Universal Arts

Heather Beardsley (b. 1987) creates mixed-media projects in response to environmental  issues. Beardsley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She  spent 2016 in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she  was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects International Artist Fellowship by the Ministry  of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony, Germany. Other residencies include KulturKontakt  Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv, Ukraine; and  La Box in Bourges, France. Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally,  including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid and Museum  Rijswijk in the Netherlands. In 2023 she had her first solo museum exhibition at the Chrysler  Museum of Art in Norfolk, VA, while in summer of 2024 she had a solo exhibition at the Virginia  Museum of Contemporary Art and an art residency and solo exhibition at Pier-2 Art Center in  Taiwan. Beardsley installed her first outdoor public sculpture in the Lewis Ginter Botanical  Gardens in Richmond, VA in 2025.