Artist Talk: Alison O’Daniel

Sound—its sensory qualities and its social role—is at the center of Los Angeles-based artist Alison O’Daniel’s multidisciplinary practice. Spanning film, performance, sculpture, and installation, and informed by frequent collaborations with hearing, Deaf, and hard-of-hearing artists and composers, O’Daniel’s practice explores the role of sound, the meaning of listening, the notion of legibility, and the importance of access.

Presented alongside the museum’s solo exhibition Steve Roden: wandering, an artist with whom she collaborated, O’Daniel will discuss her work and screen a series of short films, expanding on her and Roden’s collaborative approach to artistic practice.

About the artist

Alison O’Daniel, a filmmaker and visual artist, is d/Deaf and builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary in her work that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the ear. She is the director of The Tuba Thieves, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2023 and was broadcast in 2024 on Independent Lens on PBS and Arte in France. The Tuba Thieves screened at festivals across the globe, including CPH Dox, MOMA Doc Fortnight, SFFILM, IDFA and has also screened at the Academy Museum, Los Angeles; Mumok, Vienna; BAM, Brooklyn; Arsenale, Berlin; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, and others. She is a United States Artist Disability Futures Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. O’Daniel has also received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Field of Vision; ITVS; Chicken & Egg; SFFILM. She has developed projects in various labs, including Points North; Sundance Talent Forum; True/False/Catapult Editing Lab, and has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was included in Filmmaker Magazine’s 2019 25 New Faces of Independent Film issue. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council Gallery in Los Angeles and is the Suraj Israni Endowed Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts in the Visual Arts department at University of California, San Diego.