Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art.
Since graduating with an M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S., including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods’ work is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco and has been published in The New York Times and Harper's, among others. In 2025, Woods will be a fellow at Le Moulin à Nef Residency in Auvillar, France through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, creating work for her next solo exhibition.
At MacDowell in 2006, she generated material for three short experimental films: Five Cents a Peek, Passing, and Mirror with a Memory (working title). Passing premiered at the Castro Theater in San Francisco in 2006. During her 2025 residency, Woods completed a series of sculptures, photographs, and collages for her solo show, Recast, curated by Allie Haeusslein and exhibited at Filter Space, Chicago, in 2025. Recast is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of motherhood. Woods' hybrid approach to image-making in Recast illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.
