Linda Brant

Linda Brant is a visual artist and clinical psychologist based in Orlando, Florida. She maintains a private practice and works as a contractor for DiscoverABILITY in Orlando. Her art practice focuses on honoring and memorializing animals that are not typically regarded as grievable. In 2015 she created Mourned and Unmourned, an interactive public memorial project honoring beloved dogs, as well as those who lost their lives the previous year at Orange County Animal Services. In 2020 she launched the ongoing All Species Memorial Project, a collaborative installation of decorated lanterns collected from individuals spanning the globe. Brant is the recipient of two creativity grants from the Culture and Animals Foundation. With these grants, she created and installed a Monument to Animals We Do Not Mourn  (2018) at Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in New York. Her paper, Monuments of Compassion, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Public Space (2020), examines various strategies for compassionate memorialization of known and unknown animals. In 2021, she curated and installed a science and art exhibition at the Orlando Science Center gallery, entitled Love and Loss Across Species Lines: The Neuroscience of Attachment.

 

Brant’s work is featured in Margo DeMello’s text, Mourning Animals (2016); Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (Summer 2017); The Compassion Arts Festival (2022) and Our Hen House Podcast, Episode 539 (2020). She has been an invited interviewee for classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Florida Atlantic University, and Ringling College of Art & Design. She has taught courses at Winthrop University, Eckerd College, the University of Central Florida, Saybrook University, and Ringling College of Art & Design. 

Brant has created work using animal bones, metal, mixed media, maps, and watercolor. She has exhibited her work in shows and galleries across the country including the Women’s Research Center Gallery at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL, the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL, the J. K. and Sarah Galloway Foundation Gallery in Winter Park FL, the Selby Gallery at Ringling College of Art and Design and the Gallery at California State University, Northridge. She has presented papers on her various projects at state and national conferences.