Martine Syms

Martine Syms (born 1988 in Los Angeles, California) is an American artist, filmmaker, writer, publisher, and director whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, video, installation, performance, photography, drawing, sculpture, sound, programming, theater, and publishing. Combining conceptual experimentation, humor, technical precision, and social commentary, Syms examines how identity is constructed and performed through media, language, gesture, technology, and popular culture.  Her work is particularly concerned with representations of Blackness, Black vernacular culture, race, gender, surveillance, digital communication, and the circulation of images. Drawing from television, cinema, social media, advertising, comedy, music, Black radical thought, and everyday interactions, Syms creates fragmented narratives that move between autobiography and fiction. Her films and installations frequently use repetition, nonlinear editing, multiple screens, text messages, avatars, artificial intelligence, and appropriated media to explore how people produce and manage versions of themselves before different audiences.  Syms earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2017. After completing her undergraduate studies, she cofounded Golden Age, a Chicago bookstore and project space devoted to independent publications. After returning to Los Angeles, she established Dominica Publishing, an artist-run press focused on Black art, writing, and visual culture. Her publishing practice remains closely connected to her work in cinema, installation, and institutional exhibition-making.  Syms’s work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Lafayette Anticipations, Carré d’Art, Fridericianum, Secession, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Hammer Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Studio Museum in Harlem. She wrote and directed the feature film The African Desperate, which premiered during the 2022 New Directors/New Films program presented by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center. Her honors include a 2025 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2022 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2021 Creative Capital Award, and a 2020 United States Artists Fellowship. Syms lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is developing another feature film and preparing a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles for 2027.