Rankaitis, Susan

American, b. 1949

BiographySusan Rankaitis is a multimedia artist who works primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Completing a BFA at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (1971), and an MFA at University of Southern California (1977), Rankaitis was initially an abstract painter before turning to photography. Inspired by the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy, she began to develop a multifaceted, deliberately unconventional approach to photography, utilizing various chemical processes in the darkroom, the incorporation of other media, and composite imagery. Over the decades, she has focused on representations of the brain and DNA, as in the mixed media works mounted on steel that are represented in the Museum of Contemporary Photography's collection. For a number of projects, she has worked collaboratively with molecular biologists and neuroscientists. Since 1990, Rankaitis has been a professor and Fletcher Jones Chair of Art at Scipps College located in Claremont, California.

http://susanrankaitis.com