Currently based in Providence, RI.
Available for illustration and teaching opportunities. Reach me at maramenahan@gmail.com for more information and my CV.

I am interested in unsettling human/nature binary thinking. Working with watery media, glass, fabric, and video projection, I use layers and translucency to implicate the observer in what is observed, creating low-tech, poetic interfaces that blur boundaries between analog and digital, feral and domestic, the environment and our bodies. Bodies with holes. Bodies that leak. Bodies contaminated and contained.

From my experience working alongside scientists, as both a botanical illustrator and a technician at an atmospheric research station, my work also responds to scientific ways of knowing. I collage scientific and personal imagery to question how media and imaging technology such as microscopes, satellites, infrared cameras and cinematic devices expand our sense of self and time.

In my work as a botanical/scientific illustrator, I value images made slowly, by hand, informed by my own sensory participation with the more-than-human world. I am especially concerned with documenting threatened lifeforms and evolutionary variation as a result of human activity, and in using sequential images to animate change over time.

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2024 MFA Rhode Island School of Design
2015 BA Environmental Studies, BS Geography, University of Montana 

Selected Workshops

  • 2024 Botanical Illustration: a research method and embodied practice, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

  • 2023 Sky Talk, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 

  • 2023 Plant Bodies: Breath Sex and Interspecies Relations, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI 

  • 2023 Participatory embroidery workshop, Decolonial E-textile intervention at the RISD Museum, Providence, RI 

  • 2020 Keeping Time with Plants: a three-part video series; U.S. Botanic Garden, Online  

  • 2019 You Live in a Botanic Garden: workshop and public art project; Tenakee Springs, AK  

  • 2017 Into the Field: Sketching and Observation Outdoors, Bainbridge Artisan Resource Network, Bainbridge, WA 

  • 2017 Artist Talk: Meet our Botanical Illustrator, United States Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 

  • 2017 Slow Looking: Drawing as Contemplative Practice, Workshop, United States Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 

  • 2016 Into the Field: Sketching and Observation Outdoors, Workshop, United States Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 

  • 2016 The Art and Botany of Orchid Flowers, Workshop, United States Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 

Teaching Experience

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
    Senior Portfolio Review Fall 2024, Technological Landscapes Spring 2023

  • Instructor/Visiting Artist 2019 Science camp/backcountry float trip for rural youth, Togiak NWR, AK

  • Visiting Artist, 2017, Wilderness and Civilization Field Experience, University of Montana, Missoula, MT

  • Field Instructor 2016 Freshman Wilderness Experience, Wilderness Institute, University of Montana, Missoula, MT

Honors

  • RISD Fellowship, funding for 2 year MFA degree

  • Botanical Artists for Environment and Education Individual Grant, U.S. Botanic Garden, Washington, D.C. 

  • Truman Scholar National congressional scholarship for graduate school

  • Udall Scholar, National congressional scholarship for environmental work