Rita Leduc is a synesthetic sensor and hallway-dweller whose creative practice stretches across an intertwining gradient of personal, interpersonal, and societal sectors. Her innermost starting point is a practice of co-creation with ecosystems of all kinds. Insights garnered at this level inform interpersonal work: interdisciplinary collaborations, teaching, workshops, talks, exhibitions. As these relationships develop, so too does her broader work of offering the values and insights of an intimate, creative practice toward “thrutopian” leadership and change.
Across this gradient, Leduc has researched, taught, shown, and communicated her work internationally. Interdisciplinary and ecological collaborations with Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, MacLeish Field Station, Nantucket Harbor, and others engage inquiries such as “how the light gets out,” edge-running along watersheds, tipping points, network dynamics, sparkle, mentorship of decomposing birch, nonduality, and water-to-life-quality metrics. Since 2013, Leduc has directed GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary, process-oriented research platform she created and most recently co-facilitated at Rutgers University. She is a member of The PLACE Collective where art is used to “inspire, amaze, and enrich research within our wider communities.” She teaches Environmental Arts practice and theory in Rutgers University’s program, Creative Expression and the Environment.
Past exhibitions, courses, and events have been at the Museum of the White Mountains (NH), Syracuse University (NY), The Nature of Cities Festival (Berlin), The Zimmerli Art Museum (NJ), The Cognitive Science Show, Art.Earth’s conference, “Sentient Performativities: Thinking Alongside the Human” (Dartington Hall, UK), Stand4 Gallery (NY), Mount Saint Mary College (NY), Maria Mitchell Association (MA), Governors Island (NYC), and Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), among others. Leduc has received support from NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, Atlas Obscura, Oika, Broto, and Rutgers University, among others. Publications include Signal House Edition, Artis Natura, unpsychology magazine (“An Anthology of Warm Data”), and Dartington Trust’s “Arts + Ecology” podcast. (For links to recent talks and publications, see here.)
Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
