Megan Foster

Megan Foster earned her BFA from RISD and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Black and White Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Mixed Greens Gallery, NYC; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing, China; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, among other venues.

Foster’s work gives authority to the everyday by presenting moments in time that suggest open-ended narratives. Her work examines the often-inflated expectations of contemporary life while exploring shifting relationships to nature and technology. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she began a series titled Nite Brite, which reflects on altered daily rituals through the lens of nostalgic toys, designer pets, and virtual platforms such as Zoom, Zwift, and iOS. These works use landscape as a stage to reconsider the meaning of the contemporary environment and the technological sublime.

Appropriated images from art, architecture, and science frequently serve as her point of departure. In Sifter, holographic shark’s teeth—crafted from fishing lure tapes—merge consumer culture with marine science, inspired by MIT’s robotic fish SoFi and encounters with collectors on Florida’s beaches. Her most recent project, Unexcelled Fireworks, explores pyrotechnics’ history and computational future, linking fireworks to today’s drone shows. Across these projects, Foster repositions the overlooked and the ordinary as sites of reflection, aspiration, and spectacle.

Before joining the faculty at RISD, Foster taught at The City College of New York, where she served as head of Printmaking and director of the MFA program. She has also worked as master printer at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies and is the co-founder of Moonlight Editions.