Ellie Ga

Stockholm, Sweden-based multi-disciplinary artist Ellie Ga was born and raised in New York City, and earned her MFA at Hunter College in 2004. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts that explore the limits of the human capacity to objectively document and reconstruct both personal and historical events. 

A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video, Ga recalls being attracted to the MFA program at Hunter largely for practical reasons: the reasonable cost, its prime location, and the ability to work while attending part-time. She says, “It was a flexible program where you learned to be independent and to make your studio practice work with the reality of being an artist in a big city. Going to grad school at Hunter felt like an extension of my life as an artist in New York.” She says she also found a community that grounded and challenged her, where, “the students came from many walks of life, many approaches to making art. The MFA program felt less like a cloistered art school for the lucky few, but rather an extension of the city. We were challenged, not coddled.”

Ga’s work has been exhibited and performed at the New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; M-Museum, Leuven; Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire; and in 2019 she was included in the Whitney Biennial. She has been the recipient of a Swedish Research Council artistic research grant, and her work is in public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright-Knox, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, FRAC Besançon, Swedish Public Art Fund, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. She is also the author of Square Octagon Circle and North Was Here.