Hybrid Animal Encyclopedia: An All-Ages Workshop with Nobuho Nagasawa 

Step into a space of imagination and invention, where new hybrid creatures begin to appear!

Using images from books and their own drawings, participants will create collages that merge dinosaurs with present-day animals, and build three-dimensional beings from dinosaur parts— assembled from other materials.

As these creatures take shape, participants enter a world of storytelling and transformation. Together, these creatures form a speculative bestiary—an imagined collection of living beings that might exist in possible worlds. Each creation becomes a page in this shifting Hybrid Animal Encyclopedia, a meeting point of memory and invention, nature and imagination, past and future. Participants and families take their collages and drawings home, each holding a personal fragment of this imagined world.

Based in New York since 2001, Nobuho Nagasawa is a transnational, transdisciplinary artist trained in Berlin and invited to the United States by the California Institute of the Arts in 1986. She creates immersive, site-responsive environments shaped by time, process, and collective engagement. Approaching each site like an archaeologist, she uncovers hidden histories, ecological and psychological traces within the landscape. Her practice explores how perception, memory, and embodied experience shape our sense of place. Nagasawa has received major grants and awards, including DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), the Rockefeller Foundation, the California Arts Council, multiple Japan Foundation grants, and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Among more than forty completed public art commissions, she has earned three Design Excellence Awards. A recent project exhibited at MoMA received a dozen awards, including Woman-Designed NYC. Her work has been exhibited at Prague Castle, the Ludwig Museum, the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico, and the Alexandria Library in Egypt, and represented in biennials and triennials across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. From 2026 to 2028, her work will be featured in exhibitions at Mudam (Museum of Contemporary Art Luxembourg), Lenbachhaus Munich, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Photo courtesy of Nobuho Nagasawa