Grace Grothaus
Artist Statement / Bio
Grace Grothaus (b. New Orleans, USA) is a Toronto-based computational media artist and researcher exploring relationships among people, plants, atmosphere, and the built environment. Through interactive installations, wearable artworks, and public encounters, she makes environmental phenomena perceptible, inviting participants to consider how their everyday lives intersect with wider ecological systems. Her practice combines physical computing, environmental sensing, light, sound, and textiles to investigate the climate crisis and imagine possible futures.
Her current project, We Are Air Aware, brings together wearable sensing, community participation, and research-creation to explore urban particulate air pollution. Within this work, her AtmoSpheres series translates air-quality measurements into embodied encounters through wearable artworks. Moving between personal experience and collective environmental conditions, these works ask how sensing and artistic expression can support public dialogue and civic action. Her broader practice examines human–plant relationships and challenges the assumed separation of built and natural environments. Collaboration with communities, scientists, engineers, musicians, and other artists is central to her approach.
Grothaus’s artworks have been exhibited across five continents, including at Cité Internationale des Arts in France, the International Symposium on Wearable Computers in China, Environmental Crisis: Art & Science in the UK, the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Spain, Australia and South Africa, and the World Creativity Biennale in Brazil. She holds a PhD in Digital Media from York University, where she was a Vanier Scholar, VISTA Scholar, and Graduate Fellow of Academic Distinction. She is currently a Connected Minds Postdoctoral Visitor and a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research.