Bryan Zanisnik
Bryan Zanisnik is a contemporary artist who works with video, performance, photography, and installation. He uses many objects together to explore American culture, Freudian ideas, and family relationships.
His site-specific installations include a crumbling library of Philip Roth novels, a sprawling swamp inNorthern New Jersey filled with trash, and a recreated Americana museum in Guangzhou, China.
Critics describe his work as funny and intriguing, mixing dubious history with a fascination for inherited family narratives without leaning into sentimentality.
In spring 2012 he faced a legal dispute with Philip Roth over using The Great American Novel in a performance at the Abrons Arts Center. He staged Every Inch a Man, locking himself in a Plexiglas case while quietly reading Roth’s book as a wind of old baseball cards and money blew around him.
Since 2002, Zanisnik has photographed and written about the Meadowlands, a polluted swamp in northern New Jersey. He focuses on the objects left behind in the landscape and has encountered police, environmental scientists, homeless communities, and homeland security. Critics describe his Beyond Passaic photo essay in Triple Canopy as detailing his illegal wanderings through the toxic landscape and meeting people who live there, inspired by Robert Smithson but emphasizing the space’s legal ambiguities and hazards.
Zanisnik was born in Union, New Jersey, in 1979. He earned a B.A. from Drew University and an M.F.A. from Hunter College. He has held residencies at Skowhegan, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Smack Mellon, the MacDowell Colony, Art Omi, and the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, China.
He is married to Anna Kaschel, a German former H&M fashion designer, whom he met at a New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn in 2014.
His work has been shown in New York at MoMA PS1, SculptureCenter, and the Queens Museum; in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum; in Miami at the De La Cruz Collection; in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Photography; in Los Angeles at LAXART; and internationally at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna and the Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and ARTnews, among others. He appears in Art:21’s documentary series New York Close Up and is a contributing writer at Triple Canopy.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:50 (CET).