Brandon Ballengée (b. 1974, Arnaudville, Louisiana) is a visual artist, biologist, and environmental educator. Ballengée holds a Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology from Plymouth University (UK) in association with the Hochschule für Gestaltung Zürich (Switzerland). From 2016-2019, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, studying the impact of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill on fish species. He was also a 2017/18 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. examining species “missing” from the Gulf since the 2010 oil spill. In 2019 he received a Creative Capital Award and delivered a TEDxLSU talk. In 2020, he was included in the 2020 Grist 50 Emerging Environmental Leaders. In 2021, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was appointed Adjunct Faculty of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Tulane University.
Ballengée’s artwork has previously been exhibited throughout the USA and internationally in countries, including Canada, Argentina, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Russia, India, China, South Korea, and Australia. In the summer of 2013, the first career survey of Ballengeé’s work debuted at the Château de Chamarande (Essonne, France), and traveled to the Museum Het Domein (Sittard, Netherlands) in 2014. In 2016, a twenty-year retrospective of his work was held at the University of Wyoming Art Museum in Laramie, Wyoming. He has held solo exhibitions at Ronald Feldman Gallery (New York, NY), Redbud Arts Center (Houston, Texas), and Jennifer Baahng (New York, NY) in 2023. Ballengée’s work has been collected by a number of significant public and private collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Progressive Collection, Mayfield, OH; the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and NASA, Washington, DC among many others.