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. There, she uses visual means to acquaint with a system’s multi-sensory phenomenologies. Insights garnered at this level inform interpersonal work: interdisciplinary collaborations, teaching, workshops, talks, exhibitions, etc. As these relationships develop, so too does her broader work of offering the values and insights of an intimate, creative practice toward aspirational leadership and “thrutopian” change.
Across this gradient, Leduc has taught, shown and communicated her work internationally. Recent examples include Extending Ecology, an Oika collaboration between an artist, an ecologist, and a forest that began in 2021. Through researching light in the gorge as well as other phenomena in the forest, the project has been a case study in “how the light gets out” via local and international public exhibitions, workshops, and talks. Another collaboration, Cause and Affection, is an investigation into relational dynamics and water quality-of-life along a continuum of vantage points spanning Nantucket Harbor’s eelgrass beds to community stakeholders. In 2025, Leduc began collaborating with MacLeish Field Station at Smith College, researching neighboring watersheds, a decomposing birch, liminality, and nonduality. In 2013, Leduc founded and has since been directing GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary, process-oriented research platform (most recently, GW: Interdisciplinary Cultivation Unit 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.” Pedagogically, she packages her work into teaching 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.
