Overview
New York Times Bestselling Author
In partnership with Butler’s Philosophy Program
Jenny Odell is a multidisciplinary artist and author based in Oakland, California. Her first book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), was a New York Times bestseller. It was named One of the Best Books of the Year by a multitude of publications such as Time, The New Yorker, NPR, GQ, Elle, and others, including one of Barack Obama’s Best Books of 2019. She followed the huge critical success of that work with a second New York Times bestseller, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023). She is currently working on a book about repair.
Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Sierra magazine, and other publications. Her visual work has been exhibited at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, the New York Public Library, the Marjorie Barrick Museum (Las Vegas), Les Rencontres D’Arles, Fotomuseum Antwerpen, Fotomuseum Winterthur, La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), the Lishui Photography Festival (China), and apexart (NY).
Her work generally involves acts of close observation, whether it’s birdwatching, collecting screenshots, researching trash, or trying to parse bizarre forms of e-commerce. In general, she is searching for frameworks that allow us to perceive something new about everyday reality.
She’s been an artist in residence at Recology SF (the dump), the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and the Montalvo Arts Center. From 2013 to 2021, she taught digital art at Stanford University.
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