Allison Schulnik was born in San Diego, CA in 1978 and lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. She received her B.F.A. in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2000. Schulnik’s films have been included in internationally renowned festivals and museums including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Annecy, France; and Animafest Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. Solo exhibitions of Schulnik’s work have been presented at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Zieher Smith, New York, NY; Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Frances, Madrid, Spain; and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. Schulnik’s work can be found in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Santa Barbara Art Museum, Santa Barbara, CA; Museé de Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, UT.
Schulnik’s practice spans the mediums of painting, sculpture, animation, and dance to create a body of work that is both cohesive and deeply expressive. Her work is characterized by a unique sensibility that fuses theatricality with emotion, bringing to life a world that feels at once familiar and surreal. Known for her films which navigate the intangible landscapes of nostalgia, childhood memories, and dreams, Schulnik’s newest paintings and ceramics craft narratives that are both deeply personal and universally resonant. Her pieces capture fleeting moments of beauty, melancholy, and transformation. Through her distinctive visual language, she constructs a contemporary and multifaceted portrait of existence—one that unfolds through the quiet, dreamlike environs of the desert, where time seems suspended with an eerie, poetic stillness.