Nancy Lu Rosenheim

Nancy Lu Rosenheim is a visual artist working in sculpture, painting, drawing, and printmaking from Chicago, Illinois, USA. She is joining Studio 88 for a solo residency in May – June 2024. Find out more about her and her work.

Nancy Lu Rosenheim is an artist and educator fascinated with the exquisite yet sinister constituents of the natural world, distorted through the lens and perceptions of the human psyche. Through her fictional landscapes and hybrid beasts, she explores themes of environmental degradation and resilience, as well as psychological and emotional states of mind.

Her approaches vary from portraiture to allegorical landscape, and from illustration to installation. Her imagery evolves alongside her personal and political perspectives. For example, in a brush-and-ink portrait series, she depicts aging as an intimate experience and challenges social stereotypes: “Where a beaver’s tooth might imply decrepitude, I use the unfurling tongue of a mythic hag to denote power.”

Featured in the Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune, NewCity, and Chicago Portraits, some of Nancy’s exhibitions include the Hyde Park Art Center, Slow Gallery, and the Koehnline Museum, in Illinois, Galerías Cartel and Verlín in Granada, Spain. Residencies include the Ragdale Foundation, IL, and the Atelier Neo-Medici, Monflanquin, France.

Nancy is Instructor of Art + Design at Northeastern Illinois University and College of Lake County. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. In her spare time, she advocates for the pristine karst geology of the Driftless Area of Wisconsin by battling the CAFO insurgence (factory farms) that threatens its land, water, and air.

Fascinated by the abundance of hybrid creatures in the traditional arts of Thailand, Nancy would like to study the Thai animal/human entities found across the arts, on architecture and in temples during her residency at Studio 88. Then she plans to apply her discoveries to launch a new series of mixed media works on paper and in sculpture.