A Celestial Game (part of When The River Becomes a Cloud), 2023, collaboration with Tia Kramer and students, families and staff at Prescott School District

Amanda Leigh Evans is a socially engaged ceramic artist whose work manifests as participatory sculptures, performance, print and digital media, and long-term collaborative systems. She has presented projects and publications institutions including MOCA Los Angeles, Everson Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University, Red Lodge Clay Center, and Nationale. Evans and her collaborators have been the recipients of grants and awards including the Precipice Fund, ArtsWa, UC Humanities, the ArtPlace Creative Placemaking Grant, and multiple NEA grants.

Evans’ work oscillates between self-contained work for traditional art spaces and multi-year, site-specific collaborative projects. Since 2021, Evans and her collaborators have been developing When The River Becomes a Cloud, a co-authored contemporary public artwork generated with students at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA. From 2016-21, Evans was an artist-in-residence in an affordable housing apartment complex in East Portland, where she and her neighbors created an intergenerational, multilingual alternative art school. From 2014-21, Evans was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a K-5 public elementary school in Portland, OR. Before that, she was a collaborator with the LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15) on projects engaging the history, politics and ecology of the Los Angeles River.