Jillian Crochet
2026 Eureka Fellow
Jillian Crochet is a disabled interdisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area working in interactive sculpture, video, and performance to engage embodied perception and challenge inaccessibility. Her experiments with haptics, touch, sounds, and movement reflect and unsettle our understanding of nature and self. This work confronts preconceived expectations for how we interact with the world, revealing the inherent ableism of our built environment and social structures.
She was a 2020-21 Artist in Residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability program and a Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2021, she was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She has exhibited work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now Triennial and SOMArts in San Francisco, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Alabama Contemporary Art Center. She has had work published in RACAR in Canada, The Journal of Arts and Communities in the UK, and Feral Fabric. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2020.
Crochet is working on a series of performance works addressing the inaccessibility of what we think of as ‘nature’ - which is built and maintained for certain bodies - grappling with who and what is disposable/valuable, while also making space for pleasure and humor. She is expanding her tactile vocabulary in continued experiments with amorphous ergonomically useful sculptures, unusual access tools, and touch machines/objects using irresistible to touch, delightful, and unexpected textures.
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