Robin Bernat is an artist, writer, filmmaker, curator, and publisher whose work explores the fleeting and the provisional. Working primarily in film and video and poetry, she draws upon the natural world, the body, memory, and personal experience to consider love and desire, loss and mortality, and the persistence of the past within the present. Her work embraces classical ideas of beauty and their dark cousins, finding in beauty not permanence but an awareness of transience.
Across media, Bernat employs an associative rather than strictly narrative approach. Landscape, water, gardens, bodies, movement, music, language, and the material qualities of the moving image become vehicles through which memory and experience are recovered, altered, and reimagined. Her films often combine original and personal footage, voice, music, and performance; her poetry similarly moves between the intimate and the mythic, grounding emotional experience in the physical and natural world. Throughout the work, past and present remain permeable: absence can coexist with presence, beauty with sorrow, and the ordinary with the mysterious.
Bernat's work has been exhibited locally, regionally, and nationally and is held in numerous institutional collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art, MOCA GA, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
From 2010 to 2022, Bernat was the owner and curator of Poem 88, a contemporary art gallery in Atlanta, Georgia. Previously, from 1992 to 2001, she was proprietor of Circle B Press, a cooperative printmaking studio and publisher. Her longstanding engagement with artists' books, publishing, filmmaking, and curatorial practice has informed both her studio work and her approach to creating contexts in which the work of other artists can be encountered.
From 2000 to 2005, Bernat was an instructor in the Atlanta Film Festival's media program, formerly IMAGE Film & Video, where she taught filmmaking to underserved teens and facilitated discussions of avant-garde film. From 2004 to 2006, she was Manager of Youth and Family Programs at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, developing educational programs, workshops, and publications centered on the museum's collections of antiquities.
Through Bernat Creative, her design and media production practice, she has also worked in book design and publishing, interior design, event production, fundraising, and culinary and lifestyle projects. She has spoken throughout Atlanta and the Southeast on collecting, professional practices for emerging artists, book arts and publishing, and strategies for community engagement. Bernat has served on the Board of Directors of ART PAPERS, where she initiated the public program ART PAPERS LIVE, as well as on the advisory board of Nexus Press. She was vice chair of the Twentieth Century Art Society of the High Museum of Art. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia and the Atlanta College of Art and completed graduate coursework in art history at Emory University. In 2001, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome and has twice been an artist-in-residence at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
