Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Installation, video, drawing, painting, maps, books and prints
Website: conniezheng.com
Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer, and experimental filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She immigrated to the United States from Luoyang, China in 1993 at the age of five and grew up in New England. She earned dual bachelor’s degrees in Economics and English from Brown University, followed by an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley (2017–2019), where she was also a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. She is currently a PhD candidate in Visual Studies at UC Santa Cruz.
Zheng has held residencies and fellowships with the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Marble House Project, and Willapa Bay AIR, and has received support from the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. She was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee and was named a recipient of the inaugural Joint Space Award presented by The Space Program San Francisco and Minnesota Street Project Foundation. Her work is held in the collections of Kadist and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, and she was included in Phaidon Press’s Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art (2025). In the Bay Area she serves as Art Director for the literary nonprofit Quiet Lightning and sits on the Board of Directors of Small Press Traffic.
Zheng works across drawing, painting, mixed-media maps, experimental film, installation, seed-based participatory projects, and artist’s books. Her large-scale maps on rice paper and cotton paper fuse archival photographs, handwritten annotations, geological cartography, and layered mark-making into what she describes as history paintings alive with feeling — works in which documented labor history and ecological mythology inhabit the same space. She is drawn to process-based and durational methods: she has photographed her garden every day since 2021, soaking exposed film in expired refrigerator food before hand-sequencing each frame. Her participatory seed-making workshops have collected more than 30,000 clay seeds from collaborators worldwide, building a speculative catalog of futures.
Her projects deal with the intersections of diasporic memory, environmental justice, agricultural labor history, and the geopolitics of food and land. She is attentive to what she calls “developing new language around the apocalypse,” and frequently employs speculative fiction, field recordings, and hand-drawn animation to open space for collective imagining amidst ongoing ecological transformation.
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