Bio

Macaulay Woods is a contemporary American painter trained as a filmmaker. Her work is built for movement — for how images shift and narratives unfold across time. Working with brayers and brushes, her canvases hold multiple timelines, gestures suspended mid-action, and stories unfolding simultaneously.

Blocks of paint become characters, lines and dots come alive; forms flicker in and out of focus, collide, dissolve, and reassemble.

Her recent body of work, Lazarus Ball (2024–2026), grapples with techno-fascist surveillance, authoritarianism, and digital systems designed to silence dissent. Drawing on the Egyptian Book of the Dead to examine contemporary themes of corruption and moral reckoning, the series unfolds across four interconnected volumes: Book of the Heart,Book of the Dead,Book of the Sky, and Book of the Night.

In the Spells of the Netherworld subseries, biomorphic forms — the animated “sprites” that populate her canvases — move through dense, shifting color fields navigating isolation, war, surveillance, and grief in ecosystems under pressure.

Woods holds a BFA in Multimedia Studies from Massachusetts College of Art (1994) and has exhibited at University Place Gallery, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Gallery at the Piano Factory, the Lexington Armory, SOWA Open Studios, and Brickbottom Gallery, among other venues. She is based in Massachusetts.

Instagram @macaulaywoodsstudi0

Photo by Andrea D. Guerra, 1996, San Francisco, CA