Matt Shaw lives on the Blue Hill peninsula where he works as an artist, teacher, and bookseller. His work is centered in a slow contemplative practice of looking and listening that engages walking, conversation, and research over multiple seasons of the year to focus on local history and relationships with the more-than-human world. By drawing our attention to the close at hand he believes we can experience a radiating depth of awareness and stillness.
Born in Poughkeepise, New York and raised in the Mid-Hudson Valley, Matt Shaw attended College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. After earning his BA in Human Ecology he enrolled in a year of the college’s MPhil program before attending the University of Illinois at Chicago. At UIC he was part of an interdisciplinary program of artists and earned his MFA in Moving Image in 2014. He has been back in Maine since 2017, working at College of the Atlantic and Blue Hill Books. A member of the Morgan Bay Zendo and Zen DownEast, he is a student of Diane Shoshin Fitzgerald in the combined lineage that derives from Rev. Master Jiyu-Kennett and Robert Aitken Roshi. His art practice has been supported by LEF Foundation, Maine Arts Commission, Arteles Creative Center, the Anahata Foundation, a Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship, and the Kindling Fund.
CV vimeo
interview in The Ellsworth American
P.O. Box 781 Blue Hill, ME 04614
mshaw410(at)pm(dot)me