Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Gardner Fellowship with the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Tiffany Foundation Award, and a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Her artist monograph “Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive” was released in spring 2024 by Radius Books, and features images and research produced during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
As an artist scholar she has participated in numerous convenings including “Objects of Dispute: Material Culture” at Yale University (2017), “Rethinking the Peacock Room” at the Smithsonian Asian Art Museum (2022), “The Anarchival Impulse” at the National Gallery, Washington DC (2022), and The Lunder Institute of American Art’s “Bay Area Think Tank: Artist Legacies and Archives” (2026).
At Berkeley she has taught courses in sculpture, social practice, photography, Junior Seminar, Senior Projects/Professional Practices, Special Topics, and Graduate Studio/Seminars. She is Co-Director of the Undergraduate Program, and oversees The Project Lab, an interdisciplinary studio facility, and The Garron Reading Room.
Office Hours: Tuesday, 12-1pm, 348 Anthropology & Art Practice Building (AAPB)
Campus Affiliations:
Center for Southeast Asia Studies
The Center for Race and Gender (CRG)
The Hearst Museum
University Awards and Fellowships:
Osborne Fellowship Award, Division of Arts and Humanities (2023)
Collaborative Research award, Mellon Foundation, New Strategies for the Humanities, Division of Arts and Humanities, 2020
Humanities Research Fellowship, 2019
Arts Research Center Fellowship, 2017
The Green Initiative Fund (TGIF), 2016
Presidential Chair Fellows Curriculum Enrichment Grant, 2015
COR Faculty Travel Grant, 2014
Courses Taught:
ART 14 – Sculpture Foundations
ART 21 – Digital Photography: Foundations
ART 100 – Big Ideas: Collaborative Innovation
ART 130 – Advanced Sculpture: Concept and Construction
ART 133 – Advanced Sculpture: Meaning in Material
ART 136 – Advanced Sculpture: Radical Wearables
ART 141 – Temporal Structures: Video and Performance Art
ART 160 – Special Topics: Advanced Interdisciplinary Projects
ART 160 – Special Topics: Art + Archive
ART 163 – Social Practice: Critical Site and Context
ART 184 – Junior Seminar: Meaning and Making
ART 185 – Senior Projects/Professional Practices
ANTHRO196/HUM295 – Collaborative Research Seminar: Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest
ARCH 209/ART 209 – Borderwall Urbanism (Global Urban Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Studio)
ART 218 – Graduate Seminar: Theory and Criticism
ART 294 – Graduate Studio Critique
Selected Honors and Awards:
Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 2026
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, 2021
Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Award, 2019
Guggenheim Fellowship Award, 2014
Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, 2009
Eureka Fund Fellowship Award, Fleishhacker Foundation, 2001
Artadia Fellowship Award, 1999
Selected Public Collections:
The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Guggenheim Museum, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Jose Museum of Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Walker Art Center
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Represented by:
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
Silverlens Galleries, Manila/New York
Recent Highlights:
- “Stephanie Syjuco Named 2026 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography,” The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, May 2026.
- Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call), BAMPFA, 2025
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Nineteenth Century Photography Now, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2024
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Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2023
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Stephanie Syjuco: After / Images, Frye Art Museum, 2024
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Don't Forget to Call Your Mother, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023
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MATRIX 190: Stephanie Syjuco: Image Trafficking, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 2022
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Stephanie Syjuco: White Balance/Color Cast, solo exhibition, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Sept. 18, 2022 - March 5, 2023
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Undoing Time: Art and the Histories of Incarceration, BAMPFA, Sept. 3–Dec. 18, 2022
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Joan Mitchell Center Artist in Residence, New Orleans, July 2022
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This Is Not America’s Flag, The Broad, Los Angeles, May 21 - Sep 25, 2022
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“de Young Museum Acquires 42 New Works by Bay Area Artists,”KQED Arts, July 11, 2022.
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Artist Talk: "Archive=FAIL" at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Oct. 15, 2020.
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The Visible Invisible, solo show at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Oct. 17, 2020—Jan. 9, 2021.
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"Openings: Stephanie Syjuco,"Artforum feature, Nov. 2019
Selected Publications / Writing:
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“Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive,” Radius Books, 2024, 320 pages.
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“Stephanie Syjuco: After / Images,” exhibition catalog, Frye Art Museum, softcover, 128 pages, 2024.
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"Hands, Floating; Faces, Recognized: Escaping the Anthropological Gaze," Harvard Peabody Museum, May 2024.
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"What We Can Learn From Ruth Asawa," Frieze, Oct. 2020.