Dan Ortiz Leizman holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College. Their interdisciplinary research has been recognized through awards such as the 2023 Clarvit Endowed Faculty and Graduate Student Research Fund and the 2023 ArtsAMP Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Research Grant. Recent shows include a solo show at IA&A at Hillyer, group exhibitions at the Cafritz Foundation, Studio Gallery, Maryland Art Place, and UMD Art Gallery, as well as screenings at the Chroma Arts Film Festival at Superblue Miami and the 2023 American College Dance Association conference in Los Angeles. Dan is currently a lecturer at the University of Maryland and Montgomery College.

My artistic practice is grounded in a sustained inquiry into queerness, political philosophy, and speculative futures. I utilize a broad range of media—including AI-generated imagery, archival materials, fluorescent plastics, sound, and text—to probe the limits of perception, desire, reproduction, and political phenomenology through immersive installation. My work investigates how histories of queerness and illegibility inform contemporary struggles over visibility and futurity, while also imagining new modes of being and belonging in the face of capitalist and cisheteronormative constraints.

The concept of indeterminacy—both as a formal strategy and a theoretical stance—is central to my practice. Through projects like UNDERBELLY, a tactile sound installation where vibration renders sound physical, and MY TRANS.PARENT WOMB,a glitchy holographic illusion of cyborg fetuses generated by AI, I create spaces that refuse stable interpretation or clear boundaries between digital and physical, organic and synthetic. These pieces, much like queerness itself, embrace fluidity, flux, and the potentiality of the undefined. My work challenges dominant cultural scripts by operating within these in-between spaces, asking viewers to reckon with uncertainty and embrace non-normative ways of being.

This theoretical orientation is deeply informed by my engagement with speculative fiction, queer theory, and the legacies of feminist materialism. Drawing on thinkers like José Esteban Muñoz, Fred Moten, Karen Barad, Sylvia Federici, and Donna Haraway, my work reimagines reproduction not as a biological imperative but as a site of play, pleasure, and possibility. I am particularly interested in how artificial intelligence and quantum theory offer new frameworks for thinking about connectivity, entanglement, and the ways in which bodies—human and otherwise—are produced, perceived, and activated.

My recent work explores quantum entanglement as both a scientific phenomenon and a metaphor for queer kinship and relationality. I see the quantum realm’s resistance to clear-cut boundaries and determinism as a powerful analog for the radical potential of queerness to resist static, linear narratives. For example, SONOGRAM.AI, a piece where AI-generated sonograms depict re-imagined nuclear tests, plays with this tension between destruction and creation to complicate ideas of propaganda, violence, and regeneration. It also connects the speculative potential of AI to larger questions of war, reproduction, and the politics of visibility in a post-human world.

My research focuses on how new technologies, particularly AI, can serve as tools for queering histories, reimagining futures, and challenging dominant modes of engagement with the general public. I approach each work as a kind of intervention—a space to reconsider the present by embodying alternate sensorial inputs. At the same time, I am invested in tactile, embodied processes—whether through sound-based installations or manual manipulations of material—that ground my work in a physical experience of time, space, and sensation.

Ultimately, my practice seeks to create openings for unexpected encounters, embracing the glitches, distortions, and instabilities that characterize life on the margins of legibility. My work is not about providing clear answers but instead about provoking questions, creating spaces where multiple interpretations and futures can coexist, and foregrounding the possibilities of a queer, speculative existence.

dleizman@umd.edu