ABOUT

Emily Zarse is an artist and curator based in Bloomington, Indiana. The recipient of the 2025 DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, she holds an MFA and MA from Indiana University and a BA from Cornell University.

Her work spans sculpture, social practice, archival collaboration, and installation, drawing on feminist economics, maintenance theory, and the daily arithmetic of caregiving to get at what sustained living actually costs.

Her sculptural series Load-Bearing uses playground equipment and silk skins to hold and expose the physical logic of support: what bears weight, what gives. In The Pregnant Image, a collaboration with Gloria Manzanares, she draws from archival pregnancy photographs in charcoal, treating the historical body as both document and contested ground.

Emily returns to the same questions: who does the work that keeps things running, who accounts for it, and what would it look like if we did.