Courtney Egan
b.1966, New Orleans LA

Courtney Egan is an interdisciplinary media artist and naturalist who weaves the tradition of botanical art with sculpture and digital technologies. Strongly inspired by the profusion of flora in New Orleans, where she was born and has been based since 1991, Courtney’s artworks ask broad questions about how human life and the plant world co-evolve. She feels that how humans interact with the environment is central to being human, and she seeks for her art to create stronger relationships between people, plants, and ecosystems.

Courtney first presented nature-themed projected artworks in 2010 with her solo show, “Field Recordings,” at Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans. She continues to show in gallery settings, with her projection-based work for interiors represented by Arthur Roger Gallery. She participates in light festivals such as Napa Lighted and New Orleans’ Luna Fete, and has shown short films in film festivals nationally. She is in her third decade of teaching art and media, spanning elementary, secondary, and college classrooms, and she likes to invite students and communities into art projects.

Recent shows include “Eco Tone” at the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the solo shows “Encounters: Courtney Egan” at the Huntsville Museum of Art, “Extinct in the Wild” at Arthur Roger Gallery, “Virtual Idylls” at the Ogden Museum of Art, and “Superflora” at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Gallery in Austin, TX.  She recently completed the monumental projection “Eco Logic” on the historic Gretna City Hall as a part of Luna Fete 2023. For “Eco Logic, a local elementary school’s art classes participated in creating artwork inspired by regional ecologies, that Courtney then animated and projection-mapped to the architecture.

Courtney was an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute and at Louisiana Artworks in New Orleans.  She is a founding member of the New Orleans-based visual arts collective Antenna. Her work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine among others. Courtney holds an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute College of Art. 

Her work has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Country Roads Magazine, OxfordAmerican.com, PelicanBomb.com, Artforum.com, and is in the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation collection, University Medical Center in New Orleans, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and in private collections.