Biography
Doreen Maloney is a Professor of Art at the University of Kentucky. Her work has been shown at major venues such as Project Space 5533 in Istanbul, Turkey, 48 Hours of Neukölln Berlin, the Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale, the Tribeca Film Festival, LaMama Theater in New York City, the Dallas Contemporary Art Museum, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba, the Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Kentucky Craft Museum, LACDA in Los Angeles among many other university galleries and locations.
In addition to her degrees in Dance, Interarts and Technology and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she holds degrees from Indiana University in German and Russian languages and a Masters in Turkish History. She was the president and founding member of the New Media Caucus. She lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky.
Artist Statement
My work explores how identity, memory, and loss shape the emotional and psychological atmospheres we inhabit. Through immersive installations, moving-image works, and sonic environments, I use fragile materials, light, shadow, and spatial intervention to create environments that reflect the transient nature of lived experience. Drawing from personal narrative as well as collective memory, my projects often function as visual metaphors for the ways individuals carry invisible histories within everyday space.
Many of my installations are constructed from delicate, light-responsive materials such as paper, fabric, and translucent surfaces that shift as viewers move through them. These environments invite slow looking and embodied perception, encouraging viewers to become aware of breath, presence, and the subtle emotional registers that shape how we experience the world. Film and sonic works extend these concerns, exploring voice, absence, and the mediated ways contemporary technologies influence memory, communication, and authorship.
Recent projects, including Personal Weather, Lantern House, and the ongoing Spirit House, investigate shelter, atmosphere, and the fragile architectures people construct in response to uncertainty and change. Across media, my work asks how personal experience becomes spatial, how memory becomes material, and how ephemeral forms can hold complex emotional meaning.