Amanda Aileen Fisher is an interdisciplinary social practice artist and writer exploring language as a material of perception, transformation, and relational depth.
Amanda’s practice currently includes place-based participatory writing, immersive performance, collaborative publications, and site-responsive interventions
Beyond what we call writer, I am an artist working with words. My work explores how words are markers of perception, which draw our awareness to particular parts of our lived experience. Each word, or particular arrangement of them, is a signpost calling our attention towards what to look at, notice, even feel. Each word alerts: look there, at that thing. Words, then, are hierarchical parts of a whole experience that we have collectively agreed are most important to regard.
My work attempts to get those who interact with it into the space between the words — to perceive other sensations, or languages, that live there. These are the languages of sense, which we access through perception. Here, we can perceive beyond the pre-codified parts to the whole and, with this expanded awareness, more fully live the experience we are inside of.
Whether you call yourself artist, writer, or human, I am always attempting to remind you: words are our shared medium — our common access point to creation. Words are the material we all use to make and eternally remake that thing we call "reality.” My work invites you to do this with awareness, often giving you a new container or doorway in to do so.
To read more about the conceptual framing of her work, see Amanda’s Artist Statement.
Writer + Artist = Things with Words
amandaaileenfisher.com
abretuboca.org
ephemeralcult.substack.com
portraits by Sasha Golyanova
Interdiscipinary
Interdiscipinary
Social Practice
Social Practice
Artist & Writer
Artist & Writer
Full Bio
Amanda Aileen Fisher is an interdisciplinary artist working internationally at the intersection of language, perception, and participatory practice. Her work investigates how words shape consciousness, act as signposts of attention, and encode inherited narratives. She creates experiences that open space between the words—into sensation, relationship, and deeper ways of knowing.
Her practice blends writing, voice, somatic inquiry, and relational design. Over the past three years, she has developed immersive experiences that combine writing, sound, and embodiment; published both literary and interactive artist books; and trained other facilitators in her original lens-based methodology for working with the inner voice through writing. Her work has reached participants in Mexico, the U.S., Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, with a new project launching in Europe in 2025.
Her work often begins with deep listening—whether to place, body, or community—and unfolds through site-specific or participatory experiences that invite layered perception. In 2022, she developed the participatory performance Parts Divided during an independent residency with Proyecto Florecer in Medellín, Colombia. Rooted in time spent listening to local women and observing the emotional landscape of the city, the piece explored internalized narratives and their somatic expression.
In 2024, she was invited as resident interdisciplinary artist for a five-day immersive retreat in the Dominican Republic, where she offered spontaneous, site-specific interventions that integrated the retreat’s breathwork, performance, and embodiment practices.
In 2025, Amanda was invited by the Modern Elder Academy (MEA)—the world’s first Midlife Wisdom School—to bring her writing methodology into their Summer Immersion Program. MEA is a globally recognized retreat center dedicated to helping people in midlife and beyond reimagine their next chapter through transformational, science-backed programming. Two certified facilitators from Amanda’s Abre Tu Boca training program will lead sessions throughout the summer, and Amanda will return in September to personally teach and close the season.
Her participatory writing project Abre Tu Boca—based in Todos Santos, Mexico—has grown into a cross-cultural movement of expression and personal transformation through language. The project now includes multilingual writing circles, facilitator training, and public, place-based encounters such as The HemmingWay and Writing Safari, which explore presence, perception, and narrative through writing in live environments.
Before this current focus, Amanda founded and ran EDIA Inc., a map publishing company that created and distributed hundreds of thousands of storytelling-based maps illuminating overlooked foodways, geographies, and cultural memory. EDIA garnered national recognition for its narrative cartography and helped shape Amanda’s long-standing interest in collective voice, place-based narrative, and what lies beneath the surface of language.
She has co-founded participatory arts initiatives in Los Angeles and North Carolina, led creative writing programs in private and public contexts, and regularly collaborates with performers, movement artists, writers, and other interdisciplinary creators. She is currently writing a foundational book on her lens-based methodology for perception, writing, and relational transformation.