Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell is an Oakland-based writer and artist whose work revolves around close observation of everyday practices and environments. Through this observation, her pieces undertake a search for evidence of non-dominant value systems  — whether related to the effects of digital environments, notions of productivity, or our relationship to the nonhuman world. 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 the San Francisco Planning Department, Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), and the Internet Archive. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Paris Review, The Believer, Sierra Magazine, and the Atlantic. Odell is the author of the New York Times bestsellers How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023). Additionally, a transcript of her commencement address to the Harvard Graduate School of Design was published in 2020 as Inhabiting the Negative Space.