Bio+CV

BIO

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-creating multidisciplinary artwork with ecosystems of all kinds. Insights garnered at this level inform interpersonal work: speaking and writing, teaching, workshops, inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations, and consulting. 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, shown, taught, communicated, and embodied her work internationally. Interdisciplinary and ecological collaborations with Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, the San Diego coastline, Vassar College Arboretum, MacLeish Field Station, Nantucket Harbor, and others engage inquiries such as “how the light gets out,” tipping points, collective consciousness, sparkle, mentorship of decomposing birch, “shimmering friction,” water-to-life-quality metrics, and floodplain dynamics. Since 2013, Leduc has directed GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary, process-oriented research platform she created and most recently offered 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,” an affiliate at Rutgers’ Climate and Energy Institute, and a consistent participant in a variety of transdisciplinary symposia, forums, and alliances. She teaches Environmental Arts practice and theory in Rutgers University’s program, Creative Expression and the Environment and is currently running Creativity in Conversation: Creative Research as Inquiry, Insight, and Instigator, a student research program across Rutgers’ Coastal Campus.

Exhibitions and offerings have been at the Museum of the White Mountains (NH), Syracuse University (NY), Smith College (MA), Vassar College (NY), the University of San Diego (CA), 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), Dartington Trust (UK), 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 an upcoming chapter in “Artful Science, Ecological Arts: Transdisciplinary Curiosity for Wayfinding to Futures Worth Living” (ed. Dr. David Syring, Rutledge Press).

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.