Máire Witt O'Neill

Máire Witt O’Neill is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. She makes performance, reality television, lecture, and installation to undermine constructs of a broadly defined 'authority'—seeking stability in groundlessness. Especially interested in the uncertainty that abounds when the authority (or 'common ground') of a singular truth is unraveled. Her work claims that cultural and socio-political ideas function more productively when held in contradiction to one another. O'Neill's work tests the veracity of seemingly contradictory ideas, states and perspectives by mashing them together, blurring them and forcing them to coexist within a body, a space, a text, or an object. 

O'Neill is one half of the collaborative duo, Mia+Máire. Their largest project to date is the performance of a television corporation, SoftPantsStudios, which creates Sad Girls Club TV and the new Mad Girls aka MAGGOTS Club TV. Theory and research cycle through O’Neill’s solo work and Mia+Máire, creating a circuit—further testing ideas and perspectives by prioritizing collaboration and resisting the singular authoritarian perspective.

 

O’Neill received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and her MFA in Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).