Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is research based, often involving encounters with archives or the creation of new ones. Most of her work encourages close observation of one’s physical environment, whether ecological or infrastructural. In both her art and writing, Odell is compelled by the ways in which attention (or lack thereof) leads to consequential shifts in perception at the level of the everyday. Her work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, Ever Gold Projects, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerp, Apexart, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, East Wing (Dubai), and the NATO building in Brussels. Odell has been an artist in residence at Recology SF, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and was the inaugural artist in residence at the San Francisco Planning Department. She was an art practice lecturer at Stanford between 2013 and 2022. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Salon, McSweeney’s, and Sierra Magazine. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, was published in 2019. A second, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, will be out in Spring 2023.