Susan Weiss
BA: University of Michigan
MA: Mills College
MFA: San Francisco Art Institute
ICP: Visual Story Telling Certificate, April 2023
Susan Weiss works in the visual arts in various mediums including painting and drawing, photography, graphics, and video. She is both a working artist and an art educator.
Susan’s work explores the issues of identity and the social landscape of contemporary culture. Her documentary work has explored the lives of military families during a deployment, the refugee crisis in Lesbos and Berlin. Her long term project, “Humanity In The Modern World” documents humanitarian and NGO work in other countries. The work for these projects includes photography, written articles, speaking engagements and interviews. Her teaching experience includes working both in live classes and via Zoom on fine are subjects including drawing and painting. She also advises art students on preparing their portfolios and preparation for interviews for school applications.
She is currently working on four projects in various stages. THE ORCHARD, a series of polaroid images photographed during the pandemic. GREATER VERMONT tells the story of people and the agricultural community coming together, KILT ENVY is a personal story of finding possible relatives in a kilt shop in Scotland, and LIA TAYLOR CHRONICLES which follows a female body builder to a pro tournament.
Susan Weiss lives in San Francisco and Vermont.
Artist’s Statement
Exploring the human condition has been a theme in my work since receiving an MFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. I have attempted to connect with people to tell their stories in a documentary style, their hopes, fears, anxieties, and what makes them unique individuals. This theme has been pursued through my personal work as well as projects for NGOs and humanitarian groups which present the human condition under extreme circumstances such as the refugee crisis, the global health crisis, effects of military deployment on families, and Vietnam veteran soldiers returning to battlegrounds where they once fought. All of these projects are connected in their emotional truth and reality of existence and what an image can convey to the viewer. Most recently I have also been exploring these emotions through abstraction in the photographs by using various Polaroid cameras and manipulating the images in camera to create the wide range of feelings that we all experience.