Marie Watt (she/her, b. 1967, Seattle, WA) is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians, and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Haudenosaunee protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.
Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and in 2016 she was awarded an Doctor Honoris Causa from Willamette University.
She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center; and has received fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, among others.
Watt served two terms on the board of VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) from 2017–2023. She serves on the Native Advisory Committee at the Portland Art Museum, where she also became a member of the Board of Trustees in 2020. She is a fan of Crow’s Shadow, an Indigenous-founded printmaking institute located on the homelands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla; as well as Portland Community College.
Selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of American Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. She is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, OR; Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and Marc Straus Gallery in New York, NY.