Creative team, Selwyn/Oh No Studio, 2026.

Bio

For more than three decades, Amy Selwyn designed spaces where people could think together. Today, she designs encounters that do the same.

Working across photography, writing, archives, artificial intelligence, and installation, Selwyn builds conceptual systems that invite us to see one another more completely. Her practice is grounded in what she calls the Designed Encounter: a carefully constructed experience that rewards curiosity, close looking, conversation, and the discovery of meaning.

Selwyn is interested in the invisible architectures that shape our lives—the judgments, assumptions, aspirations, expectations, and systems that influence how we see ourselves and one another. Rather than illustrating these forces, she gives them form.

"I am a looker," Selwyn says. "I build conceptual structures that let me share what I noticed with other people."

Using fictional systems, humor, satire, and imagination, Selwyn creates works that ask participants to reconstruct meaning rather than receive it. Whether through a fictional artist's archive, a bureaucratic evaluation system, or the abandoned objects left in a luxury apartment building, each project is a Designed Encounter.

Current bodies of work include Terms & Conditions, Objects of Measurement,‍ ‍Taxonomy of Imagined Lives, Fate Unknown, and Simultaneous Translation.

Selwyn lives and works in New England.

Selwyn / Oh No Studio
…taking a tiny instruction far more seriously than anyone reasonably should