Janna Avner is an artist whose current artwork produces optical effects for Indigenous and multi-heritage Futures. Using light as her primary medium, Avner seeks to reclaim romanticizations of landscape imagery and incorporate expansive interpretations of Indigeneity, perception, and the environment. Her pieces serve as visual metaphors that, at times, contain projections of beadwork and hologram recreations of the Northern Lights. 

Avner is Koyukon, Athabaskan, Alaska Native, and has fished the Yukon River in the wilderness for most summers of her life. She graduated from Yale (BA, 2012) and CSU, Northridge (MA, 2022), with artworks and writings covered in Vice, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Artforum, ARTNews, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. 

Avner was the most recent artist-in-resident at the Anchorage Art Musuem this past winter (2026) and was the Art Fellow at the School for Advanced Research (2023).

Avners writings on Artificial Intelligence were published in “What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent Our Future” (2017), “one of the best science books of the year” by Smithsonian Magazine.