St. Elmo Arts Residency Artist Talk: Francesca Lally
Francesca Lally with her work Opus Incertum. Photo by José Witteveen.
Join 2025–26 St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellow Francesca Lally for a presentation on her artistic practice and learn about her upcoming exhibition at the Visual Arts Center, opening in January 2026.
Admission is free, but seating is limited.
About the artist:
Francesca Lally (b.1997) is an artist from New York. Moving between photography, performance, fiber, and cinema, her visual art practice centers time as a material and collaborator. Informed by her work as a media archivist, teacher, and researcher, Lally explores the poetic webs of weaving, data storage technologies, volcanoes, and language in translation.
Investigating the architectural ruins of empire from ancient Rome to the United States, Lally’s recent work considers how sites and landscapes are built by collective memory; how history is made up of creative retellings along vast geologic time scales and intimate personal ones. Situating herself between documentary and performance, Lally explores the way lens-based technologies, material culture, and systems of encoding mediate our perception. With a longstanding interest in creative reinterpretation of obsolete media, she hacks technological systems which no longer fit into the immediate present of accelerated capitalism, presenting possibilities for alternative modes of intervention and connection.
Lally’s work has been screened and exhibited at Vox Populi, AUTOMAT Collective, and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, PA; Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, CA; San Diego Underground Film Festival in San Diego, CA; TUR Gallery of Art in Rome, Italy; Saliva in Barcelona, Spain; and Entre Film Center in Harlingen, TX. She has received support from the Independence Public Media Foundation, Scribe Video Center, and the National Film Preservation Foundation. She earned a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2019 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art in 2025, where she spent her first year in residence at Temple University Rome. Lally is currently the 2025–26 St. Elmo Arts Residency Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.