Anne E. Stoner (b. 1999) is a sound artist, researcher and social practitioner whose work criticizes geographic, infrastructural and political systems of disability, injury, and death.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Tang Museum, New York State, and the Chazen Museum, Madison. Anne’s sound and writing can be read and listened to in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Global Performance Studies Journal, and the Struer Tracks Sound Biennial Almanac.
Anne holds an undergraduate MA(h) from the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh College of Art and an MA from Northwestern University. In 2026 she earned an MFA in Studio Art, focusing in time-based media, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She currently teaches Art and Art History at Carthage College.
Email: anneestoner@gmail.com
CV
News:
October 15-17, 2026 - Speaking at the American Association for Arts of the Present (ASAP) Conference, 2026
June 2-29, 2026 - Artist in Residence at the I-Park Foundation
Apr 10–May 22, 2026 - Infrastructure Bodies/Injury Systems: An Exhibition by Anne E. Stoner at the Chazen Museum of Art
Anne E. StonerHomeNewsCurator’s Essay
Essay by Tyler Blackwell, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum
Across her practice, Anne Stoner works with sound, surveillance, and collective voice to ask urgent questions about who is allowed to appear in public space—and under what conditions. Her work does not speculate about the future. It begins with what is already here: existing footage, existing technologies, existing lives shaped by systems that quietly watch, sort, and judge. Stoner’s commitment is to telling real stories, not inventing them, and to using the image of now as a way to bear witness.
At the heart of her practice is a belief in the power of sound. Where contemporary surveillance collapses bodies into patterns and probabilities, sound restores texture and humanity. Breath, vibration, rhythm, and hesitation carry emotional and political weight. They remind us that bodies are not abstractions, and that listening—truly listening—can be a form of care, resistance, and solidarity. In Stoner’s work, sound refuses efficiency. It lingers. It accumulates. It asks viewers to slow down and stay present.
Stoner’s projects are deeply informed by disability history and scholarship, particularly the long policing of bodies deemed disruptive or out of place in public. Drawing from The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, her work connects past systems of exclusion to contemporary infrastructures of monitoring and control. Today’s AI-driven surveillance extends these histories, embedding old ideas about order and acceptability into new technologies that claim objectivity while producing harm.
Yet Stoner’s work is ultimately generous and affirming. By transforming surveillance footage into sound and amplifying the voices of those injured or disabled through protest, she reclaims tools often used to erase accountability. Layered voices form a collective presence—one that resists isolation and insists on shared experience. Her work reminds us that even in a hyper-monitored world, connection is still possible, and that listening carefully to one another can open space for dignity, care, and collective imagination.