Marianne Shaneen is a Lebanese/Mexican-American writer and film and documentary video maker. She received her M.F.A. in writing from Bard College Milton Avery School of the Arts. Her essays on artists such as Christine and Margaret Wertheim’s Institute for Figuring, Ken Jacobs, and Madeline Gins/Arakawa, have appeared in publications such as Bomb Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail.
Shaneen is directing a feature documentary film about people who have animal alter-egos: a poetic, playful, provocative exploration of fluid identity and trans-species possibility. She received a NYSCA New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant, 2010, and is a Yaddo fellow. She made significant progress on her first novel, Homing while at MacDowell. She has recently read from this work at The Poetry Project in NYC and has fiction forthcoming in Bomb. She received an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Glimmer Train Press Short Fiction Contest. She has been a Yaddo fellow and a recipient of a NYSCA Individual Artist grant.
