Camille Casemier
camillecasemier@gmail.comCamille Casemier (b. 1995, Vermont) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and content creator for a resale shop. Her work contends with persistence: the ways stories endure through objects and gestures. Across image, performance, and archival research, she studies how legacy is rehearsed, resisted, and occasionally unsettled.

Her day job at Mt. Sinai Resale Shop serves as an ongoing research site, where she investigates the cultural rituals of accumulation through video, interviews, and the everyday dramaturgy of secondhand things. In 2024, her solo exhibition ‘Almost Heaven’ was presented at Trinity College. In 2025, she exhibited ‘Hugh’s Pole’—a 43-foot printed image installation on a downed telephone pole—for the Chicago Cluster Project, tracing the afterlife of a settler monument found in Rod Slemmons’ photographic archive. She presented ‘The Right to Look the Right to Have’ for her 2024 graduate exhibition, documenting museum goer interactions with veiled displays in the Field Museum following the 2024 NAGPRA update, gestures of entitlement reminiscent of the insistent narratives of her settler ancestors.

Casemier holds a joint BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now teaches in the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments. Both her study of dance at The New School and formative time with Bread and Puppet Theater instilled an embodied attentiveness to the liveness of objects.

Her work has been shown locally and internationally, including Festival Arte/Acción (Mexico City), the Performative Drawing Forum (Yogyakarta), Re-Happening at Black Mountain College, PAS #73 (Germany/Poland), and the Volkenburg Symposium at the Chicago International Puppet Festival. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China, studying the material and cultural legacy of a local dish, fish jelly.


In my studio I work from a table that is 120 years older than me, where a woman wrote letters to her grand daughter of her pride and her troubles, imploring her to join the DAR. As she aged she stopped hearing the typewriter bell ding at the end of the line and her sentences fell off the page unfinished. My grandmother past these letters from her grandmother down to me and when I sit at this table I do not aim to finish any sentences but perhaps to pick up these dangling lines and to cherish instances of legacies come unfixed.

 My research emerges through collaborations, friendships and affinities: Artists, theorists, and performers such as Germaine Dulac, George Lucaks, Fred Moten, Kobo Abe, Peter and Elka Schuman, Elvia Wilk, Ariella Azoulay, Laurie Anderson, Eiko Otake, Hito Shteyerl, Miranda July, Faye Driscoll, Allan Sekula, Teju Cole, Dani and Sheila Restack, Agnes Varda, to name but a few. I am often in collaboration with Selena Kearney, Jonas Muller-Ahlheim, Yezhou Zheng, Steph Patsula, Chris Reeves, Maite Iribarren Vasquez, and Fee Christoph. I am grateful for the support of many people such as Donato Loia, Jan Tichy, Nate Byrne, Holly Hughes, Lin Hixson, Mary Jane Jacobs, Mark Jeffrey, Charli Brissey, and Cynthia Pachikara.