Autumn Knight

Autumn Knight (born January 5, 1980 in Houston, Texas) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across performance, installation, video, sound, text, drawing, and participatory social exchange. Drawing from training in theater, drama therapy, improvisation, and the psychology of group dynamics, Knight creates performances that unsettle conventional relationships between performer and audience. Humor, discomfort, intimacy, confrontation, and unpredictability become tools for examining how authority is constructed and how people negotiate power within shared spaces.  Knight’s performances frequently begin with a prompt, structure, character, or social proposition that remains open to intervention by the audience. Works such as Sanity TV, M _ _ _ ER, WALL, and the ongoing NOTHING series investigate race, gender, behavioral expectations, familial intimacy, psychological states, social contracts, disappointment, complaint, and the potential of doing nothing. Rather than treating viewers as passive observers, Knight invites them to become participants whose reactions, silences, conflicts, and decisions alter the direction of the work.  Knight earned a Bachelor of Arts in Theater Arts from Dillard University and a Master of Arts in Drama Therapy from New York University. Knight also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. The artist’s work has been presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Walker Art Center, Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Akademie der Künste, Museum Ostwall, REDCAT, and numerous other institutions.  Knight received a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film-Video, the 2021–2022 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts, a 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, a 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a 2024 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant. Knight’s WALL became the first live performance work acquired for the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Autumn Knight lives and works in New York City.