Amy Olivia Pierce integrates photography, performance, installation, textile, sound, videography, text, and audience engagement into her creative practice, with research efforts spanning art, sociology, psychology, gender studies, marketing, history and theatre. Pierce has worked as a commercial and editorial photographer, producing national and international projects with clients that include AT&T and The Village Voice. She has exhibited photography throughout the New York area, including the Brooklyn Museum and New York City’s Museum of Sex. Pierce received a BFA in studio art from the University of Connecticut and an MFA from the University of Maine, where she is currently a candidate for an Interdisciplinary PhD and an adjunct assistant professor of New Media.

I explore the elasticity of what is perceived as “normal” behavior within the temporary boundaries created by ritual activities. My research and creative engagement in contemporary American wedding culture focuses on the prevalence, and affects, of a phenomenon, which I have coined “perfection hysteria,” that often ensues as brides engage in a quest for perfection, striving to achieve the status of “perfect bride” and have a “perfect wedding.” By reframing components of popular and often unquestioned rituals through an interdisciplinary practice, I intend to provoke the viewer to question the roles that society and self, play in constructing identity, and to rethink established conventions that are transmitted and reinforced through ritual behavior.