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Edited: February 21, 2024
Sammie Veeler
A white tattooed trans woman sits at a kitchen table backlit by a green passionflower vine in the window. She has blond center-parted short hair, with long twin braids draped over the front of her open charcoal button up shirt. She looks into the camera while eating a tangerine.

Portrait of Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow 2024, Sammie Veeler. Courtesy of the artist.

Pronouns
She/her
Date and place of birth
b. 1993
Current location
Los Angeles, CA
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2024, Democracy Machine Fellow

Sammie Veeler is a Los Angeles-based artist and organizer examining the political nature of technological infrastructure and the embodied connections between people which are foundations of collective action. Through installation, poetry, performance, and world-building, Veeler exposes technologically mediated processes of individual and collective becoming.  

Veeler uses archives as a container to explore themes of cultural memory, technological grief, and virtual embodiment. Since 2022, her personal practice has centered around an ongoing hybrid performance called Dead Name, which has received funding from Octobre Numerique Faire Monde, Gray Area, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Mirror Archive. She questions the stability of memory’s relationship with experience through lectures wrapped in eulogies for her pre-transition self, who she calls her ‘dead husband.’ Each address activates a spatial archive of audio from all previous performances, forming a rising chorus of dead Sammies who both interrupt her and automate her labor.

Veeler is also the co-founder of New Art City virtual art space, an online art gallery which has shown over 6,000 artists and reached 500,000 visitors since 2020. She was responsible for supporting artists, educators, and institutions while developing the gallery program in accordance with values of access and inclusion. In 2023, Veeler founded the Virtual Access Lab as a non-profit research unit of New Art City, in collaboration with Gray Area. Virtual Access Lab supports accessible digital culture through open source software, artist commissions, and digital preservation. 

Veeler is a current incubator member at New Inc. in the Y10 Extended Realities track. 

Her work at New Art City has been supported by the Knight Foundation, Derby QUAD, the San Jose Museum of Art, and more than 30 universities around the world. 

Eyebeam models a new approach to artist-led creation for the public good; we are a non-profit that provides significant professional support and money to exceptional artists for the realization of important ideas that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Nobody else is doing this.

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