Annie Saunders

Annie Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences, and has made award-winning installations and performance works for major arts institutions as well as immersive projects in disused buildings and experiential works in public space. Saunders is the founder and artistic director of site-specific performance company Wilderness, a core collaborator and performer with Lars Jan on Holoscenes, and her experimental project The Wreck for Opera Omaha was called "ingenious...a persuasive expression of complex female feeling," by the Wall Street Journal.

She has created multiple site-and-time-based interactive audio works for public space with Andrew Schneider and OpenEndedGroup: CURRENT, a time-based site-specific soundwalk though Lower Manhattan accessed via a custom platform, which won both the Tribeca Festival Immersive Creative Nonfiction Award and the Tribeca X Award, and included sound design by Jackie! Zhou/One Thousand Birds, and Kormós, a series of walks created with composer Emma O’Halloran, commissioned by the Onassis Foundation for the Plásmata exhibition in Athens.

Her installation The Home, a headphone-based experience for one audience member at a time for Santander Bank/Domestic Violence Awareness Month, won the D&AD Yellow Pencil ("Creative Excellence") for Spatial Design and Installation Design, the AICP Next Award in the Experiential category, Merit in Storytelling, Art Direction and Installations at the One Show, and two APA Ideas Awards in the U.K.: Best Experiential Project and Best Use of Technology for Good. The work is archived in the Department of Film at MOMA NYC. Her work for HP’s "Family Portraits" campaign won a Shorty award for Diversity and Inclusion and Ogilvy Awards for Tech/Telecommunications and Data Innovation.

Her ongoing multi-platform collaboration Up In Arms with Anna Maria Nabirye incorporates social practice, visual art, live-cinema performance and a book project was presented at the De La Warr Pavilion in the U.K. in 2023. 

She is currently developing new performance-installation work supported by the residency program at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA and with residency and commissioning support from EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

She is an alumnus of the Devised Theater Working Group for next-generation performance-makers at the Public Theater and is represented for commercial projects by m ss ng p eces; she has created award-winning large-scale experiences for MasterCard, Santander, Hewlett Packard, Dos Equis, Bulleit and ASICS Worldwide.

Her essay "A Case for Liveness" for Exeunt Magazine was adapted for video by the One Club for Creativity in 2021.