Camille Casemier (b. 1995, Vermont) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, and content creator for a resale shop who conspires with and against legacies. Her works occur across pages, stages, and screens, often given form by cameras and audiences, pursued as an ongoing experiment with the film essay.
Her artistic roots began in puppetry and experimental theater with Bread and Puppet Theater, where she developed a sensitivity to the liveness and agency of objects and the political capacities of gesture. This embodied awareness deepened through studies in dance at The New School in New York City, further grounding her practice in movement and performative presence, often exploring the social choreographies embedded in everyday spaces and objects.
Since 2020, Camille has worked at Mt. Sinai Resale Shop in Chicago, where her role as content creator doubles as artistic research into the cultural dramaturgies of discarded objects, producing short form videos for social media and longer interviews for the organization’s historical archive with donors, volunteers, employees, and the larger social ecosystem involved with the objects that move through the shop.
She holds a 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 currently teaches in both the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments.
She is a 2025 artist in residence at the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China, 1/4 of ‘Four Ways of Looking’ an expanded cinema and expiremental theater ensemble. She will work with the Department of North American Anthropology within the Field Museum as part of her ongoing collaboration with Selena Kearney in 2025/2026.
I create interdisciplinary performances, texts, and images that conspire with and against the materials and ideologies we inherit. Drawing on methods from performance studies and essayistic cinema, I choreograph associative encounters between the archival and the embodied, the discarded and the intimate. While my day job involves producing explanatory media about secondhand goods, my artistic practice resists resolution—favoring opacity, failure, and the minor as generative modes. I’m interested in how storytelling can exceed narration: how presence, liveness, and instinctual enactment might function as forms of knowing and unknowing.
In my apartment 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 Aïsha Azoulay, Laurie Anderson, Nancy Shaver, Eiko Otake, Hito Shteyerl, Miranda July, Faye Driscoll, Teju Cole, Dani and Sheila Restack, Agnes Varda, to name but a few.
Friendships and 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.