Allison Leigh Holt

On Sunday, May 3, 2026 Allison Leigh Holt (@oillyoowen) completed their three-week New Media residency with us!

Allison Leigh Holt is a neurodivergent, anti-disciplinary artist, a Fulbright scholar (Indonesia), and the first person in their household to graduate high school. A current Lucas Arts Fellow at Montalvo Art Center, they have held residencies at EMPAC, Djerassi, the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (Indonesia), Bullseye Glass Company, and the Experimental Television Center; and resident researcher roles at Sanggar Perbakayun, the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Notable exhibitions include Eye Filmmuseum (The Netherlands), The Ford Foundation Gallery, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, BAMPFA, Stanford University, SFMOMA, The Exploratorium, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society (solo, Indonesia), The North Dakota Museum of Art (solo), and San Francisco Cinematheque. They have lectured at Stanford Arts Institute’s Imagining the Universe: Cosmology in Art and Science; FEMeeting: Women in Art|Science|Technology (Canada); RIXC Art-Science Festival (Riga, Latvia); After Agency (Mickiewicz University, Poland); Video Vortex (Indonesia); the 20th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference; the American Anthropological Association Conference; and the Yogyakarta International New Media Festival. At the University of North Dakota Writers Conference, Holt was in dialogue with science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson and theoretical physicist Brian Greene; and has served on the Mind & Life Summer Research Institute faculty. Holt studied at The Evergreen State College BA), Massachusetts College of Art (MFA), and now, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Ph.D. candidate).

Allison said the following about their residency:

“I spent time with two projects that explore the flows of information that occur between agents in dialogue, and the autonomous forms they take on. One is a work-in-progress tentatively called Quantum Touch: I explored driving point cloud networks I’ve built in TouchDesigner using motion capture devices–something I am continuing to talk about with Alfred faculty–and printing stills using the dye sublimation process. I also found myself committed to staring deep into usually undesirable stuff in video feedback, like static, navigating around the incredible iea tools to turn up gold. While my samples here are quite different, they are models for envisioning dialogic flows at the human scale, and at scales and contexts beyond the human.”

If you missed Allison’s artist talk, you can view it and others at www.youtube.com/@theinstituteforelectronica5746