Roberta Allen


Roberta Allen is a short story writer, novelist, memoirist, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, and creative writing instructor. Language has been the inspiration for both her writing and her art. In her conceptual works - which include drawings, collages, artist books, photo/text works, installations and digital prints - she explores how text informs or changes our perception of images, often with more than a hint of humor and a philosophical bent. With dark humor, her books present characters at odds with themselves and others, sometimes in exotic locales.

Early life

Roberta Allen is a New York-based artist who was born and raised in New York, NY. At age twenty, she traveled alone to Europe and lived briefly in Athens, Amsterdam and Berlin, later in Mexico. Over the years, she traveled, often alone, to the Peruvian Amazon, Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt, Mali and countries in Central America.

Art career

Allen began as a painter living in Amsterdam where she had her first one-person gallery exhibition in 1967. After several one-person shows in New York, she joined John Weber Gallery in 1973 and had one-person exhibitions there in 1974, 75, 77, 79. During this time, she also had one-person gallery exhibitions in Milan, Dusseldorf, Brussels, Munich and Rome. She had one-person museum exhibitions at MoMA P.S. 1, L.I.C., NY, 1977, 80; the Kunstforum, Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich, 1981, and The Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth, Western Australia, 1989. Her conceptual works, which combine image and text, include drawings, collages, artist books, photo/text series and installations. She has been in over one hundred group exhibitions worldwide. After 1981, while continuing to make conceptual art and exhibiting intermittently, she preferred to stay outside the art world. In 2014, the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, CA began a catalogue raisonne of her multiple edition 1970s artist books and a one-person exhibition of her 1970s art took place at Minus Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn. A one-person show of recent conceptual drawings and one-of-a-kind artist books took place at the Athenaeum in 2016.

Selected one person exhibitions

began writing fiction in 1979 while making conceptual art. Her first stories were published in 1980 by Sun & Moon Press in the anthology Contemporary American Fiction. Her first story collection was The Traveling Woman,. Her other books are The Daughter,, Certain People, ; Amazon Dream Fast Fiction,, The Playful Way to Serious Writing, The Playful to Knowing Yourself, and The Dreaming Girl. Her latest story collection, The Princess of Herself, will be published by Pelekinesis in September. Her short shorts and short stories have appeared in over 300 literary magazines, including Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, Open City, The Collagist, Gargoyle and in many anthologies, including Micro Fiction, to be published by W.W. Norton in 2017. She received the 2015 Honorable Mention for The Gertrude Stein Award for Fiction. She has been a Tennessee Williams Fellow in Fiction at the University of the South and a Yaddo Fellow.

Teaching (writing)

Teaching positions include: The Writing Program, New School University from 1992 – 2010, Columbia University's School of the Arts, University of the South, Sewanee, TN, Parsons School of Design, NY, Summer Writers' Conference, Hofstra University, International Women's Writing Guild Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. Allen's private writing workshops began in 1991 and continue to the present.