Beverly Naidus
Born in Salem, Massachusetts, to two New Yorkers, Beverly Naidus grew up in the Northeast. She received a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Early recognition in the New York City art world offered her many opportunities to exhibit her interactive installations and digital art projects in diverse venues, including mainstream museums and city streets. Inspired by lived experience, topics in her artwork include environmental illness, global warming, unemployment, the alienation of consumer culture, nuclear nightmares, body hate, celebrating cultural identity, confronting racism and anti-Semitism, and envisioning utopia and global justice.
Beverly Naidus has produced several artist's books including What Kinda Name is That? and One Size Does Not Fit All. Her art has been discussed in books by Paul Von Blum, Lucy R. Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Lisa Bloom and others, and reviewed in many contemporary journals. Her writing about art for social change has been published in two books (New Practices — New Pedagogies edited by Malcolm Miles and The Arts, Education and Social Change: Little Signs of Hope edited by Mary Clare Powell and Vivien Marcow Speiser), and in articles in Radical Teacher, the New Art Examiner, and the National Women's Studies Association Journal. She was a finalist for the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant Program and has received numerous grants, including a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant in photography.
Her teaching career includes work as an artist/teacher in New York City museums, Carleton College, California State University Long Beach, Goddard College, Hampshire College, and the Institute for Social Ecology. She has guest lectured and led workshops all over North America and in Europe. Beverly has co-created a program, Arts in Community, with a focus on art for social change for the University of Washington, Tacoma. She lives in the middle of the woods on Vashon Island with her husband and son.