Community engagement and social justice
2-D art, including murals, mosaic, photography, etc.
Live performance, including puppetry, theater, dance, music, and spoken word poetry, etc.
Pittsburgh Creative Corps Artist Directory
T. Foley
Primary Discipline
Artistic Practice
Painting/works on paper/printmaking
Textile / fabric / weaving
Socially Engaged Art
Easy Pieces, active 2010-12, digital media, performance.
About Face, ongoing (since 2015), collaborative portrait-drawing game.
Locally Toned, active 2009-2013, digital media, performance.
Soft Sculpture, ongoing (since 2022), embroidery, appliqué, hand-sewing, fabric remnants, old clothes, found textiles, upholstery foam.
Dimensional Collage, ongoing (since 2017), cut paper, photocopies and enlargements of images, archival adhesive, string.
About the Artist
T. Foley is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She uses humor, her own life experiences, and source material from the real world to make participatory art works, videos, textile, and paper-collage works.
She produces public art in which participants may see themselves, collaborating to make and share, imagine and play. She facilitates About Face, a collaborative drawing game, in which participants reconsider traditional approaches to portraiture and make chalk pastel or ink drawings together. In her multimedia performance The Dummy Is Present, Foley puppeteered a mute ventriloquist figure online, coaxing performances out of unwitting participants on Chatroulette.com before live/participatory audiences. In her project Locally Toned, she engaged Pittsburghers to create and share homegrown ringtones. Foley makes art with others to affirm our collective creativity.
Foley holds a BA in English Literature, and studied film/video production and fine art as an independent student. She’s received fellowships from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and The Pittsburgh Foundation. She’s been awarded residencies by Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Deeplocal, The Banff Centre, Visual Studies Workshop, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Collage with photos by Anna Lee-Fields, Heather Mull, Carolina Loyola Garcia, and T. Foley
Web
Accreditations, Certifications, and/or Awards
- The Art Center College of Design, independent studies in illustration, 2012-2015
- Pittsburgh Filmmakers, independent studies in film, digital media and video, 1991-2007
- Duquense University, BA in English, 1988
Provides Fabrication Services to Other Artists
No
Teaching Artist
Yes, ages 4 and up
Joined the Directory
December 2025
Related
PROJECT
Pittsburgh Creative Corps
Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.
“I’m interested in making public works of art which affirm our collective creativity and in which people can see themselves.”
T. Foley
Contact the Artist
Please enter information in all of the required fields below.
Related
PROJECT
Pittsburgh Creative Corps
Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.
