Lee Pivnik

Lee Pivnik (b. 1995) is an artist living in Miami. His artwork takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future that is based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies.

Permeating his practice is the idea of entanglement—the touching, changing, mutating relationships between species and their environments. Through these intimacies, worlds arise—worlds of decay and degradation or verdant flourishing. His sculptures, drawings and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing the fungal networks, epiphytic plants and emergent animal architectures that inhabit South Florida.

Pivnik also founded and co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that has worked with over 150 artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but grounded in themes of interconnectivity, intimacy and multispecies relationality. IQECO explores the overlaps between queer cultural production and multispecies biological adaptation to reveal a vibrant and complex world of belonging.

Pivnik has been awarded Knight Arts Challenge Awards (2019 and 2024) and a Creative Capital Award (2025). He has been an artist in residence at Biosphere 2 (2017), Mana Contemporary Miami (2018), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2021), Deering Estate (2022–2023), Oolite Arts (2024) and Folly Tree Arboretum (2024). In 2018, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture.

Learn more about Lee on his website here.

Commissioned Work

Filmed by Preguntas Studios