ABOUT
SUSANNAH HAYS is a philosophical, pragmatic thinker and educator whose fine art photographs reveal the essential systems interconnecting our universe, from the smallest leaf to the cosmos itself. Seeing shadow within form and form within shadow she steps quietly in the footsteps of Henry Fox Talbot and other early pioneers of photographic image-making, looking for clues that connect a photographer with the essence of the medium and the motivation that lies deep within the impulse to photograph. Sensitive to both the language of photography and the visual signifiers within her immediate surroundings, her work exists in the midst of a dynamic and imaginative exchange with our In/Visible Cosmos. Her photographs have been widely exhibited and collected by numerous private and public institutions, including Stanford University's Green Library who acquired her archive in 2010.
Serving on the faculty of the San Francisco Art Institute’s photography program between 2002-2012, she completed her doctorate in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016. Her dissertation Nature as Discourse: A Co-evolutionary Systems Approach to Art and Environmental Design investigates a natural approach for the Humanities to recalibrate single discipline learning by way of transdisciplinary experiential practices that necessarily engage, unify, and expand mind-body perception and awareness.
As an Independent Researcher and Consultant, she has assisted organizations advancing Transdisciplinary integral principles. In emergence since the late 1970s, this global movement engages a Systems View/Quantum non-locality understanding of Reality, which ultimately speaks to the agency of integrating Gnostic [Eastern] and Empirical [Western] traditions. She is an active member of Centre International de Recherches et Études Transdisciplinaires (CIRET), based in Paris, France and serves as an advisory member to the Intropy=Entropy Institute in San Francisco, California.
Originally trained as an archivist and paper conservator, Susannah is presently assisting individual artists and non-profit organizations with various stages of their collection’s management—from inventory gathering, visual/written documentation, preservation care, and historical research to catalog raisonné and curatorial/exhibition programing. She guides short and longterm planning, often performed in phases, depending on collection size and budgetary concerns.
Susannah is represented by Galleria il Pozzo, Cortona, Italy and Photo-Eye Gallery and Photo-Eye Books + Project Space in Santa Fe. She lives and works in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico.
Printable:
“We are each born at a certain instant from a seed and just as sure as the solar and lunar systems cycle around us, we inherit our ancestral lineage —the blueprint/membrane of our Being.
From the soil of our planet earth, we are given the potential to engage our human spirit in the endeavor of coming to understand our evolutionary bodies.
The photographer’s role brings light to the invisible, comprehension to the incomprehensible. ”