Faculty
Amanda Leigh Evans
Amanda Leigh Evans is an artist, educator and cultivator investigating the social-ecological interdependence of land use systems, site-specific communities, and deep time. Her work manifests as ceramic objects, gardens, books, websites, videos, sculptures, and long-term collaborative systems. Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and Post-Bacc in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She was raised in the California Inland Empire and rural Nevada County, and lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.
Evans’ work is rooted in design thinking, research-based inquiry, and long term collaboration, often resulting in artwork that exists outside of traditional gallery spaces. For five years (2016-21), Evans was an artist-in-residence in an affordable housing complex in East Portland, where she collaborated with her neighbors to create The Living School of Art, an intergenerational alternative art school that centered the creative practices of their multilingual community. For eight years (2014-22), she was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum and social practice artwork developed with students in a public elementary school in NE Portland. Before that, she was a collaborator on the LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15), on projects making visible the history, politics and ecology of the LA River.
Currently, Evans is a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching ceramics and social practice at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA. She and her collaborator Tia Kramer are the DeepTime Collective. They are developing When The River Becomes a Cloud (2022-25), a co-authored public artwork generated through a long term artist residency at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA.