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Fiona Connor is a New Zealander born in 1981, currently living and practicing her art in Los Angeles.
She received a degree in Fine Arts and History from the University of Auckland, and she earned her Masters in Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts. After graduating from the University of Auckland, Fiona concentrated on exhibiting installations in Auckland and Melbourne.
In 2007, she was a founding member of Gambia Castle: a cooperative gallery of like-minded artists. Connor’s work uses strategies of repetition to produce objects that interrogate their own form by engaging different histories embedded within our built environment. For her, fabrication is a form of research.
Her work was recognized in New Zealand when she was shortlisted in 2010 as one of four finalists for the bi-annual Walter's Prize for contemporary art. Her installations are held by the Auckland City Art Gallery, The Dowse Gallery, the Te Papa in Wellington, the Christchurch Art Gallery, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Fiona Connor has held artist residencies at Monash University in Melbourne and at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Fiona was awarded $10,000 from the Chartwell Trust as an Arts Foundation Award for Patronage donation in 2011.
During the past eight years since being resident in Los Angeles Connor has devoted her energies both locally and across a global spread with exhibitions in New York, Barcelona, Basel, Istanbul, Sydney and Auckland. Connor's artistic career has displayed a consistent attraction to working in a collaborative way and fluidly between curating, facilitating and object making. An example being the Newspaper Reading Club founded in 2011, and the conversion of her own Los Angeles apartment over 12 months into a gallery titled Laurel Doody in 2016.
Connor initiated the Varese Group: a loose collective of her associates, mentors, and fellow artists meet annually in an old house in Marzio, Northern Italy since May, 2017.