Ruth Burke is an interdisciplinary artist from and of the Midwest who collaborates with animals in her creative practice. She lives and works in Central Illinois, lands that were once home to the Illini, Peoria, and the Myaamia, and later due to colonial encroachment, genocide, and displacement to the Fox, Potawatomi, Sauk, Shawnee, Winnebago, Ioway, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo Nations. Straddling the practice of contemporary art and the fields of human-animal studies, and agriculture, Burke has exclusively focused on human-animal relationships in her practice since 2015. As part of a broader socially engaged practice, her current focus is a series of large-scale native plant earthworks powered by animal traction.
Ruth Burke is a 2024 Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Partnership Award Grantee and the 2022 Illinois State University (ISU) Creative Activity Initiative Awardee. Burke has been a resident artist at ACRE, Detroit Community School, and was a fellow in the 2017 inaugural cohort at the Animals & Society Institute. She has published articles and creative work in the peer-reviewed journals Society & Animals, Zoophilogia, Social Work in Mental Health, is featured in the Interspecies Performance book and has a forthcoming chapter in the book Visualising Multispecies Encounters: Art, Affect, Indigenous Knowledge, and ontology in Other-than-Human Worlds.
Burke has presented her work at venues and institutions nationally and internationally, created earthworks in three US states, and received numerous grants from various entities. She was recently honored with the Harold Boyd Endowed Professorship (2024-2026) from the ISU Wonsook Kim School of Art and the ISU Teaching Initiative Award (2024).
Ruth Burke holds a BFA from the Ohio State University, an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
DAP STUDIOS LLC is Ruth's art-and-agriculture business through which her animals are available for hire on public artworks, small-scale agricultural and garden cultivation, compost production, garden consultations, and presence at events. Burke also runs Oxeye Farm LLC, a micro-farm that focuses on small-scale egg and pastured pork production, and occasionally, vegetables and native plants starts.
Ruth Burke is a 2024 Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) Partnership Award Grantee and the 2022 Illinois State University (ISU) Creative Activity Initiative Awardee. Burke has been a resident artist at ACRE, Detroit Community School, and was a fellow in the 2017 inaugural cohort at the Animals & Society Institute. She has published articles and creative work in the peer-reviewed journals Society & Animals, Zoophilogia, Social Work in Mental Health, is featured in the Interspecies Performance book and has a forthcoming chapter in the book Visualising Multispecies Encounters: Art, Affect, Indigenous Knowledge, and ontology in Other-than-Human Worlds.
Burke has presented her work at venues and institutions nationally and internationally, created earthworks in three US states, and received numerous grants from various entities. She was recently honored with the Harold Boyd Endowed Professorship (2024-2026) from the ISU Wonsook Kim School of Art and the ISU Teaching Initiative Award (2024).
Ruth Burke holds a BFA from the Ohio State University, an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Video Art in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
DAP STUDIOS LLC is Ruth's art-and-agriculture business through which her animals are available for hire on public artworks, small-scale agricultural and garden cultivation, compost production, garden consultations, and presence at events. Burke also runs Oxeye Farm LLC, a micro-farm that focuses on small-scale egg and pastured pork production, and occasionally, vegetables and native plants starts.
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Photo by Tyler Mardis
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some interests, in no particular order:
interspecies relationships and performance / Interspecies labor / pragmatic ecofeminism / multi-sensory thinking / human-animal studies / human-animal bond / land art / earthworks / performance / video art / animal cognition / phenomenology and technology (sound, moving image, responsive environments) / chosen family: queer and animal kin / mediating interspecies relationship / multispecies ethnography / small-scale agriculture & livestock farming / animal powered agriculture / sustainable & regenerative agriculture / site-specific art making / colonial/indigenous relationships to animals & agriculture / social practice - socially engaged art / community building through a multispecies art practice / animal creativity / interspecies collaboration / land back / animal welfare / animals in settler colonialism / systems restoration / pollinators |