Work shaped by the interplay of human behavior, embodied knowledge, and civic form.
Anita Glesta is a multimedia and public artist whose work often begins with a personal experience or intuition that leads to a larger human question. She develops these ideas through sustained research, collaboration, and experimentation, drawing on fields as varied as environmental science, neuroscience, history, and psychology.
Working across painting, moving image, sound, sculpture, installation, and public space, Glesta creates works that make complex and often unseen conditions tangible. Her projects have explored climate change, collective memory, trauma, the body, and social history. Whether in the studio or in large-scale civic settings, she is interested in creating visually compelling experiences that draw people in and open a space for reflection, curiosity, and public engagement.
She is the creator of major interdisciplinary projects including WATERSHED, Aqua Cosmos: The Hudson Canyon, UNNERVED, GERNIKA/GUERNICA, and Census Walk. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Peking University, the Hudson River Museum, the National Theatre in London, Australian Center for the Moving Image in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia, the Parrish Art Museum among other museums and galleries.
Glesta has completed two major permanent public art commissions: Yurong Water Gardens (1999), a three-tiered water garden commissioned by the City of Sydney, and Census Walk (2010), an integrated seven-acre landscape for the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland, Maryland, commissioned through the U.S. General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture program. Her awards and fellowships include support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Australia Council for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation and in 2020, she received an Australian Research Council Laureate Research Fellowship at UNSW’s felt Experience and Empathy Lab, where her research explored trauma, embodied perception, neuroscience, and the physiological effects of moving image
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