Rainey Straus is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on cultivating kinship with the more-than-human world through sculpture, installation, and fieldwork. After an extended period working as a designer in the Bay Area tech industry, she returned to artmaking in response to an ecological urgency she could no longer ignore.

Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Spinning Time into Form at Gallery Route One (2026), Bodies and Borders: Ecologies of Consent with Women Eco Artists Dialog (2025), and a solo exhibition at Mercury 20 Gallery (2026). Her painting series, The Old Growth Project, was exhibited at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and featured in Forest Unseen at the Petaluma Arts Center, The New Geologic Epoch with Ecoartspace, and Art & Ecology at the O'Hanlon Center for the Arts. She has also shown work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Design Exchange Museum in Toronto.

Straus recently returned from the BigCi Environmental Residency in New South Wales, Australia, and held residencies at the Morris Graves Foundation and the Lucid Art Foundation in 2024. Her work has been featured in Dark Mountain Journal, Sculpture Magazine, Rhizome, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts, and lives on the unceded territory of the Coast Miwok in present-day Marin County.

CV