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Edited: July 17, 2023
Cassandra Thornton
A young woman with fair skin sits in a 1970s Victorian Style chair, photographed in a portrait studio with bright lighting on an all blue background. Her light brown hair is pulled back into a bun and she is wearing heavy foundation and red lipstick. She is wearing a bright blue blazer and she clutches a rock that is almost as large as her, as she looks up.

A young woman with fair skin sits in a 1970s Victorian Style chair, photographed in a portrait studio with bright lighting on an all blue background. Her light brown hair is pulled back into a bun and she is wearing heavy foundation and red lipstick. She is wearing a bright blue blazer and she clutches a rock that is almost as large as her, as she looks up.

Pronouns
She/her
Date and place of birth
b. 1981, Chicago, Illinois
Current location
Berlin, Germany
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2020, Rapid Response Fellow

Cassandra Thornton is an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her 2020 book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press.

Rapid Response Project

For Phase 1 of Rapid Repsonse, Thornton created a new online course to supplement her book project The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future. The course, titled ‘We must begin again: Asking for help as a new world”, was 6 weeks, and included 28 participants. The course was built off of key concepts introduced in her publication, which asks how we can take health care back into our hands in an era when capitalism leaves so many to suffer and die. In The Hologram, Cassie Thornton puts forward a bold vision for revolutionary care: a viral, peer-to-peer feminist health network.

 

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