Hannah O’Brien (b. 1988, Texas) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from Loyola University in New Orleans and an MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in 2024. She moves between sculpture and performance, constructing environments that both support and unsettle our desire for purpose, routine, and order. Her practice illuminates the ways in which life, labor, and self-worth are entangled. By moving fluidly between various roles, O’Brien exposes the inherent flimsiness and mutability of identity.

Her work embraces the unpredictable. By engaging pedestrians, weather, and other uncontrollable conditions, O’Brien invites chance into the structure of the work. Improvisation is a central strategy across her practice—whether in live performance or sculptural installation. This responsiveness to her surroundings produces moments of unscripted dialogue and connection, anchoring both artist and viewer in the immediacy of the present.

Questions of value and visibility run through her projects. O’Brien’s blend of comedy and seriousness complicates distinctions between what is recognized as “art” and what is dismissed as the residue of everyday life. The videos produced from these performances become sites of further inquiry; shaped through editing, they function as mechanisms for examining the aesthetic, social, and material traces left behind by each encounter.

O’Brien did alternative stand-up comedy from 2017-2021 and has shown work at Diboll Gallery in New Orleans LA, A.I.R Gallery Brooklyn NY, Gatto Pardo, Los Angeles CA, Peter and Mere Mullen Gallery, Pasadena CA, and a solo exhbition at PSLA in Los Angeles CA.

maryhannahobrien@gmail.com