Joy Episalla is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work repositions photography and the moving image into the territory of sculpture. Engaging a queer/feminist perspective they create open-ended situations that prompt the viewer to slow down and take in the moment, in all its complexity and seeming contradictions. Episalla has been exhibiting in the US and internationally since the 1990s. Museum exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MoMA PS1 (NYC), ICA (Philadelphia), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Leslie-Lohman Museum (NYC), Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris), the Wexner (Columbus), Central for Contemporary Art (Brussels), Artist Space (NYC), Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix), and the International Center for Photography (NYC). Writing about her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Artforum, BOMB, the New York Times, Two Coats of Paint, POST Italia, Slate, and Art in America. Their work is included in the collections of the Rose Art Museum, Centre Pompidou, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Gallery, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Episalla is the recipient of a 2003 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. A longtime AIDS activist and member of the ACT UP affinity group the Marys, Episalla is included in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Artist Oral History Project and is a board member of TAG Treatment Action Group. They are a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy with Nancy Brooks Brody (1962-2023), Zoe Leonard and Carrie Yamaoka, whose on-going work has been in the public sphere since 1991. Episalla is represented by Tibor de Nagy gallery (NYC), where she had a solo exhibition in 2022. Upcoming exhibitions include Chapter Eight of arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified, curated by Jo-ey Tang at Participant Inc. from March 2– May 11 2025 in NYC.
