biography

“My practice invokes joy and belonging in the face of grief and injustice, and dares us to imagine shared futures that redefine inherited narratives.” — Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya (b. 1988, Atlanta, GA) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and community builder based in Brooklyn, New York. The daughter of Thai and Indonesian immigrants, her practice spans sculpture, large-scale murals, installation, and public art.

Through defiant storytelling, her work brings forth colors, patterns, textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices. Amanda has investigated how to create liminal spaces that can serve as conduits for healing and transformation.

She is a 2024 New York City Artadia Awardee, a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Visual Arts and Civic Practice Artist in Residence with Poster House and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with GATHER: a series of monuments and rituals that examined how ceremony, sound, and textiles can inscribe new meaning to memory and foster unexpected belonging.

As artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights, Amanda’s art series celebrating the resilience of the AAPI community, I Still Believe in Our City, reached millions in New York City and worldwide through reclaiming billboards, bus shelters, subway tunnels, buildings, and the cover of TIME Magazine.

Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Times Square, Lincoln Center, and recognized by The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and the Guardian. She has received support from the Sloan Foundation, the Café Cultural Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her work is held in permanent collections at the Museum of the City of New York, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In 2023, she was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities where she advises the President on how art can foster community well-being.

Artist Statement

My practice channels loss and disconnection into portals of renewal and repair. I create living monuments that serve as liminal spaces for audiences to reclaim, rebuild, and restore through participation and communion. Weaving together gifted stories, artifacts, and wisdom, I shape expansive spaces of softness and wonder where new seeds can be planted.

Employing materials that are like second skin, familiar as conduits for connection and meaning, my work whispers a narrative of how far-flung imperialism is spun from the same thread that weaves trauma and disconnection into descendants generations later. My sculptures draw from disparate and juxtaposed parts, melding cultural identities and colonial legacies with bodily and psychic impacts. They harness the power of mundane objects to tell larger, evocative stories that mirror lived human experiences.

Through participatory works that transform everyday actions into powerful statements of reclamation, I not only represent but actively engage with contemporary societal issues. My work contends with the fragments of inheritance we all must piece together to find wholeness in a sea of grief and erasure. In doing so, I evoke the deepest sentiments of humanity, drawing audiences into a collective journey of restitution.

Awards & Residencies

  • New York City Artadia Awardee (2024)

  • Materials for the Arts Residency (2024)

  • The Luminary Artist Residency (2024)

  • Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship (2023-25)

  • Poster House Civic Practice Artist Residency (2023)

  • SF Asian Art Museum Civic Practice Artist Residency (2023)

  • TIME Cover (March 2021)

  • Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights (2020-2021)

Pronounciation

Amanda’s last name is Thai and pronounced (PUNG-bodee-bak-ee-ah)