Bella Butler (b. 2002) is a Brooklyn based performance artist, photographer and writer whose interdisciplinary practice explores the ontological role of the body in the formation of the female subject. She received her BA in 2025 from Princeton University where she concentrated on Media Studies and Aesthetic Philosophy. 

Artist’s Statement:

Often taking my own body as the primary material, my practice is first and foremost concerned with what it means to inhabit both physical and media spaces as a woman. Using self-archive and documentation as precursory tools, I approach the question of how to live with a female body in a society where the body can feel pitted against the female subject herself. 

In a world where the female body is often object, I am interested in material operations that disrupt the constitution and representation of the female body, allowing it to become subject. Because of this I regularly invoke seemingly destructive operations such as cutting, folding or simple omission of visual information. With an extensive background in both media studies and performance, I find ways to liberate the image by bringing it into the three-dimensional by highlighting its object-ness as well as its inherent relationship to space, bodies, and time. I believe that to understand the ontological role of the body for women, one must break open the image by bringing it into embodied practices. With my recent multimedia sculptural and photographic projects, I have begun to investigate the relationship between presence and absence of the female body—what does it mean to take a self-portrait where your body is nowhere to be found? How do we represent ourselves as bodies without losing ourselves? I am interested in both the dangers and potential liberation that the absent female body poses, which results in repetitive use of materials whose properties embalm and document the body (i.e. tracing paper, clay, photography). Because of my almost obsessive relationship to documentation, my work is often iterative, durational and serial in nature. A work is a study, and I consider almost every work of art as inherently performance and gesture based.