Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Installation, Video, Performance, Collage, Curatorial
Website: astriasuparak.com
Astria Suparak (ศุภรักษ์) is a Thai-American artist, writer, and independent curator based in Oakland, California. She studied studio art and art history at Pratt Institute, where she also directed the Pratt Film Series from 1997 to 2000, organizing nearly 100 programs of avant-garde and experimental cinema. After directing the inaugural Warehouse Gallery at Syracuse University (2006–07), she served as Director and Curator of the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University (2008–14), where she organized landmark exhibitions including Alien She (2013), the first exhibition to examine the Riot Grrrl movement’s impact on contemporary artists, and Whatever It Takes (2010), co-curated with Jon Rubin as one of the first exhibitions to frame sports fandom as cultural production.
Since relocating to the Bay Area, Suparak has maintained a robust independent practice. She has taught at California College of the Arts and the University of San Francisco’s Museum Studies program, and held advisory roles at Creative Capital and the Alpert Awards. In 2022 she received the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center, the Ford Foundation Gallery, the ArtScience Museum Singapore, and SFMOMA, among many other venues.
Suparak works across installation, video essay, performance, collage, and curatorial practice, typically anchoring projects in sustained archival research. Her projects often begin with a pointed cultural observation — the erasure of Asian people from futurist cinema, the colonial logic embedded in tropical imagery, the overlooked politics of sports fandom — and then unfold as multimedia systems: databases, poster series, moving-image works, and large-scale installations that invite audiences to examine the assumptions built into popular culture. Her aesthetic draws on the visual languages of science fiction, punk zine culture, and natural-history illustration, holding them in productive tension.
A recurring feature of her work is the accumulation of evidence at scale: hundreds of film stills catalogued, hundreds of botanical specimens composited, thousands of hours of footage analyzed. This density of research grounds projects that might otherwise feel polemical, giving them the texture of primary-source argument. The result is work that moves between institutional gallery contexts, university lecture halls, science museums, and experimental film festivals — adapting its format to each venue while maintaining a consistent critical voice.
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