Gina Siepel : About

Gina Siepel (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and woodworker. Their artistic practice reflects an engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology, and their work integrates conceptual concerns and craftsmanship with a focus on wood as a natural and a cultural material. Gina’s objects, installations, drawings, videos, and other works link aesthetic and materially-based modes of artistic production to other forms of inquiry, including collaboration, social engagement, site-based exploration, and interdisciplinary research. Gina is originally from rural western New York, and lived in New York City, Maine, and eastern Massachusetts, before arriving in the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts (Nipmuc, Pocumtuck, and Abenaki land), where they now live with their partner and frequent artistic collaborator, interdisciplinary artist and choreographer Sara Smith.

Gina’s works have been shown in museums and galleries nationally, including the Colby Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Museum for Art in Wood, Vox Populi Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Amherst College. Gina has been a fellow or artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, Hewnoaks, the Winterthur Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, Mildred’s Lane, and the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College. She has received funding from the Berkshire Taconic Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and was a 2023 recipient of a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft.

Gina holds a BFA in painting and drawing from the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase and an MFA in sculpture and interdisciplinary studio art from the Maine College of Art. She currently teaches in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design MFA program, and has taught at Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. From 2016 - 2022 Gina was a full-time lecturer in studio foundations at Mount Holyoke College, where she developed and taught an original interdisciplinary foundations curriculum. Gina is currently a MacLeish Field Station Artist-in-Residence and a Research Affiliate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at Smith College. Gina is currently enrolled in the Field Naturalist Certification Program at Mass Audubon, and is a member of the Greenfield Tree Committee, a volunteer urban forestry organization in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

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