Assistant Professor
Studio Art - Visual Studies, Foundations

Office: 1108 Calder Art Center
Phone: (616) 331-2521
E-mail: [email protected] 

Personal Website

Marianne Hoffmeister Castro is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her work proposes a critical examination of the representation of nature and nonhuman animals in contemporary western world. Working with drawing, installation, film, experimental writing, and editorial practices, she investigates inherited narratives of instrumentalization, and objectification that underlay dominant modes of capture and othering of the animal. Through her artistic research, she explores the possibilities of non-anthropocentric storytelling strategies to reimagine new modes of relation, modes of seeing, and iconographies of empathy with nonhuman domains in times of existential and ecological crisis. 

Marianne holds a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. She has exhibited and screened work in Chile, the United States, Ecuador, Peru, Switzerland, Korea, United Kingdom, and has participated in diverse international residency programs such as Cow House Studios, Ireland (2017); Northwestern Oklahoma State University, United States / Molten Capital, Chile, (2018); Bibliothek Andreas Züst, Switzerland (2018); Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies, Madrid (2020); St. Elmo Fellow at UT Austin and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (2022 - 2023); Animalia by Language and Creation Center of the University of the Americas, Chile (2022 - 2024) and SVA Bio Art Lab, NY (2024). Selected group shows include: We Live Like Trees Inside the Footsteps of Our Ancestors in Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University UK, and Quasi: Experimental Writing Systems at Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, ArtCenter, US. 

BFA , Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

MFA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 

• ART 153 - Foundations: Making and Meaning in Art and Design
• ART 391 - Civic Studio: Art in Public
• ART 498 - Senior Project