Marianne Shaneen
Selected Work
The Mason Jar
Fiction excerpt from Homing, a novel in progress
The Kenyon Review print issue Sept/Oct 2020
AUDIO LINK Kenyon Review Out Loud
Essay for the Prospections publication
as part of the exhibition
at BAK, Basis for Contemporary Art,
Utrecht, NL
Text and narration for eteam, Flowers Series, images by eteam and sound by Zach Layton
Text and voice by Marianne Shaneen for essay film by Peggy Ahwesh
screened at New York Film Festival, Microscope Gallery,
and New Media Artspace at Baruch College
From Wanton Weevils to Amoral Algorithms
Essay commissioned by Henry Gallery for the film and installation Bugs and Beasts Before the Law
by Bambitchell
GODZILLA VS. THE PREHISTORIC BISON:
On Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Creative nonfiction, The Brooklyn Rail
On the passing of New York City's
beloved Jonas Mekas
Christine Wertheim's recently released book mUtter-bAbel is gorgeously hyperbolic, a primordial pataphysics of text and drawings that explores relationships between babies, mothers, language, and "ugly archaic feelings and their troubling social effects."
Essay on Christine Wertheim’s book mUtterbAbel,
and Margaret and Christine Wertheim's Institute for Figuring
and the Crochet Coral Reef
Bomb magazine
Lucent Amnesis
Chapbook by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs
Shadows Mirror Shadows
Monograph essay for solo show Shadows Mirror Shadows
by artist Miruna Dragan
commissioned by G Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Everywhere Possible, Therefore True
Limited edition book of texts in response to installation works for
solo exhibition by artist Miruna Dragan
Commissioned by Nickle Galleries, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Ken Jacobs and the Sublime Horrors of Perception
Essay on multimedia artist Ken Jacobs’s Nervous System performances
for the book Monstrous Adaptations
Manchester University Press
Inhabiting the Impossible
Essay on the work of Madeline Gins and Arakawa
Reversible Destiny Foundation and Bioscleave House
in INTERFACES special edition: Architecture Against Death
Commissioned text for publication accompanying movement piece
BLOOWST WINDKU by Rebecca Davis
Performed at Here, NYC
Homing
a novel in progress
HOMING is a wildly ranging novel of human, animal, and geological entanglement, and a woman’s search for home. In animistic raptures that are part dark fairytale, part American cultural history, and part cabinet of curiosities, Isabel is a homing beacon to nonhuman voices: As a child, a magpie teaches her to disassociate from trauma. Plastic speaks, a quasi-immortal substance intimately imbedded in her life. The oracular orb of Trinitite in her mother’s ring narrates its story from geological time, to genocide, to the occult fringes of the A-bomb—while also revealing secrets that Isabel’s family kept hidden from her.
Over the course of a hallucinatory red-eye flight from hurricanes in New York to wildfires in Los Angeles, as she realizes that everywhere home might be is becoming uninhabitable, intergenerational trauma is increasingly entwined with ecological trauma.
State by state, the plane flies over the U.S. in a web of digressive speculations of personal and planetary wonder and loss: Jonestown and coral reefs; nukes and alchemy, Jell-o and plant sentience, dirt-eating and genocide, Wile E. Coyote and the Great Chain of Being.
HOMING is a portrait of a woman who continually asks, Where does self end and other begin? On the cusp between hope and extinction, she is characterized by her place in our dizzying contemporary moment, where the implications of our interconnectedness may be as destructive as they are sublime. Homing’s encyclopedic scope is intimately grounded in its narrators’ desire for embodiment, family, and home—urgent longings we all share, as we grow increasingly alienated from our ecological body, interspecies family, and planetary home.
Marianne Shaneen writes fiction and essays, and has also worked in documentary video. She has been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, the Tusen Takk Foundation, and Kebbel Villa, and she is the recipient of a NYSCA Individual Artist grant. She received her MFA in writing from the Bard Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Manchester University Press, and elsewhere. She has been commissioned for numerous pieces for artists and filmmakers. Her chapbook Lucent Amnesis was published by Portable Press/Yo-Yo Labs. She teaches writing and seminars on 'the more-than-human world,' and has recently finished her first novel, Homing, and is at work on her second.
About
News
June 2025
Reading and performance, Amant, Brooklyn, NY
April 2025
Reading, Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn, NY
Jan 2024
Reading, That Time of Year Series, Spotty Dog, Hudson, NY
May 2024
Residency, Kebbel Villa, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany
April 2024
Reading, Familiar Trees + RA Gallery, Great Barrington, MA
Mar 2024
Reading, Pete's Candy Store, Brooklyn, NY
Nov 2022
Reading, Artificial Moon, liner notes prose piece for Victoria Keddie's album release, performance, and solo show, Electrona in Crystallo Fluenti, at Fridman Gallery, NYC, [four channel video with stereo sound installation from live sessions tracking space debris over host coordinates of New York City]
Oct 2022
Reading, Bradley Eros' Black Screen: Imageless Films and Performances, Microscope Gallery, NYC
Reading, benefit for performance collaborative Flowers in the Basement [Suzanne Kite, Alisha B. Wormsley, Frances Ines Rodriguez, Tsedaye Makonnen, Mel Elberg, and Amy Ruhl, formed to create new work and speculate on insurgent, utopian alternatives to our current forms of reproductive labor]. Sunview Luncheonette, Brooklyn, NY
Sept 2022
Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, CA, residency
OR119, (actor/cast member), film dir. by Peggy Ahwesh and Jackie Goss — a 'theoretical musical' that playfully examines the unsettled legacy of Wilhelm Reich and his surprising relevance to contemporary feminist thought, sneak preview screening, Upstate Films, Rhinebeck, NY
Reading, VERBATIM day-long market featuring Hudson Valley & Catskills-based small presses and record labels, at Opus 40 sculpture park in Saugerties, NY
Jul/Aug 2022
Tusen Takk Foundation, Leland, MI, residency
Feb 2022
The Moving Picture Show, Foreland, Catskill, NY: "Where the Flowerbots Bloom"-text and video collaboration with eteam
https://www.forelandcatskill.com/happenings/the-moving-picture-show https://www.meineigenheim.org/portfolio/?p=3721
Nov 2021
"Immortals: on the Ancient Future Lives of Stone and Plastic" for the Prospections publication as part of the exhibition "No Linear Fucking Time" at BAK, Basis for Contemporary Art, Utrecht, NL
Oct 2021
Reading for the show "The Ambassadors" installation of painting, sculpture, and video, by Michele Abramowitz, H.A. Halpert, and Barb Smith: https://theaccident.club/
"Where the Flowerbots Bloom" collaboration with eteam, Flowers Series Part 12, with sound by Zach Layton
https://www.meineigenheim.org/portfolio/?p=3721
August 2021
Residency at Tusen Takk Foundation
Reading, Boston Poetry Marathon
Reading, Shivastan, Woodstock, NY
July 2021
Commissioned text for performance with scenes from PHASE IV, the psychedelic 70s sci-fi insect film by Saul Bass. A Night of Neo-Benshi at Hudson Hall, Hudson, NY. Organized by the Flow Chart Foundation.
https://hudsonhall.org/event/a-night-of-neo-benshi/?fbcli
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/
Sept/Oct 2020
Kenyon Review (print) "The Mason Jar"
Fall 2020
"From Wanton Weevils to Amoral Algorithms" — essay commissioned for publication to accompany the opening of Bugs and Beasts Before the Law, film and installation by Bambitchell (multimedia artists Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell), at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA
Aug 2020
Reading, Boston Poetry Marathon
April 2020
Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Woodside, CA, residency
Fall 2019
Text and voice by Marianne Shaneen for Kansas Atlas, essay film by Peggy Ahwesh: Screened at The New York Film Festival, Projections, Sept 2019; at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn as part of Ahwesh's solo show Cleave, May 2019; and as part of Unsettled States, Ahwesh solo exhibition at the New Media Artspace at Baruch College, New York, NY, Sept 2019
Nov 2019
Reading, St. Rocco’s Reading Series at Urban Aftermath Books, Albany, NY
Sept 2019
Reading, Subterranean Poetry Festival, Rosendale, NY
April 2019
Reading, Volume reading series, Hudson, NY
Dec 2018
Commissioned text for Barbara Ess video installation and photography solo show Lunatic(k),
3A Gallery, New York, NY
Oct 2018
Reading, The Poetry Project, New York, NY
Aug 2018
Reading, Howl Gallery, New York, NY
April/May 2018
MacDowell, Peterborough, NH, two-month residency
Recipient of Whiting Writers’ Aid grant
March 2018
"The Post Card" received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Contest March/April 2018
http://bit.ly/2018MarAprVSFhonorablemention
Nov/Dec 2017
Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, residency
Oct 2016
Reading, Whitney Museum NYC, as part of Bradley Eros' Black Hole Cinema film screening
Residencies & Grants
