Portrait by Brad Ogbonna for the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2014). Portraits by Christa Holka (2012–2018) here.
As a performance artist, Amber Hawk Swanson has explored care, animacy, and desire in the context of queerness and disability. Her complementary scholarly interests focus on investigations of enabling objects and actions; technologized, roboticized, and transpeciated bodies and selves; animacy and animal intimacy; and worldmaking in the online forums and livestream channels that have served as the primary platforms for her work. Hawk Swanson’s practice has embodied these concerns through a material and conceptual engagement with captive marine mammals, silicone Dolls, and networks of care among the community of silicone Doll-loving men known as iDollators. Recently, she has explored sites of belonging and protection that simultaneously function as spaces of violent exclusion, and, along with her collaborators, Synthetiks advocate Davecat and his roboticized silicone spouse Sidore, how sexual racism functions in the Doll community.
She is currently revisiting a component of her Amber Doll Project (2005–11) that involved archiving cinematic rape scenes and shopping for equivalent costumes worn by each film’s victim at the fast fashion retailer Forever21. This component of the Amber Doll Project, then titled Costume Sketches, went viral in 2007 resulting in the project’s research-based contours being overwritten by sensation.
Hawk Swanson has exhibited nationally and internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). She has created performances for non-art venues such as a Doll community meet-up, an anonymous Doll community member’s garage, and a carousel horse carving school. She has also created livestreamed and other lens-based performances at the Watermill Center (Water Mill, NY), Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), MacDowell (Peterborough, NH), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (New York, NY).
Scholarly writing on her work, including Amber Jamilla Musser’s chapter on her collaboration with artist Xandra Ibarra in Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), Jillian Hernandez’s discussion of Hawk Swanson’s early Doll work in “Meditations on the Multiple” (2013), and David Getsy’s essays focusing on her durational performances and lifeworks (2014, 2013) can be found here. PDFs of select chapters and essays can be found here. Recent lectures, panels, and appearances—including at the 2025 International Care Ethics Research Consortium Conference (Utrecht, NL), Yale University (New Haven, CT), Columbia University (New York, NY), ]performance space[ (London, UK), and McGill University (Montreal, QC)—can be found here. Video documentation of select appearances can be found here.
Amber Hawk Swanson is the Creative Director and one of three cocreators of The Harmony Show. She has taught performance and installation in the sculpture departments of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and Purchase College (SUNY). Hawk Swanson is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at Brown University where she was a 2024–25 Cogut Institute Collaborative Humanities Fellow, a 2024–25 Pembroke Center Research Development Grantee, and where she received both an MA in performance studies in 2024 and a doctoral certificate in collaborative humanities in 2025. Her current writing, according to scholar Elizabeth Berman, “interrogates and undoes the transhistorical rhetoric of sex scandals and transactional consent formations by thinking with artist Marisa Williamson’s performance Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014).” Hawk Swanson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She was a recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant, among others. She was live on-air as a host / producer during the first two years of Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo initiative (2007–08) and has additionally worked as a registered carousel operator in Brooklyn (2014–18).
Hawk Swanson was born and raised in the Midwest near the Mississippi River where she lived half of each week in a blue collar community with people who worked outdoors and the other half of each week in a middle class community with people who worked indoors.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s given and legal name is “Amber Hawk Swanson.” Her last name is “Hawk Swanson.” Citations should read “Hawk Swanson, Amber.” An example is provided below.
Hawk Swanson, Amber. 2005–2006, 2013. “The Feminism? Project.” https://amberhawkswanson.com/The-Feminism-Project.
She is currently revisiting a component of her Amber Doll Project (2005–11) that involved archiving cinematic rape scenes and shopping for equivalent costumes worn by each film’s victim at the fast fashion retailer Forever21. This component of the Amber Doll Project, then titled Costume Sketches, went viral in 2007 resulting in the project’s research-based contours being overwritten by sensation.
Hawk Swanson has exhibited nationally and internationally for the span of her twenty-year career, with venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), PS2 (Belfast, UK), Denny Gallery (New York, NY), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY) and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). She has created performances for non-art venues such as a Doll community meet-up, an anonymous Doll community member’s garage, and a carousel horse carving school. She has also created livestreamed and other lens-based performances at the Watermill Center (Water Mill, NY), Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), MacDowell (Peterborough, NH), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (New York, NY).
Scholarly writing on her work, including Amber Jamilla Musser’s chapter on her collaboration with artist Xandra Ibarra in Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), Jillian Hernandez’s discussion of Hawk Swanson’s early Doll work in “Meditations on the Multiple” (2013), and David Getsy’s essays focusing on her durational performances and lifeworks (2014, 2013) can be found here. PDFs of select chapters and essays can be found here. Recent lectures, panels, and appearances—including at the 2025 International Care Ethics Research Consortium Conference (Utrecht, NL), Yale University (New Haven, CT), Columbia University (New York, NY), ]performance space[ (London, UK), and McGill University (Montreal, QC)—can be found here. Video documentation of select appearances can be found here.
Amber Hawk Swanson is the Creative Director and one of three cocreators of The Harmony Show. She has taught performance and installation in the sculpture departments of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and Purchase College (SUNY). Hawk Swanson is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at Brown University where she was a 2024–25 Cogut Institute Collaborative Humanities Fellow, a 2024–25 Pembroke Center Research Development Grantee, and where she received both an MA in performance studies in 2024 and a doctoral certificate in collaborative humanities in 2025. Her current writing, according to scholar Elizabeth Berman, “interrogates and undoes the transhistorical rhetoric of sex scandals and transactional consent formations by thinking with artist Marisa Williamson’s performance Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014).” Hawk Swanson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. She was a recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant, among others. She was live on-air as a host / producer during the first two years of Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo initiative (2007–08) and has additionally worked as a registered carousel operator in Brooklyn (2014–18).
Hawk Swanson was born and raised in the Midwest near the Mississippi River where she lived half of each week in a blue collar community with people who worked outdoors and the other half of each week in a middle class community with people who worked indoors.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s given and legal name is “Amber Hawk Swanson.” Her last name is “Hawk Swanson.” Citations should read “Hawk Swanson, Amber.” An example is provided below.
Hawk Swanson, Amber. 2005–2006, 2013. “The Feminism? Project.” https://amberhawkswanson.com/The-Feminism-Project.