Les Joynes
b Santa Barbara, California. Lives and works in New York
Les Joynes is a multimedia artist, critic, and artistic researcher whose work spans moving-image, photography, projection, performance, and new media. His practice explores questions of place, identity, cultural flux, and formlessness, investigating how images, technologies, and communities co-produce meaning through process, participation, and encounter rather than fixed form.
Teaching since 1999, Les has taught as Visiting Professor at Peking University and as Professor of Record at Renmin University School of Art, and was the 2022 Visiting Associate Professor in the School of Art at Visva Bharati University, West Bengal, India. His lectures blending contemporary art, collaboration, and artistic research have featured at Columbia University, the Royal Academy of Arts, the College Art Association, Teachers College, Columbia University, National Taipei Normal University, National Sun Yat-sen University, University of California, Dunedin School of Art (New Zealand), the Cambridge University Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and University of the Arts London.
His work and research have been supported by Fulbright Fellowships and U.S. Department of State grants for projects in Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Colombia, and he has served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. He has been invited as a Research Scholar in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Department of Art History, Columbia University, where his research engages artistic practice, media, public culture, and institutional critique.
Joynes currently serves as a Board Director at the College Art Association (CAA), where he is an active voice for contemporary artists and leads the Artistic Research Working Group, advancing artist-led research within academic and institutional contexts. He also serves as a selector for Japan Contemporaries (Tokyo) and as a member of the Fulbright National Selection Committee. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (London), the Royal Anthropological Institute (London), the Explorers Club (New York), and the Royal Asiatic Society (India), reflecting the interdisciplinary and field-based dimensions of his artistic and research practice.
Joynes’ artistic and critical writing has appeared in Art in America, Flash Art, Art Monthly, Sculpture Magazine, Springer, and the Journal for Artistic Research, and his work has been featured on NHK Television (Japan). He has served on the editorial board of Project Anywhere, a peer-reviewed journal for site-responsive and practice-based research published by the University of Melbourne in collaboration with Parsons School of Design, New York.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art (Mongolia), the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (São Paulo), Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australia), the Barbican (London), the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, and the Bauhaus (Germany), among many others. His work is represented by Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York.
Joynes’ ongoing project FormLab extends his early research into moving-image, projection, and participation. In this work, aberrant movements, illogical sequences, and temporal disruptions are treated not as errors but as generative strategies. Drawing on experimental cinema, Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, and practices of “camera-ing” associated with Fernand Deligny, FormLab positions film, digital systems, and AI as thinking processes rather than narrative devices. Projected images, spatial conditions, algorithms, and audience interaction combine to produce formless, emergent fields of perception that resist closure, authorship, and linear storytelling.
Through both practice and research, Joynes develops environments in which cinema becomes an event rather than an object, and meaning arises contingently through encounter—between image, space, technology, and collective attention.
BA (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture) Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London (art and theory).
Masters in Fine Art at Musashino Art University, Tokyo (Monbukagakusho Fellowship to Japan)
PhD, Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Communications and Arts (ECA), University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Columbia University visiting Scholar and Scientist Program, New York
Taiwan Ministry of Education Scholar, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.
