Mariah Robertson

Mariah Robertson (b. 1975; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, photography, and performance. Her work explores the systems, rules, and assumptions embedded in photographic practice. Using the darkroom as a site for improvisation and performance, she embraces chance, scale, and material limitations as a way to probe larger questions about authority, value, and societal structures. 

Robertson has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. Beyond her studio practice, Robertson co-founded two artist-run spaces and created The Free Art School, a podcast featuring lessons and dialogues for artists.

In 2026, Robertson completed Portrait, Translation, Interpretation, a permanent installation commissioned for the United States Consulate in Erbil, Iraq.

Robertson received her BA in Religious Studies, focusing on Buddhism, from the University of California, Berkeley (1997), and her MFA from the Sculpture Department at Yale University (2005).