Signe Pierce

Signe Pierce is an American multimedia artist and performer. Her work spans performance, photography, video art, art direction, GIFs, and web-based art. Her aesthetic frequently takes inspiration from femininity, excess, alterity, perversion, self-mediation and distortion.

Pierce rose to prominence with the 2014 short film, American Reflexxx, in collaboration with director Alli Coates. The film shows Pierce, masked and portraying a "hyper-sexualized" persona, becoming an object of derision and then attacked. It was made in Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. An earlier version of the work was first shown at "Bushwick Gone Basel" at Art Basel Miami in 2013. The work has been shown in numerous galleries including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the BHFQU Brucennial, which was "the largest art exhibition ever to feature only women."

After its formal debut at BHFQU in 2014, the film has garnered over 1.5 million views on YouTube, and the work has been featured in Vice, Rhizome, ArtNews, Open Space: SF MoMA, and Paper Magazine. Alexis Anais Avedisian for Rhizome commended the film for being "a brave work that construes many related topics within current cyberfeminist discourses," while Matthew Leifheit for Art F City postured it as "terrifying, surreal—and true."

Born in Tucson, Arizona in 1988, Pierce grew up in Arizona, Encinitas, California and Frederick, Maryland. Pierce studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where she received a BFA in Photography with a focus on performance art in 2011. During her time at the School of Visual Arts, Signe interned for Saturday Night Live and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.