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Susan Silas is a dual American and Hungarian national who has built a diverse career as an artist during the past two decades. After completing her graduate studies in 1983, she moved from Los Angeles back to New York. Soon afterwards, she began exhibiting her work in many group exhibitions including: White Columns, New York; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Cal Arts: Skeptical Belief(s) The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Girls Night Out; Femininity as Masquerade, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Bridges and Boundaries The Jewish Museum, New York.

In 1990, Silas had her first solo exhibition, at fiction/nonfiction in New York. This exhibition was followed in 1991 by her first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Antoine Candau. In 1992, she was invited to teach at New York University, and in 1993 was a visiting artist at Cooper Union. Silas continued to teach at NYU while actively exhibiting work throughout the United States and Europe. A number of Silas' essays were featured in ArtNet magazine.

During the past decade, Silas has produced and exhibited several major photographic and video works, including one sound piece exploring issues related to the reception of the Holocaust by the second generation. In 2002, after Silas retraced the steps of a 1945 death march on foot in Germany and what is now the Czech Republic she was interviewed by the BBC radio for a program examining the history of walking.

In 2005, her work Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, created from materials shot on this 225 mile walk, was shown in a solo exhibition at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto. Her 2001 video installation, untitled (11-14 May 1998) was shown in the same exhibition. While preparing these works, Silas was awarded grants from: the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1998, 2000); the Lee and Lawrence J. Ramer Foundation (1998); The Puffin Foundation (1998); and the André and Elizabeth Kertesz Foundation (1997). This work was shown at Hebrew Union College Museum in 2009, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany in 2010, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria in 2010 and Zavod Celeia Celje in Celje, Slovenia in 2011.

Academic interest tracing Silas' practice and work has increased in recent years. A chapter of Dora Apel's, Memory Affects; The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing is devoted to Silas' recent work. Silas' recent works are cited in Unwanted Beauty; Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation, by the scholar Brett Kaplan. Her photographs of Buchenwald and Treblinka are reproduced in Ulrich Baer's Remnants of Song; Trauma and the experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Her work Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, is the subject of a chapter in Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory by Brett Ashley Kaplan, published by Routledge in 2011.

Silas' photographs taken on September 11, 2001 appeared in the two ad hoc exhibitions, Here is New York and The September 11 Photo Project, both emerging from the aftermath of 9/11.

Silas received her BA in History at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and her MFA in Fine Art at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

self-portraits sessions, 2010
session one