Trained as an artist, modern dancer, choreographer, writer, and architect, Kim Tanzer incorporates elements of each of these disciplines in her art.  Her work explores patterns spanning time and space, across scales.  She has a particular fascination with the infinite ways energy deposits form, and form, conversely, shapes flows of energies.  She makes marks, structures improvisational or scripted choreographies, documents communities, and captures and adjusts film sequences, to map and occasionally to transform, the world’s processes.  Her work is informed by her long practice of architecture, evident in her use of architectural drawing conventions, and in her sense of spatial precision.  She is motivated by a desire to increase social equity and reverse environmental destruction.  Her art includes paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, performances, social and community-based exchanges, and writings.  Her subject matter--abstracted landscapes, reverentially retraced paintings of barks and trees, confluences of natural or social forces or perceived pure energy--converge in the goal of making planetary forces visible.

Tanzer was born in Montclair, New Jersey.  She graduated from Duke University, where she studied studio art, modern dance, and choreography.  She received her Master of Architecture degree from the College of Design at North Carolina State University.  She taught architecture at the University of Florida and later at the University of Virginia, where she served as Dean.  She is based in Gainesville and Cedar Key Florida, where she retains her license to practice architecture.  She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a Distinguished Professor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.