Emily Vey Duke

Emily Vey Duke is an artist and critic living and working in Syracuse, New York. She is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University where she has been teaching since 2009. Her work has shown at the Whitney Museum, the Walker Center, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, the Musee d’Art Contemporain Montreal, The New York Film Festival, and the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. In 2022, her project The Infernal Grove made the final round of competition for the Creative Capital award, and in 2011 she was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.

A book about her work, The Beauty Is Relentless, was published in 2012. In 2016, her 10-year drawing and writing collaboration with Shary Boyle was made into an award-winning book called The Illuminations Project.

Since 2020, Vey Duke has been focused on The Infernal Grove Project, a multi-modal work about drug use, addiction and recovery. The Infernal Grove provides a platform for artists with lived experience of drugs to present work and engage in dialogue with other artists and scholars in a professional context of care and support. It is committed to paying fees for creative work in accordance with Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.).

To date, The Infernal Grove has hosted over 40 events and serves an audience of over 1600 participants and viewers. It has received grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the New York State Council for the Arts; and has collaborated with artists and institutions globally, including Laraaji, Christopher Harris, Michelle Lhooq, the Goethe Institute, The Flaherty Seminar, Museum Ostwall (DE), and the Museum of Moving Image (NYC).