Andy Graydon He/him/his a@andygraydon.net https://www.andygraydon.net In-person, Online, Hybrid mentor BIO Andy Graydon is an interdisciplinary artist making films, video installations, sound works, performances, photographs and sculptures. Originally from Maui, Hawai’i, his work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices. Recent projects have focused on island ecologies and the imaginal and narrative forms employed by the natural sciences. His projects frequently engage structures familiar to music such as the ensemble, the score, improvisation and techniques of the voice. His work has been presented internationally including shows at the New Museum, New York; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; MassMoCA; Wroclaw Media Arts Bienniale, Poland; and the Honolulu Biennial. Graydon was a fellow at the Film Study Center, Harvard, and artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, NKD Norwegian Artists’ Center, and the Center for Computer Music at Brooklyn College. He has taught art at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University; Harvard’s Art, Film and Visual Studies department; and most recently at MIT’s Art, Culture, Technology program. TEACHING PHILOSOPHY & MENTORSHIP I like to think of art as speculative thinking done with your senses. I believe that working with students and artists today means fostering a deep engagement with the situations of the world and a will to speculate on its futures; an ethics and a set of techniques that are both pragmatic in means and wildly conjectural toward the ends of creating not only new worlds, but a better world. I like to work with student artists to build their own creative and critical vocabulary, and to develop techniques for productive self-questioning during the often difficult process of working in the studio. A critical goal in this process is to open a deeper attention to one’s own work, to listen better to it, to recognize the contexts from which it emerges, and also the potentials it seeks to realize. This is my favorite environment, in which the only syllabus is the work and process of the student themselves, and the range of inquiries and passions they are willing to engage.