Susan Rankaitis

American, born 1949

BiographySusan Rankaitis (born 1949) is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.

Rankaitis draws on science in her work—particularly ideas generated through research in the fields of biology and neuroscience and she collaborates regularly with scientists on interdisciplinary projects.

Rankaitis is currently an Art Professor at Scripps College in Clairemont, CA.

Person TypeIndividual