JEANETTE ANDREWS

NYC. b. 1990.

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Bio

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Jeanette Andrews is a New York-based artist working at the intersections of illusion, performance, installation, film, and audio. Her studio practice bridges the worlds of illusion, installation, and conceptual art, creating interactive vignettes and surreal, multisensory experiences that investigate perception, cognition, and the seemingly impossible. She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances which function as live thought experiments.  She has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as well as for the Quebec City Biennial and Boca Raton Museum of Art, presented talks for Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas Week, The British Society of Aesthetics, and universities, including Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Harvard.

She has held residencies with the Institute for Art and Olfaction and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and is a former National Arts Club Artist Fellow and Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard. Her work has been featured in the Boston Globe, PBS, Chicago Tribune and New York Times.  ​
 

She was a 2024-2025 Visiting Artist for the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT and the current visiting artist for the Arts Institute at Brown University.

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Artnet says, “Andrews’s avant-garde approach to magic transforms it into performance art.” 

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Artist Statement

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My performance, installation, audio, and film practice is grounded in illusion-based work. Through a research-driven approach, I work to uncover the selective nature of attention and the limits of perception to reveal multiple realities, hidden worlds, the nature of belief, and how illusions can construct reality.

Creating interactive, surreal performance vignettes, my pieces invite audiences to co-author live thought

experiments. 

 

My decades-long technical training in parlor and sleight of hand magic affords a distinct perspective on crafting experiences with nuanced psychological underpinnings, the creation of surreal visuals and designing/building objects that function completely differently than they appear. 

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 I merge illusion with multidisciplinary performance to craft experiences rooted in psychological

nuance, sensory misdirection, and visual transformation. My work engages phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science, investigating impossible objects, unseen communication, invisible worlds, scent, and the ways illusions shape reality. Ultimately, my practice seeks to illuminate the astonishing within the everyday and heighten awareness of the dynamic process of perception itself.

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image: Michael George