Bio

The daughter of an immigrant, Natasha Sweeten was born in Kentucky and considers her youth a navigation between belonging and being an outsider. She grew up in college town suburbia and attended high school in rural southern Indiana, where her first job was on a U-Pick-It farm, sweeping parking lots and leading school children on apple orchard tours. She studied painting and sculpture at the Cleveland Institute of Art and painting at Bard College, supporting herself by working at art galleries and as an artist assistant.

Sweeten’s work has been included in various solo and group exhibitions and has appeared in The New York Times, Art in America and the Journal of Contemporary Painting, among other publications. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and a PS 122 Space Fellowship, as well as several artist residencies at MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Collaborations with fellow artists include painting, sculpture, collage, film, installation and a flag flying atop a roof in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Sweeten occasionally organizes exhibitions and writes reviews for Two Coats of Paint. Recently she collaborated with the Ithaca-based architecture firm Ballman Khapalova to create an homage to Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting - to celebrate its 50th anniversary - by cutting her upstate garage in half. She lives and works in Brooklyn and Columbia County, New York.