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.
Hawk Swanson is the creative director of the durational performance, social mode of study, and multifaceted talk show The Harmony Show (THS). Cocreated with Hawk Swanson's collaborators of twenty years, Synthetiks advocate Davecat and his roboticized silicone spouse Sidore, THS examines how sexual racism functions in the iDollator community—of which Hawk Swanson is a part—while exploring the community alongside sites of belonging and protection that simultaneously function as spaces of violent exclusion.
Currently, Hawk Swanson is 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. Costume Sketches, which explored the raced, gendered, and classed contours of the notion of “asking for it” in the context of self-fashioning and fast fashion, went viral in 2007, resulting in the project’s research-based contours being overwritten by sensation. Hawk Swanson’s current project continues to ask how race, fashion, and rape script one another.
Hawk Swanson’s work has been exhibited at venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR), 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), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (New York, NY). She was a recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant, among others.
Scholarly writing on her work can be found here—including Amber Jamilla Musser’s chapter on Hawk Swanson’s 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). PDFs of select chapters and essays can be found here. The final pages of Aliza Shvarts’s “Nonconsensual Collaborations” (2017) discusses Hawk Swanson’s creative-intellectual labor in formulating what she and Shvarts once termed “the condition”—more recently theorized by Shvarts through notions of dark play—nonconsensually and without citation.
Hawk Swanson’s recent lectures, panels, and appearances can be found here—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). Video documentation of select appearances can be found here.
Hawk Swanson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at Brown University, where she was a 2024–25 Cogut Institute Collaborative Humanities Fellow and 2024–25 Pembroke Center Research Development Grantee. She received an MA in performance studies in 2024 and a doctoral certificate in collaborative humanities in 2025, both from Brown University.
Hawk Swanson is currently working on two scholarly projects. The first project interrogates and challenges the transhistorical rhetoric of sex scandals and transactional consent formations by inviting artist Marisa Williamson into a conversation about her performance Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014), which stages an exchange between Sally Hemings and Monica Lewinsky. Hawk Swanson’s project proposes a field of study that the performance makes imaginable: Hemings and Lewinsky studies. Exploring artist Elizabeth Axtman’s engagement with Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Dahmer, and O.J. Simpson, Hawk Swanson’s second project considers the sartorial contours of these figures’ public images; notably Cosby’s sweaters, Dahmer’s glasses, and Simpson’s Ford Bronco, to reflect on the mainstream popularity of knockoffs and re-releases of these items at key moments in the recontextualizing of each man’s violence in the lead up to, height, and wake of MeToo.
Hawk Swanson has held full- and part-time positions teaching performance and installation in the sculpture departments of Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Purchase College. She was live on-air as a host/producer during the first two years of Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo initiative (2007–08) and worked as a registered carousel operator in Brooklyn (2014–18).
Born and raised in the Midwest near the Mississippi River, Hawk Swanson lived half of each week in a blue-collar neighborhood with people who worked outdoors and the other half of each week in a middle-class neighborhood with people who worked indoors.
Hawk Swanson’s given name is “Amber Hawk Swanson,” last name “Hawk Swanson.” Citations should read “Hawk Swanson, Amber.” For example:
Hawk Swanson, Amber. 2005–2006, 2013. “The Feminism? Project.” https://amberhawkswanson.com/The-Feminism-Project.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist-scholar making lens-based performances with sculptural outcomes and producing scholarship in the fields of performance studies and history. I determine the media my projects will engage based on their conceptual concerns. The artwork I produce merges and draws from various fields including performance, sculpture, installation, video, photography, and writing. My engagement with these materials questions how the racial, cis-hetero-patriarchal regime is probed by the queer performance of femme and feminized inhabitations of gender and sexuality to foster collaborative companionships that blur the divide between “human” and “non-human” or “organic” and “synthetic” forms of life. Working with a range of collaborators from the iDollator silicone Doll community, of which I am a part, my live and livestreamed performances often involve the creation of a sculpture or the cooking of a meal while opening space for conversations through the teaching and learning of gendered skills as applied to idiosyncratic tasks such as creating a replica of a captive whale using disarticulated silicone Doll bodies. I am invested in simultaneously blurring and illuminating the ideological organizations of power relations ascribed to distinct roles and positions, be that victim and victimizer, autonomy and dependency, or consumer and commodity. These investigations take up unresolved questions of historical and contemporary feminisms, specifically the embedded frames that animate subject-object relations.
Hawk Swanson is the creative director of the durational performance, social mode of study, and multifaceted talk show The Harmony Show (THS). Cocreated with Hawk Swanson's collaborators of twenty years, Synthetiks advocate Davecat and his roboticized silicone spouse Sidore, THS examines how sexual racism functions in the iDollator community—of which Hawk Swanson is a part—while exploring the community alongside sites of belonging and protection that simultaneously function as spaces of violent exclusion.
Currently, Hawk Swanson is 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. Costume Sketches, which explored the raced, gendered, and classed contours of the notion of “asking for it” in the context of self-fashioning and fast fashion, went viral in 2007, resulting in the project’s research-based contours being overwritten by sensation. Hawk Swanson’s current project continues to ask how race, fashion, and rape script one another.
Hawk Swanson’s work has been exhibited at venues including Performance Space (New York, NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR), 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), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (New York, NY). She was a recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and a Franklin Furnace Fund Grant, among others.
Scholarly writing on her work can be found here—including Amber Jamilla Musser’s chapter on Hawk Swanson’s 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). PDFs of select chapters and essays can be found here. The final pages of Aliza Shvarts’s “Nonconsensual Collaborations” (2017) discusses Hawk Swanson’s creative-intellectual labor in formulating what she and Shvarts once termed “the condition”—more recently theorized by Shvarts through notions of dark play—nonconsensually and without citation.
Hawk Swanson’s recent lectures, panels, and appearances can be found here—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). Video documentation of select appearances can be found here.
Hawk Swanson received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 and is currently a doctoral student in performance studies at Brown University, where she was a 2024–25 Cogut Institute Collaborative Humanities Fellow and 2024–25 Pembroke Center Research Development Grantee. She received an MA in performance studies in 2024 and a doctoral certificate in collaborative humanities in 2025, both from Brown University.
Hawk Swanson is currently working on two scholarly projects. The first project interrogates and challenges the transhistorical rhetoric of sex scandals and transactional consent formations by inviting artist Marisa Williamson into a conversation about her performance Sally & Monica’s Hot Tub Hangout (2014), which stages an exchange between Sally Hemings and Monica Lewinsky. Hawk Swanson’s project proposes a field of study that the performance makes imaginable: Hemings and Lewinsky studies. Exploring artist Elizabeth Axtman’s engagement with Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Dahmer, and O.J. Simpson, Hawk Swanson’s second project considers the sartorial contours of these figures’ public images; notably Cosby’s sweaters, Dahmer’s glasses, and Simpson’s Ford Bronco, to reflect on the mainstream popularity of knockoffs and re-releases of these items at key moments in the recontextualizing of each man’s violence in the lead up to, height, and wake of MeToo.
Hawk Swanson has held full- and part-time positions teaching performance and installation in the sculpture departments of Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Purchase College. She was live on-air as a host/producer during the first two years of Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo initiative (2007–08) and worked as a registered carousel operator in Brooklyn (2014–18).
Born and raised in the Midwest near the Mississippi River, Hawk Swanson lived half of each week in a blue-collar neighborhood with people who worked outdoors and the other half of each week in a middle-class neighborhood with people who worked indoors.
Hawk Swanson’s given name is “Amber Hawk Swanson,” last name “Hawk Swanson.” Citations should read “Hawk Swanson, Amber.” For example:
Hawk Swanson, Amber. 2005–2006, 2013. “The Feminism? Project.” https://amberhawkswanson.com/The-Feminism-Project.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist-scholar making lens-based performances with sculptural outcomes and producing scholarship in the fields of performance studies and history. I determine the media my projects will engage based on their conceptual concerns. The artwork I produce merges and draws from various fields including performance, sculpture, installation, video, photography, and writing. My engagement with these materials questions how the racial, cis-hetero-patriarchal regime is probed by the queer performance of femme and feminized inhabitations of gender and sexuality to foster collaborative companionships that blur the divide between “human” and “non-human” or “organic” and “synthetic” forms of life. Working with a range of collaborators from the iDollator silicone Doll community, of which I am a part, my live and livestreamed performances often involve the creation of a sculpture or the cooking of a meal while opening space for conversations through the teaching and learning of gendered skills as applied to idiosyncratic tasks such as creating a replica of a captive whale using disarticulated silicone Doll bodies. I am invested in simultaneously blurring and illuminating the ideological organizations of power relations ascribed to distinct roles and positions, be that victim and victimizer, autonomy and dependency, or consumer and commodity. These investigations take up unresolved questions of historical and contemporary feminisms, specifically the embedded frames that animate subject-object relations.