Ayden LeRoux

Ayden LeRoux is a queer artist, writer, and critic from New England. Her work explores embodiment, eroticism, and illness, in order to complicate narratives about caretaking, gender, and family structures. She is a Contributing Editor at BOMB, covering art and literature pertaining to sexuality, disability, and feminism. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have been published in Bookforum, Catapult, Electric Lit, Entropy, Guernica, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Rumpus, and has been honored as Notable in Best American Essays 2021. LeRoux’ photography, performance, video, and installations have been presented in solo exhibitions at IDIO Gallery, Flux Factory, and the Institute for American Art, as well as in group shows at chashama and the International Photography Festival.

Her interdisciplinary praxis is informed by experience in artist collectives, worker-owned cooperatives, and as a farmer and cheesemaker. A long-term advocate for nontraditional and alternative education, her pedagogy centers values like radical hospitality, generosity, intimacy, and experimentation. In addition to her own practice, Ayden is the Co-Director of Odyssey Works, an interdisciplinary collaborative performance group that makes performances for an audience of one. She is the author of two books about their work, Isolation and Amazement (Samsara Press, 2013), and Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016) co-written with Abraham Burickson. With Burickson, she co-founded an alternative art and design school with a curriculum that centers empathy, experimentation, and rethinks the relationship between artist and audience. Odyssey Works has been featured by The New York Times, ArtInfo, Newsweek, Hyperallergic, the Marina Abramovic Institute, Vulture, NPR‘s Studio 360, Fast Company, and San Francisco Magazine.

AWARDS

• Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016)
• Isolation & Amazement (Samsara Press, 2013)