Uma Breakdown is an artist and award-winning game designer interested in animals, horror, queer feminist literature, and ecology, working at the intersections of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy. In 2020 Uma completed a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, écriture feminine, and disaster.
Uma makes video games with collaborator Sammy Paloma about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence. Uma is currently an Unseen Futures Fellow with A.N.D, and opened their first solo exhibition Earth A.D. co-commissioned by and touring across Wysing Arts Centre (Cambridge, 2022), FACT (Liverpool, 2023), and Quad (Derby, 2024).
Uma’s specific research interests include the work of Hélène Cixous, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; and the enacted politics of art that supports agency and collaboration in its audience. They work with an extensive range of materials and processes, including painting, code, sculpture, print, publishing, digital modelling, music, performance, and animation.
Uma regularly runs workshops and contributes to artist development programmes for organisations including Chisenhale Gallery, The Ruskin School of Art, University of Reading, and the University of The Underground. Uma also serves on access and inclusion boards for FACT and Wysing.
Recent projects include: Take The Moonlight by The Tail for Arebyte Gallery (London, 2021) which has just been shown again as part of the exhibition Hinterlands at Baltic (Gateshead, 2022), Wastework for TEXTUR (Berlin, 2021), Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements at Klosterruine (Berlin, 2022), and Surface of Scum: A Necrotic Character Generator in collaboration with Sammy Paloma, for Mayk (Bristol, 2022) and HOAX (London, 2022).
Uma’s upcoming work will include, A Wet and Heavy Noise, published by Market Gallery (Glasgow, 2022), Out of Scale for Transmediale (Berlin, 2023), and the subsequent digital and physical iterations of EARTH A.D. (2023-2024) and a new gaming work, The Well of Sickness Shimmering in early 2023.