Biography

John Menick is an artist and writer who works with the moving image, digital media, sound, and drawing. Over the past twenty-five years, his film work has spanned fiction and the essay, while dealing with subjects ranging from the apocalyptic imagination to subliminal messages. His work is made with fictional narratives, rule-based editing, and generative algorithms. His projects have been included in dOCUMENTA(13) and Greater New York, while his films have been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and CPH:DOX, among other venues.

One of Menick’s earliest works, Giving Time, was exhibited in 2000 for the first Greater New York at MoMA PS1. For the exhibition, the artist constructed a wristwatch that runs on a 28-hour day. Members of the audience were invited to live on this extended time and speak with the artist about their experiences.

For dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012, Menick was commissioned to make Starring Sigmund Freud, a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s life as a fictional character in the cinema. Menick also exhibited a sound installation containing subliminal messages, as well as published a book of collected prose, A Report on the City, with Buchhandlung Walther König. The latter was selected by frieze magazine as one of the highlights of the year.

Menick’s other works include the 2023 film, autoextinction, narrated by three superintelligent machines; a filmed monologue from 2005 about "last person on Earth" films (The Secret Life of Things); and a two-channel video structured around supernatural domestic horror in cinema (Haunting, 2020). His earliest video, The Disappearance (2001-02), used the procedures of location scouting to investigate the post-war history of Nuremberg, Germany. In 2025, the Lo Schermo dell’arte film festival in Florence commissioned the artist to make a new performance, Edge of Life, addressing the possibility of digital resurrection. The performance was later restaged at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

On occasion, Menick has worked in collaboration with his partner, the artist Agnieszka Kurant, including on Production Line (2017), a series of plotter drawings made with the input of thousands of online “crowdworkers.” In 2013, he co-wrote Kurant’s film Cutaways, which restaged scenes with actors whose characters had been edited out of feature films. The film is currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Born in White Plains, New York, Menick studied fine art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After graduation, he was an early member of several New York art collectives including Nomads + Residents and 16 Beaver Group.

In addition to the venues listed above, his visual art and films have been exhibited and screened at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; Artists Space, New York, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Menick’s essays and stories have appeared in frieze, The Believer, Mousse Magazine, BOMB, Spike Art Quarterly, Art in America, and Witte de With Review, among other publications.

Menick has been awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received several commissions, including from Lo Schermo dell'arte in Florence and Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in France.

Menick currently lives in New York City where he is a visiting professor of film at the Cooper Union.