joy tirade
joy tirade lives and works in Oakland, California. She holds a MFA in Fine Art with a concentration in photography and video from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned a BA with Distinction in Fine Art, focusing on drawing and painting, and a BA with Distinction in Art History from the University of Virginia, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco) and the Ackland Art Museum (Raleigh). She has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Kamloops Art Gallery (British Columbia), Universitet i Oslo (Norway), Vilnius Academy of Arts and Ideas Block LT (Lithuania), and CICA Museum (South Korea). In the U.S., she has exhibited widely, including at The Mint Museum, Ackland Art Museum, CAM, The Carrack, and LUMP in North Carolina; The Garage, The Bridge PAI, WTVF/Radio IQ Gallery, New City Arts, Art Works Gallery, The IX Building, and Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia; as well as The Masur Museum (Monroe, LA), The Fluorescent Gallery (Nashville), The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center (Covington, KY), Red Ink Studios (San Francisco), SFMOMA (San Francisco), and LACDA (Los Angeles). Her work has appeared in publications such as The Third Coast, The Virginia Literary Review, 3.7, Summmer, and Mildred Pierce zine. Most recently, it was featured on a Routledge Press book cover.
Statement
I’m deeply interested in memory, perception, and time—ideas that have shaped my work for as long as I can remember. I often return to the sense of solitude and wonder I felt growing up surrounded by a vast, wooded landscape. That environment left a lasting imprint on me, especially during a time of major transition. Those early experiences of displacement, absence, and longing continue to inform my practice today through immersive video and hybrid process-based painting, often incorporating photography. I explore how memory is carried in bodies, images, and landscapes, and how desire shapes our relationship to what is present, missing, or just beyond reach. I’m drawn to the spaces where materiality meets absence, where traces linger after something has gone, and where the personal overlaps with the collective. Influenced by art history, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies, I use my work to imagine alternate futures while remaining attentive to what has been lost, remembered, or transformed. Ultimately, I seek to create spaces for reflection and connection that hold open the tension between presence and absence, memory and forgetting.
