Ava Aviva Avnisan (she/they) is a multidisciplinary, research-based artist whose work integrates installation, performance, film, writing, sound, and emerging technologies to create embodied, time-based encounters. Working with tools such as 3D scanning, augmented and virtual reality, and generative AI, Ava’s practice explores how language, technology, and lived experience shape meaning and memory.

Recent highlights include the international festival circulation of Specters of Home—Prologue, a short film selected for the 10th Beyond Borders | Kastellorizo International Documentary Festival in Greece and screened at the 8th Independent Film Festival of Mexico City as part of the CINE X MUJERES program. In 2025, Ava also presented new work created in collaboration with Judd Morrissey at SAIC Galleries in Chicago, debuting a large-scale, site-specific installation that expanded her practice into recorded music alongside photography, poetry, and 3D imaging.

Additional selected exhibitions, performances, and screenings include Invisible Traditions at The FRONT Arte & Cultura in San Diego, CA, as part of San Diego–Tijuana World Design Capital 2024; Inside Practice at the Art Institute of Chicago (2020); Refiguring the Future at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York, NY (2019); Between Bodies at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (2018–19); and the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017).

Ava has been interviewed by BOMB Magazine, and her work has been published in Engaging the Margins: Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art (BRILL, 2024); Performance in a Pandemic (Routledge, 2022); INDEX Vol. 6: An Annual Document of Performance Practice (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017); and The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3 (2016), among others.

She was a Creative Capital Award finalist in 2016 and 2024, and an Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship finalist in 2024. Ava is the recipient of a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship through the Simpson Center for the Humanities and a Digital Studies Fellowship through Rutgers University–Camden. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ava is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at San Diego State University, with a co-appointment in the School of Journalism and Media Studies.