MORLEIGH STEINBERG
Morleigh Steinberg’s artistic practice is grounded in a lifelong investigation of movement. Trained in modern dance, improvisation, and composition, she approaches each medium—photography, filmmaking, and curation—with the same choreographic attentiveness to rhythm, space, and transformation. Her visual works reflect her instinct for kinetic structure: images shift, collide, and evolve, mirroring the body’s relationship to time and environment.
As a dancer and choreographer, Steinberg has toured extensively worldwide with Momix, ISO Dance, and ARCANE Collective, whose performances have appeared at the Guggenheim Museum (NYC), The Hammer Museum (LA), REDCAT (LA), and numerous venues across Europe. She has directed and shot award-winning short dance films, including the full-length documentary Height of Sky, as well as multiple short films and music videos.
Since 1993, Steinberg has collaborated with U2 as a creative consultant and choreographer, conceiving staging, props, and visual language for the band’s tours—including U2’s groundbreaking UV / U2 which opened the Sphere in Las Vegas. She also co-directed V:UV/U2 An Immersive Concert Film.
In 2017, Steinberg co-founded ARCANE Space in Venice, California, dedicated to presenting visual artworks by established and emerging artists. Her curatorial practice is driven by narrative, environment, and transformation. She has produced five exhibitions of her own work at ARCANE Space—LA Skylines (2017), Tucked In (2019), Pattern Sky (2020), If We Can’t Fix It – It Ain’t Busted (2021–2022), and Postage: The Macro World of Stamps (2025). Her curatorial project Dance and Eye traveled to Cuba and Ireland in 2024, and is slotted to be presented at Château La Coste in Aix-en-Provence, France, in Fall 2026. She has also designed and published books related to her exhibitions and projects.
Someplace, somewhere
someplace, somewhere extends Morleigh Steinberg’s decades long inquiry into the mutable borders between place and perception. Luminescent prints of abstract compositions of clouds, flower, and trees are the focus of her work. The show consists of 16 prints and one large scale work.
”Open space and horizon lines- lines in general and the delineations they create, their demarcation of space, the what if’s, and simple pairings of disparate forms… These things always catch my eye . When I see something inspiring, I am simultaneously in the moment and someplace, somewhere else. Terrain and light, form and composition, texture and smell, all register at once, layering in my mind, as both an emotional and architectural experience. I’m not documenting a place so much as excavating the possibility embedded within it. This exhibit is an invitation to occupy both here and elsewhere—to move through a landscape that is simultaneously observed, invented, and felt.”
PATTERN SKY
PATTERN SKY is a continuation of Steinberg’s series LA Skylines, an exploration of the artist's fascination with Los Angeles’ network of power lines and telephone poles.
"I don't know what it is exactly that I find so romantic, amusing, and nostalgic, about the countless variations of intersections between the western sky and the miles and miles of utility lines that cross my view. I do know that it is something about the sprawl- of how the unfathomable lengths of cable suspended in air, connecting to somewhere. And I know too that it’s the chance moments of meeting between buildings, branches and fronds; the knotted junctions of wire and hardware impossibly entwined, and the towering palms and raw hewn poles that compel me to always look upwards. The functionality and folly of these complex weaves ignite my imagination. On a deeper level, the tangible connectivity of these lines, structure to structure, house to house, person to person, anchors me emotionally, somehow making sense, especially in our wireless world. This interconnected airborne architecture of Los Angeles is impossible to escape and I find it endlessly electrifying. After years of photographing power lines, I began another exploration; splicing together sections of a single photograph or combining sections of others. This repetitive process became a kind of meditation for me. What transpired became completely metamorphosed images. The exploration is ongoing.”
“I chose to print the pieces for PATTERN SKY as scrolls. The work suited the vertical form and the connection to the ancient way of display took root, timeless and lofty. I wanted the installation to impress upon the feeling of being enveloped by the work in the same way that I am by the presence of LA’s interwoven matrix. It is consequential for me to be able to transform the way we experience space and also to be able to shift our perception of things that we might hold too tightly to. I am grateful that the comfort I find in the chaos of this connectedness is a vision I can share, and I hope that by doing so makes others look up too.”
TUCKED IN
TUCKED IN - a photographic installation by Morleigh Steinberg documenting the intricate miniature worlds she discovered in her seven year old daughter’s bedroom over three years of undergoing treatment for cancer. Sian Steinberg Evans’ meticulous manifestations of imagination translate what she could not articulate in language. From absolute chaos, she secured order.
Steinberg’s photographs uncannily illustrate the makings of her daughter’s imagination. Infused with courage, hope, and humor, this show affirms the integral role of imaginative play to well being, standing as testimony to the fact that in even the hardest times children find the strength to make sense of their world.
LA SKYLINE
LA SKYLINES was Steinberg’s first installation from her ongoing fascination with Los Angeles’ network of utility lines. Transforming what for many robs the blue sky of its beauty, Steinberg creates kaleidoscopic and abstracted compositions that reveal a magic that she sees in these moments of intersection. This show produced over 85 images lined up in a continuous string of iindividual mages evoking the endless variations of line, sky, flower and architecture.