Bio
Official website for artist Nicole Rademacher
Nicole Rademacher, Rademacher artist, Los Angeles, Chile, Barcelona, interdisciplinary, research-based, contemporary artist, conceptual artist, adoptee, adoptee voices, social practice artist, public practice artist, art therapy
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Nicole Rademacher standing in a brick alley stairwell, hands on hips, in a cream lace top, looking directly at the camera.
Photo: Panic Studios LA

Nicole Rademacher (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary artist and art therapist (ATR-BC, LMFT) based in Los Angeles, working across video, porcelain, installation, and participatory forms. In 2001 she gave a typewriter carriage the authority to determine where a story breaks. Later, having learned Spanish as an adult, she made silent flipbooks to be voiced by others. Finishing her MFA, she asked her family for their childhood memories and cut their accounts apart so that no single memory governs the reading. She attends to what crosses and what is held back: gates and filters, erasures that leave residue, translations that drift, documents that contradict one another and are not made to agree. The clinical training determines pacing, consent, and what is permitted to remain withheld.

In 2026, LA Artcore presented The sky broke when I was allowed to fly. / Se rompió el cielo cuando me dejaron volar. The exhibition that closed in June was not the exhibition that opened in May. In La cerámica tiene memoria [Ceramics hold memory], Rademacher draws her paternal biological grandparents’ home in Monterrey — demolished before she was permitted to enter it — from her brothers’ accounts of summers there. She draws, erases, draws again. The debris of each erasure is kept and displayed on porcelain patens. Every drawing is recorded. The videos were re-edited during the run. The work remains unstable and incomplete.

Her work has been shown at Transmediale, Berlin (2005); LOOP Video Art Festival, Barcelona (2007, 2008); the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2008); Los Angeles International Airport (2017); and Athens Digital Arts Festival (2021). Being Adopted (2020, 2024) grew from three-word responses by 252 adopted adults across 16 countries. Her artist-led curatorial projects include Chilean Video Art RIGHT NOW! (2010–12) and Acogedor (2017–ongoing). She has facilitated public work by invitation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023), the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (2023–24), and the Getty Research Institute (2026). In spring 2027 she will lead Still Here, a five-part community art series at 18th Street Arts Center for Angelenos whose lives were shaped by the 2025 fires.

Rademacher holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004), an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University (2008), and an MA in Marital and Family Therapy with specialized training in Clinical Art Therapy from Loyola Marymount University (2021). Her work has been supported by the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2016), the California Arts Council (2023–24), California Creative Corps (2023–24), and the California Community Foundation Wildfire Recovery Fund through 18th Street Arts Center (2026–27). She lived and worked in Barcelona, Nantes, Santiago de Chile, and Nairobi before moving to Los Angeles in 2012. Her current work asks how being becomes perceptible, communicable, and claimable when no single language, image, memory, document, or account will ever be good enough.