Dakota Gearhart is an artist, animator, and educator who seeks to make the familiar strange—and sometimes the strange familiar—and through that inversion articulate a more robust and less oppressive future. Her current animated video project, Life Touching Life, invites scientists, researchers, and caretakers to share their observations on consciousness and its relationship to biodiversity.
In this series, Gearhart performs as a half-woman half-algae creature who introduces viewers to fictional species, like pixel bacteria. Color, humor, sound, and playful spaces of maximalism are common features of her collage-based aesthetic. Gearhart has been awarded a Franklin Furnace Fellowship for her work on Life Touching Life, as well as a National Endowments for the Arts US-Japan Creative Fellowship which brought the series to Japan in 2023. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Queens Museum, NY; Bronx Museum of Art, NY; Horse Hospital, London; Xanadu, Berlin; Lab’Attoir, Thessaloniki, Greece; Taiyuan University, Taiyuan, China; and I-House, Tokyo, Japan. Gearhart is based in New York, where she is a Creative Science member of the New Museum’s NEW INC program and an adjunct professor at New York University and The New School.
SoMad Artist Residency
During Dakota's residency at SoMad, Tiffany—a shimmering algae-femme and host of the animated series Life Touching Life—teletransported her underwater apartment straight into their white-walled Midtown gallery for Mad World 2025.
Created from recycled set paper, collaged imagery, and remixed open-source video, this fantastical living space offered glitchy glimpses of sea life: gender-swapping fish, self-cloning sponges, and a coral reef throwing a full moon bacchanal.
The apartment’s ambient soundtrack, composed by Matthewdavid, wove together underwater sonics sourced from open-license shrimp recordings. Occasionally, Tiffany herself appeared in full algae regalia to host conversations with special guests in her aquatic salon.
Research materials on queer ecology and magical practices—books, artifacts, and talismans—rested inside an aquarium bookshelf. Live plants, including the Moon Cactus and Bird of Paradise, each with its own peculiar history of mutated cultivation, nestled in sculpted sconces, offering a surreal take on how terrestrial flora might have been stylized in aquatic homes.
Visitors were invited to sink into custom furniture, cruise the bookshelf, and observe a coral city that floated just beyond reason—unnamed, yet unmistakably subaqueous.
Featured Work
Life Touching Life
Life Touching Life Season One, 2023, Digital Video, 40 minutes
Life Touching Life is an animated limited series hosted by Tiffany, an algae creature from the future. She flies through time zones, landscapes, and the internet to interpret contributions from scientists, caretakers, and musicians who are redefining relationships with non-human life, as well as stories of yet-to-exist lifeforms from the digital unknown. A web of consciousness is created where glowing eggs are laid, cracked, and tasted.
