Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Video installation, photography, collage, performance
Website: sunewoods.net
Suné Woods (also known as Zomhlaba I Suné Woods) was born in 1975 in Montréal, Canada. She received her BFA from the University of Miami in 1997 and her MFA from California College of the Arts (CCA) in Oakland in 2010, where she developed her multidisciplinary practice rooted in video, photography, and collage. After graduating from CCA, she held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, the Vermont Studio Center, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work in Syracuse, New York. She has taught at CalArts, UCLA, Harvard University’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Woods’s work has been recognized with the 2022 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, the 2020 Los Angeles Artadia Award, the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award from the San Francisco Foundation (2015), the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer, the Visions from the New California Award from the James Irvine Foundation (2012), and the Murphy and Cadagon Fellowship (2009). She is represented by Casemore Gallery in San Francisco.
Her first solo exhibition in New York, Aragonite Stars, was presented at BRIC in Brooklyn in 2022, having originally debuted in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Her work has also been exhibited internationally at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and at institutions across the United States.
Woods works primarily across video installation, photography, and collage, creating immersive, multi-channel environments that examine absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. Her practice uses intimate, microsocial sites—particularly family—as lenses through which to understand broader sociological phenomena, imperialist mechanisms, and formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is “emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence and presence of a physical body.”
In recent years, her work has moved toward exploring interspecies relationships, ancestral realms, healing practices, and aquatic ecologies. Aragonite Stars, her signature installation, deploys waterscapes—filmed at natural hot springs, tide pools, the Los Angeles River, Hawaiian waters near Waiʻanae, and Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rainforest—to evoke multidimensional states of existence. Clothed figures in patterned fabric move through water as mythological beings, while a soundscape composed by Meshell Ndegeocello underscores themes of intimacy and healing drawn from Audre Lorde’s writings on the erotic. Her two-channel piece On This Day in Meditation (2025) engages with the teachings of Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda, extending her exploration of ancestral knowledge, spiritual practice, and collective ritual.
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