Ashton Phillips

Education

• MFA in Studio Art, Maryland Institute College of Art
• JD, George Washington University Law School
• BA, University of Maryland, College Park 
• Post-Bac, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art

Bio/ Affiliation

Ashton S. Phillips is a socially and ecologically-engaged artist and writer working with dirt, water, pollution, plasticity, and interspecies agents of (dis)repair as primary materials, collaborators, and teachers. He brings an ecological, trauma-informed approach to his teaching, prioritizing collaboration, play, speculative (un)making, and embodied research over top-down modalities.   

Ashton’s multisensory, interspecies installations and performances have been exhibited across the United States and abroad, including recent solo shows and public commissions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles; the Torrance Art Museum; Automata Arts; Maryland Institute College of Art; Cerritos College Art Gallery; Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook; and Glendale Central Park, in Glendale, CA. 

Ashton holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art; a JD from the George Washington University Law School; and a BA from the University of Maryland, where he served as the first openly trans president of the university’s LGBT student caucus. His creative and critical writing have been published by Antennae -  The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Art and Cake, Cambridge University Press, and Trans Studies Quarterly (forthcoming trans ecologies issue). Ashton’s work has also been featured in Bmore Art Magazine, Shoutout SoCal, The Gallup Independent, The Gallup Sun, Albuquerque Magazine, and The Santa Fe Reporter.  

He is a resident artist at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, CA, where he maintains a living colony of polystyrene-metabolizing mealworm/beetles and a plastic-fertilized garden as trans ecological praxis. When he is not making, writing, teaching, and caring for metamorphosing creatures, he serves as a creative consultant and trauma-informed art teacher for survivors of adverse-childhood experiences at the SHARK Clinic at Rancho Los Amigos Rehabilitation Hospital and curates exhibitions and performances at Monte Vista Projects.