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Nancy Baker Cahill

She // Her // Hers

Transdisciplinary Artist

Germantown, New York

A high-contrast, black and white photograph of a white woman with short brown hair looking directly into the camera, wearing a black tank top and multiple necklaces. A geometric tattoo is visible on her right bicep.

Photo by Mark Escribano.

“Using the sensory affordances of emerging technologies, I hope to invite viewers to reacquaint themselves with their animal senses and imaginations — and to rely more on those senses to navigate a rapidly changing and imperiled world.”

Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker whose work examines complex systems, with an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Systems thinking is integral to Baker Cahill’s poetics; her concerns focus on power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms. Since 2018, she has been the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free, augmented reality (AR) public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her work has been profiled in publications including The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and The New York Times, among others. Her essays appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nam June Paik Art Center Reader, and October Magazine.

She has been an Artist Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a TEDx speaker, a C.O.L.A Master Artist Fellow, and received the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor. She is a 2022 LACMA Art + Tech Grant recipient, winner of the 2024 Infinity Festival's Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, winner of the 2025 Full Dome Festival's Janus Award for Best Feature Film, and is an Affiliate of the Harvard metaLAB. In 2026, she will be a Fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures in Vienna. 

Baker Cahill’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and History, RFC Art Collection, The Winthrop University Collection, The Smart Museum, and 0x Collection.

Donor -This award was generously supported by Katie Weitz, PhD.

This artist page was last updated on: 01.14.2026

Media
An augmented reality image of a futuristic creature with an octagonal machine head, a serpentine body studded with multi-colored feathers, cephalopod legs, and manta ray "wings" threaded with mycelial networks soaring above the meatpacking district in New York City against a bright blue sky. The Whitney Museum is visible in the background.

Augmented reality animation still of CENTO by Nancy Baker Cahill, via 4th Wall app, 2023.

Photo by Amy Knoll Fraser.

Layered, multi-colored "pixels," some containing hand-drawn images, partially occlude a body of water surrounded by abstract botanicals. Multi-colored fire tornadoes rage in the distance, and a petroleum plant is barely visible underwater.

Digital animation still of CARBON 1 by Nancy Baker Cahill, 2025.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Precisely-mapped, chromatic video animates a sprawling horizontal wall of sculpture made of torn, graphite drawings that resembles an energetic tempest of abstract leaves or feathers.

Aftermath by Nancy Baker Cahill, 2025. Graphite on paper wall sculpture with projected video, 264 × 84 × 12 inches.

Photo courtesy of the artist.