A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, working at the nexus of language and materiality—troubling systems that assign and maintain hierarchical relationships with criticality and humor.
Burns has exhibited internationally including at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, Germany. Burns has been the recipient of a 2026 Trellis Milestone Grant; the 2023 Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards.
A frequent collaborator; Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) in 2008—an artists’ advocacy group and non-profit certification organization for Arts Institutions nationally. Working in collaboration with artist A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center (2010), a video re-imagining pornographic cinema for queer womxn, trans and non-binary community was released in 2010 and has screened widely including at The Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; and TATE Modern, London, UK and declared no. 20 of “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age” by the New York Times T Magazine.
A.K. Burns is a Professor and Graduate Co-Director in Studio Art at Hunter College CUNY, Department of Art & Art History. Burns is currently represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels, and Video Data Bank, Chicago.
*Burns is gender non-conforming, and has no preferred pronoun but identifies with female subjectivity, hence using ‘she/her’ as needed*
CONTACT: studio@akburns.net