Bio

Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, N.C. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art and Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and in 2013, she earned her M.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 2013-2014, she served as the Fountainhead Fellow in the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University and she was a 2017-2018 SMFA at Tufts Traveling Fellow. Her work has been supported with fellowships at McDowell in Peterborough, NH; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY; Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN; the Hambidge Center in Raburn Gap, GA; and Wassaic Projects in Wassaic NY. McClellan’s work has been shown at SculptureCenter in Long Island City NY; Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA; and the Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA, among others. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

McClellan was awarded the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Residency at the University of Michigan. The resulting performance project Witness Lab (2020) was exhibited at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Additionally, she was a 2019-2020 Working Artist Project Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia and shared the solo exhibition Simulations there in 2021. She was named the 2021 Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

McClellan is the Editor at Burnaway, a non-profit magazine of contemporary art and criticism from the American South. Recently, her essay “Putting Words in Your Mouth and Images in Your Eyes” was published in Ventriloquism, Performance, and Contemporary Art (Routledge 2023), a volumed edited by Dr. Jennie Hirsh and Dr. Isabelle Loring Wallace. She lives in Atlanta, GA.