Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates site-responsive installations and performances that address themes of migration, cultural memory, labor, social, and environmental concerns. She has exhibited extensively, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, China, Taiwan and across the United States. Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024), the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022), the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Norway (2021-2022), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.
Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, The Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Public Art Review, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt, and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.
Born in Jilin, China, Liu lives and works in Austin, Texas. She received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts and a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
(Philip Rogers, photo credit)