About

Serena JV Elston is a transdisciplinary sculptor and curator contemplating the body and its relationship to structures of power. Her research-based practice explores ecology, posthumanism, disability, and embodiment through a post-colonial lens. Her work asks if an institution can disable bodies, can bodies disable institutions. 

Grappling with disability as identity and condition, she depicts figures in states of decomposition and incompleteness. In her work, the body is never singular; it extends beyond flesh to encompass the institutional, the architectural, and the ideological. She renders bodies as precarious material forms that are vulnerable, interdependent, and impermanent. 

Serena interrogates the illusion of immortality alongside the certainty of death, asserting that all bodies, whether organic or constructed, require care to endure. Institutions that appear eternal are, in truth, as fragile as flesh. Through sculptural inquiry, she exposes systems of power as contingent structures sustained by our unconscious participation and vulnerability. By materializing their instability, she invites viewers to recognize the impermanence of these systems as clearly as we recognize our own mortality.

Serena’s background in architecture and production has been instrumental in the creation of ambitious curatorial projects such as SPACORE, a platform centered around lived experiences within wellness capitalism, and Siren Island, a floating stage reimagining land mythologies through live theater events on the open water. Her work has been exhibited both in the United States and internationally, including at Ever Gold [Projects] in San Francisco, VideoDrome Paris, S.O.F.A. Italy, The Palace Collective in Berlin, Germany, Watershed Art&Ecology in Chicago, and the MOAH Museum in Lancaster, California.

Serena is the recipiant of the 2026 Wynn Newhouse Award and Pritzker Family Foundation Scholarship and was a finalist for the 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. She received the 2024 Midwest Award for Artists with Disabilities and a 2024 Ignite Fund recipient. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Architecture and Sculpture from MassArt in Boston.

More information on past shows and publications.