MFA, Sculpture, RISD
BA, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM

Jillian Conrad’s artistic practice addresses themes of materiality and intangibility. Her sculptures and works on paper look to landscape and the details of the physical world as thresholds that connect the human and the universal, the visible and the invisible. Her work has been exhibited at and supported by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Bronx Museum, Smackmellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Core Program (at the MFAH, Houston) and Artadia. Recent solo exhibitions include The Earth as Air, Un Lieu Une Oeuvre, Ménerbes, France (2023), Hydras, BioScience Research Center, Rice University, Houston, TX (2022), and Airspace, Devin Borden Gallery, Houston, TX (2019). Conrad’s work has been reviewed and discussed in numerous publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, Art Lies, and the New York Times. She is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of the Sculpture Department at the University of Houston.

As an artist and educator, Conrad uses the shared energies of these practices to focus on the shadowy places that art comes from. Current projects include: creating new courses on Art & Magic and Embodiment at UH; completing a book surveying the nooks and crannies of her work with an essay by John Yau; and writing a book on caves and cave art from west Texas to southern France called Seeing in the Dark.