For 25 years, Cherie Sampson’s artwork has encompassed an interdisciplinary practice in environmental sculpture, performance & video art. She has made many site-specific works in the natural environment with wood and other local materials in wild, public and rural locations, being aware of all aspects of an environment from sensory and elemental to historical. It is evident that the body and hands are present in the creation and articulation of forms and spaces. At the same time, her constructions reflect the natural or rural surroundings as if intrinsically a part of or having emerged spontaneously from them. Indigenous wood has been a primary medium as it signifies the spirit of a place for me. ‘Interiorizing’ her body in and around the sculptural spaces in live and video-performances often follows the constructive phase of the work. An extension of this in-situ practice is the making of video works in wilderness or cultivated landscapes where Cherie has traveled and lived in which sculptural works were not necessarily constructed but the spaces themselves, such as the “architecture” of a boreal Finnish forest itself, set the stage for performances-for-the-camera. She has exhibited internationally in live performances, art-in-nature symposia, video screenings and installations in the US, Finland, Norway, Holland, Cuba, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong and other countries and is the recipient of a number of fellowships & grants including two Fulbright Fellowships, a Finnish Cultural Foundation Grant, Finlandia Foundation Grants and multiple research grants from the University of Missouri. Cherie divides her time between the University of Missouri, where she is an Associate Professor of Art, and her husband’s organic farm in Northeast Missouri where she initiates and creates many of her art works in the wooded and cultivated environments. She received her Master of Fine Art Degree in Intermedia & Video Art from the University of Iowa in 1997 with a minor in Sculpture.