[waves hello]

Hi, my name is Staci Bu Shea and I’m based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I have a multi-faceted artistic and cultural practice, which mostly takes form by writing, curating, facilitating, supporting, advising and teaching. Broadly, I convene with others over aesthetic, critical, and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships, daily life, community organizing, and institutional practice. 

I am a careworker and support people at times of transformation. For holistic death and grief care, visit the website of my practice stacibushea.care.

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Explore some of the fruits of my research and practice in the archive.

Daily haiku practice and other traces: special.fish

And if you’ve found yourself here, please leave a message for my guestbook :)

[stays for tea]

I’m the author of Solution 305: Dying Livingly (Sternberg Press, 2025), a series of propositions and encounters in service to an aesthetic, critical, and poetic experience of living life led by death.

In 2019, I embarked on a study trajectory called Poetics of Living with art historian Rizvana Bradley to explore already existing and emerging non-normative forms of living together in consideration of rapidly changing discourses around sexuality, health, communal life, and death. In many ways, this forms the basis of my life practice and my interest in art and culture. It’s at this time that I began care work alongside my professional practice in art and culture.

From 2017-2022 I worked as a curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, an art institution based in Utrecht that focuses on collective art projects and organizational experiments. Together with the team I managed the exhibition program from concept writing and organization to working with artists and designing programs, but was also engaged in other areas of the institution. Notably I helped shape the attention to and care for Casco’s analog and digital archive. I also worked to make Casco more accessible by implementing accommodations and fostering a culture of accessibility, testing what’s possible for a social, aesthetic experience of care while learning from and working with disability communities.

In the past, I co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies (2017) at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (NY) with Carmel Curtis, which New York Times art critic Holland Cotter named one of the best exhibitions of that year. I graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College with the group exhibition Emphasis Repeats (Andrea Geyer, Barbara Hammer, Alex Martinis Roe, and Tourmaline, 2016) at Hessel Museum of Art (NY). From 2011-2014 I worked as a studio manager and assistant to artist Jim Draper in Jacksonville, Florida.

Lately/soon

On being young, old and beyond, curated by Simon(e) van Saarloos, Writer Unlimited Festival, Theater aan het Spui Den Haag, 24 January 2026

A bed, a brick, a dream, Rietveld Studium Generale workshop, led with Mira Thompson, January-March 2026

Selected curatorial projects

The Sphinx’s Riddle, with Manifold Books, 2024-2025 (curated reading sessions):
28/01: to attend to
09/03: to dedicate to with Katja Mater
01/06: to attest to with Dagmar Bosma
05/10: to remember for with the Paul Hoecker Research Group
23/11: to pass on with Natalia Papaeva, hosted by Anna Arov
29/03: to live through with Moosje Moti Goosen

Summer Grief series, Metropolis M, 2024 (editorial):
00 Introduction by Staci Bu Shea
01 Lin by Chus Martínez
02 Ruben by Yessica van den Berg
03 Rami by Dina Mimi
04 Carla by Katja Mater
05 Epilogue by Jumana Emil Abboud

Never Seen, with Naima Abdullahi and Nimco Hersi, 2023 (commissioned film)

Barn’s burnt down–now I can see the moon, with CA Conrad, Camisha L. Jones, Ching-In Chen, 2021 (curated program)

Access Intimacy with Mia Mingus, 2021 (curated program)

Het is of de stenen spreken (silence is a commons), with Babi Badalov, Ansuya Blom, Ama Josephine Budge, Mire Lee, and the Casco team, 2019 (exhibition)

Two Rubatos with Terre Thaemlitz, 2019 (exhibition)

Heroic in its ordinariness, with Elizabeth Atterbury, Beverly Buchanan, Taraneh Fazeli, Feminist Health Care Research Group, Carolyn Lazard, Redeem Pettaway, Falke Pisano, and Sasha Wortzel, 2019 (exhibition)

Army of Love, with Ingo Niermann, Dora García and more, 2017 (project exhibition)

Age lines, Kerry Downey, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ilyana Ritchie, Mia You, and more, 2016 (exhibition)

Selected writing

Mirroing Breaths: Grief, Time, and the Art of Bearing Witness with Katja Mater, TRIGGER, 2026 (text)

Visitor Report on Constantina Zavitzanos’ Entrophy with Angelo Custódio and Pedro Matias, S*an D. Henry-Smith and Geo Wyex, If I Can’t Dance, 2024 (text)

Cultivating esthesia, (Listen to the lecture on Cranberry Juice Podcast) for Written in the Body symposium, with Jewellery-Linking Bodies Department Gerrit Rietveld Academie in collaboration with VU/MC hospital in Amsterdam, 2024 (text, lecture)

Sweet, sweet fantasy, with Mira Thompson, 2023 (performance, text)

CV of Care, for Curriculum Veto / CV van Toewijding, Dutch translation by Flora Valeska for nY50, 2022 (text)

Commoning Accessibility, with design by Lotte Lara Schröder, 2022 (text, publication)

Selected teaching experiences

A bed, a dream, a brick (2026) and Access Test Kitchen (2025), co-taught with Mira Thompson, Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Stedelijk Museum, 2025-2026

Dying Livingly, Independent Study Track, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague 2023-2024

Situated and Dynamic: An Introduction to Curatorial Practice, Independent Study Track, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023

Towards Access, co-taught with Pernilla Manjula Philip, Sandberg Institute, 2022-2023)

All about my mother, co-tutored with Sepake Angiama and Nina bell F., Dutch Art Institute, 2020

More than Friends: on belonging, access, and safe(r) spaces, co-tutored with Jeanne van Heeswij, HKU MAFA, Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design, 2019

Poetry bulletin

Legacies 
by Nikki Giovanni

her grandmother called her from the playground
       “yes, ma’am”
       “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old  
woman proudly
but the little girl didn’t want
to learn how because she knew
even if she couldn’t say it that
that would mean when the old one died she would be less  
dependent on her spirit so
she said
       “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”
with her lips poked out
and the old woman wiped her hands on
her apron saying “lord
       these children”
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and i guess nobody ever does

Source: My House, 1972

[aerial view of brown knapweed in the dry autumn grass, three spikey purple blooms in a tuff of deep green shrub.]