Peg Shaw
Peg Shaw is an interdisciplinary artist incorporating video, sound, photography, and mixed media within layered site-specific installations. Profoundly personal and politically aware, her work addresses how we can connect across time and space, be so moved by an experience that isn’t ours, and truly care for people we will never know – floating on a membrane of what we have been given, hovering just below what we have to give. Her work translates, re-imagines, weaves, and layers concepts from family history, the memory of place, storytelling, and the filtered experience of living in a chaotic political time. Born in Oak Park, IL, Shaw received an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the Brown Fellowship Award, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work has been shown nationally, including solo exhibitions in Chicago and New York, and has won numerous awards in photography and video, most recently the Illinois Arts Council Agency 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Media, and the 40 North Champaign Arts Council 2018 Artist Ace Award. She has presented at conferences on issues important to the community college: photographic education, technology & creativity, and women’s studies programming. She has curated multiple photography exhibitions of alternative photographic work addressing both historical and new technology.Shaw is a Professor in Photography/Video at Parkland College in Champaign, IL where she received the Illinois Community College Trustees Outstanding Full-Time Faculty Award, and serves on the Giertz Gallery Advisory Board. She lives in the woods in a timberframe home her family built by hand. Her great great grandparents were friends with Abraham Lincoln. She is the middle child of five. She still loves her friends from junior high. She is a shy drummer that only makes noise in her basement. She has a lake in Michigan that runs in her veins. She spends an amazing amount of time looking up at the night sky.
