Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who uses creative practices to transform outer and inner worlds of being. His public projects often involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy along with contemplative practices, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing.
Teaching and public speaking are extensions of Cook’s social practice that involve communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Columbia and Harvard Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Brett Cook and Wendy Ewald through Amherst College Press.
Cook has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects, he was selected as a cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 smARTpower Initiative and an inaugural A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art in 2014. Cook’s work has been featured in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and Harvard University.