Bio

Tiana Birrell is a multimedia artist and curator from Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and her MS in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah in 2019. Her current research investigates the copious amount of water and energy used by data centers in Salt Lake and Utah Valley. She uses photography, video, projections, installations, and performative lectures to consider these questions as well as bring these invisible structures into visibility. 

Birrell was awarded the 2019 Digital Matters Lab Graduate Fellowship by the University of Utah for her research on the relationship between data centers and water consumption. During the March 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, she co-founded PARC, a Utah-based artist collective, and became a Granary Arts Fellow for developing Incubation Period, a virtual exhibition that allowed artists to continue to express their creativity during lockdown. 

Birrell finished her time as an Artist in Residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021, which concluded with a multimedia solo show, ‘the weight of a cloud.’ This exhibit illuminated the invisible environmental impacts of the digital cloud as well as challenged its linguistic framework. Birrell recently co-curated ‘A Greater Utah’, an ambitious survey of the state of contemporary art in Utah featuring the work of 28 Utah-based artists from six different regions throughout the state.