Emmy Thelander was raised in Massachusetts and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. As an artist, she devises idiosyncratic systems that give rise to drawings, paintings, video and sculpture.

Emmy received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2014 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships including the Lighthouse Works, the Fountainhead at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling grant in addition to residencies at ACRE, Signal Culture, and the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Art.

She has exhibited solo projects at Practice (Philadelphia, PA) Los Ojos (Brooklyn, NY), In The Pines (Jackson, WY), and Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA). She currently teaches at Hostos Community College and Hunter College, and in 2018 was a visiting professor at Washington U. in St. Louis.

The books mentioned in the interview that she is currently reading are Healthcare and Big Data: Digital Specters and Phantom Objects and Manifestly Haraway.

Love and Intimacy, Freedom, Relating Positively to Myself, Having Income, 2018, Colored pencil, graphite, and marker on paper, 9 x 9"

Untitled (In a Good Year Drawing), 2017, Inkjet print on matte paper, 25 x 23"