Matt Neff

An artist, printer, and educator living in Philadelphia, Matt Neff is the Director of Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and the Common Press at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History from Indiana University. His work is concerned with historical and current negotiations of power and privilege. Neff has worked on a number of projects with institutions including Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, The Drawing Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Wharton Esherick Museum. His work is included in public and private collections including the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tell us who you are. What is Matt Neff about?

My practice moves between making, co-learning, and building spaces for attention, experimentation, and shared discovery. Working across drawing, photography, sound, moving image, installation, and performance, I explore memory, atmosphere, perception, and how we experience contemporary life together. I care deeply about creating environments where people feel invited to slow down, listen closely, take risks, and discover new ways of seeing. Much of my work emerges through conversation, collaboration, teaching, and shared curiosity as much as through objects or exhibitions.

Can you describe your arts pathway to this moment?

The arts have always felt less like a career path to me than a way of paying attention to the world. Drawing taught me how to see, photography taught me how to notice time, and sound taught me how to listen differently. My path has unfolded across disciplines and through relationships—studios, classrooms, exhibitions, collaborations, cities, and communities—and, over time, co-learning and conversation have become inseparable from my studio practice. I’ve come to think of art as a form of inquiry: a way of remaining open to uncertainty, perception, feeling, and connection.

What do Penn and its people mean to you?

I arrived at Penn as a graduate student with a deep interest in teaching and learning, and the possibility of building something with others. What has kept me here has been the people—students, colleagues, staff, artists, and collaborators who continue to shape the culture of this place in generous and unexpected ways. I’ve always valued the porousness between Penn and Philadelphia itself, the sense that creative life extends beyond classrooms and institutions. Some of the most meaningful moments here have happened in studios, critiques, workshops, exhibitions, and long conversations where people are collectively imagining new ways of working, living, and being together.

What are you currently working on? What do you see as the potentials that may ripple out from this project?

I’ve been working across sound, moving image, and photography to create immersive environments shaped by unstable memory, duration, looping, and perceptual drift. I’m interested in the emotional space that opens when images and sounds begin to breathe, repeat, degrade, and transform over time.

In tandem, I’ve been thinking deeply about pedagogy, mentorship, and creative infrastructure—how institutions can better support experimentation, interdisciplinarity, care, lifelearning, and sustained creative life.

I hope the work creates space for attention, reflection, and connection at a moment when all three feel increasingly fragile.

What else should we know?

CVs and images can document positions and projects, but much of the work I care about most happens quietly through trust, experimentation, and helping people feel supported and seen. I’m interested in art not only as production, but as a lived practice—something connected to how we pay attention, move through the world, relate to one another, and imagine more thoughtful and humane ways of being together.

These works I’ve included pull from an archive of image fragments, photographs, paintings, and printed ephemera that are cut, taped, layered, and rearranged to produce image-objects. Each piece builds as an improvised response to the last, highlighting intimate moments that often exist just beyond consciousness—admissions that hold multiple histories, events, and gestures that flutter between the immaterial and the physical.