Buzz Slutzky

Buzz Slutzky (they/them) is a non-binary/transgender and Jewish multidisciplinary artist, educator, writer, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work vacillates between autobiographical, auto-fictional, and research-based historical modes and uses intimacy and humor to bring juiciness to narrative. Buzz’s practice often juxtaposes text and image through video, drawing, performance, pyrography (woodburning), and other mediums. Their new film Discount Sestina brings together all of these media by reenacting an experience they had at a shoe store, which is all made out of papier-mâché.

Buzz has exhibited, performed, and screened work at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Cooper Union, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), The Leslie-Lohman Museum, Boston Center for the Arts, La Mama, MIX, and Frameline, among others. Mentions of their work have appeared in Artforum, Vice, ArtNews, Observer, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. Buzz has also co-organized art exhibitions relating to queerness, humor, politics, and history, including the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History (2011), Hysterically Accurate: Comedic Critiques of History (2015), and Queering Space at Yale (2016). They earned their BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2010 and their MFA from Parsons the New School in 2015, after which they were a resident at the Vermont Studio Center (2015) and the NARS Foundation (2017) and participated in the Triple Canopy Publication Intensive (2018).

Buzz was a 2021–22 BricLAB video art resident and a 2022 MacDowell fellow. They currently teach drawing in the Painting department at RISD.