Sheri Wills
In memoriam
Professor Sheri Wills, a beloved member of the RISD community, passed away on October 10, 2025. Professor Wills arrived at RISD in 2014, serving as Dean of Fine Arts before leading the Film / Animation / Video department several times as its department head. Under her stewardship, the department strengthened its position as a leading collective in time-based media, affirming the centrality of both exploratory and justice-based work in its curriculum and its ethos. From the Movement Lab Fellowships to the experimentation inherent in bold interdisciplinary classes such as Transparent Matter, Professor Wills inspired students to learn fearlessly and colleagues to share their expertise generously.
Beyond her many accomplishments at RISD, Professor Wills was a nationally and globally acclaimed artist whose work centers on ways of understanding time and memory by exploring gaps between what is seemingly measurable in the physical world and what is perceived through lived experience. Her work calls attention to the potential of those gaps as sites of meaning. In practice she realized this through incorporation of common material characteristics of time-based media such as frames, sprocket holes, light leaks, and audio feedback. Most recently, Professor Wills was the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, and was awarded a residency from MASS MoCA in 2022. This year, she was awarded the 2025 Fluxus Museum Prize for Experimental Video Commission, a statement about her ongoing and deeply respected practice.
Professor Wills was a truly influential and admired artist and, most importantly, profoundly loved by her family and her friends.
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Sheri Wills is an artist who works with film, video and sound to make single-channel videos, installations, sound works and live video performances. She explores the material, psychological and philosophical potentials of cinema to reveal small moments that often go unseen and pull forward the emotional content of abstract imagery.
Wills has shown work in one-person exhibitions at venues including the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her films have been screened internationally, such as at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Cinémas Différents in Paris, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, the London Film Festival, CROSSROADS in San Francisco, Fisura in Mexico City and the Abattoirs Museum in Toulouse, France. Her films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.
Her collaborations include live video projects with music composed by Jan Jirásek, Charles Norman Mason, Bright Sheng and Ofer Ben-Amots, and video performances with music ensembles, including the NYC choral group Khorikos, the Providence String Quartet, Luna Nova New Music Ensemble, and Ensemble QAT in Montreal, at venues including Roulette in Brooklyn, the Firehouse Space in Brooklyn and the Czech Center in NYC. She has also participated at residencies including the Narva Art Residency in Estonia, At Home Gallery in Slovakia and the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Wills is an American Council on Education Fellow. She came to RISD in 2014 in the position of dean of fine arts and was honored with the Frazier Award for Teaching Excellence at RISD in 2019. She is a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
(photo credit Carolina Porras Monroy)