Anna Couey

Background

About Anna Couey

Anna Couey works at the intersection of art, communications, information and social justice, using participatory media tools, story-collecting methods, community-building and organizational development processes to re-imagine and restructure power. During the 1980s-1990s, she helped develop art telecommunications projects such as the Art Com Electronic Network and Arts Wire, as well as producing temporary cross-cultural communications events as social sculpture. In the mid 1990s she made an intentional shift to explore social sculpture strategies outside an art context to address ethical and aesthetic questions related to making art with communities. Anna contributed to the development of a “research justice” framework at the DataCenter, a social justice research organization, that legitimizes diverse voices and forms of knowledge. She also helped create the organization's shared leadership structure. Her work at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children involved resource development practices as a strategy for building power and strengthening the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families, to dismantle a social system of excessive punishment, social exclusion and dehumanization. Anna's communication sculptures have been presented on the Internet, at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, International Symposium on Electronic Art, and SIGGRAPH.