In addition to initiating and organising The Writer’s Kitchen, Renée is an artist who writes for digital environments. She is a Senior Lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy and the Piet Zwart Institute, and a researcher at Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL) at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
She completed her BA at the University of Dallas Constantin College of Liberal Arts, with a curriculum spanning the arts, humanities, and sciences. After her MFA at the University of Arizona, she moved to the Netherlands in 1993 as an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie, followed by two years as a researcher in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, where she met her husband, Cesare Davolio.
Drawn to online writing, she later pursued a second Master’s in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University (Leicester, GB), supported by a scholarship from the Institute of Creative Technology. She is currently a PhD candidate at LUCA School of Art/KU Leuven within the research cluster Deep Histories Fragile Memories.
From 1996 until 2012, Renée collaborated with Riek Sijbring and Femke Snelting under the name De Geuzen: a foundation for multi-visual research. When they started, they were influenced by our time together at the Jan van Eyck, where art, design, and theory coexisted. They were also fascinated by the emergence of the internet, the popular vernacular of the web, and the DIY sharing culture made possible by networked connectivity. Their practice took various forms, combining art, design, coding, theoretical enquiry, and ongoing dialogue and learning with others.
Building on that work, she continued to explore narratives and writing for digital environments and how dramaturgy and the staging of the text shifted in each context. With grants from the Creative Industry Funds and a Mondriaan Stipendium for Established Artists, she created The Warp and Weft of Memory, a project exhibited at H401 and online, that examined the wardrobe of the Dutch artist Gisèle d’Ailly van Waterschoot van der Gracht.
Most recently, as part of her doctoral work, she published The Annotated Garden & Compost in VIS: Nordic Journal for Artistic Research (Issue 15), a two-part artistic research project hosted on the Research Catalogue. The work is creative non-fiction and digital dramaturgy meditating on garden pedagogies, ecological precarity, technological acceleration, and the entanglement of environmental and machinic systems.
For more on Renée Turner’s practice, see: https://narrativeresonance.net/
