Frances Whitehead is a transdisciplinary, environmental artist bringing the methods, mindsets, and strategies of contemporary art practice to re-imagine the future. Connecting emerging art practices and the discourses of climate change, vegetal consciousness, and counter-extinction, she develops strategies to deploy the knowledge of artists as change agents, asking, What do Artists Know? 

A long-term resident of the Great Lakes, she has recently relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to focus on arid ecologies, demonstrating possibilities and reworlding cultures for a dryer future. Whitehead has worked professionally as an artist since the mid 1980’s and has worked collaboratively as ARTetal Studio since 2001. She is Professor Emerita of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.