Amber Hawk Swanson’s work explores care, animacy, and desire in the context of queerness and disability.

Recent exhibition and screening venues include Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); PS2 (solo, Belfast, UK); Denny Gallery (New York, NY); Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY); and Locust Projects (solo, Miami, FL). Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL). 

Hawk Swanson has participated in the New Museum Speculation Seminar (New York, NY); a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Residency (New York, NY); and an LMCC Process Space Residency (New York, NY). She has also completed residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY); MacDowell (Peterborough, NH); Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE); and the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program (Brooklyn, NY). 

Scholarly writing on her work has been published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies (2012, 2015), Theatre Drama Review (2012), and Art and Architecture in the Americas (2016). Hawk Swanson's work has also been featured in several recent books: Grace Banks’ Play with Me: Dolls, Women and Art (Laurence King Publishing, 2017); Cris Beam’s I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); and Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York University Press, 2018).

Hawk Swanson holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Studio Arts, 2006) and is a recipient of a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant and 2014 Franklin Furnace Fund Grant. She has recently taught in the Sculpture Departments of Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), Virginia Commonworth University (Richmond, VA) and Purchase College, SUNY (Purchase, NY).