BIO

Brian O’Dell weighed 10 pounds and was 23 inches long when he was born on January 8, 1976 in Hammond, IN. He was raised to adulthood in Lansing IL. Being a solitary boy, Brian spent much of his childhood watching movies and using his precocious drawing skills to create imaginary worlds and the characters within them. Naturally, this led to an interest in science fiction and alternate theories of natural phenomena, which continues to inform his work to this day.

Exhibiting occasional signs of obsessive compulsive disorder, he tends to measure his food and is very careful as to what he allows in his body. The food he eats often becomes the subject matter for his art. Brian is fascinated by the magic that exists in the everyday, especially the unseen microscopic and macroscopic worlds that coexist with our own.

“He uses this phenomenon of biological processes to point out the elegant traps of self-confirmatory bias.” says artist Millie Wilson. He attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, IL from 1994-1995, realizing shortly thereafter that this was not the school for him and left. So, after spending two years at South Suburban College in South Holland, IL, he transferred to the California Institute of the Arts, where he completed his BFA in 2002. Brian then stayed at CalArts for two more years to pursue his Master of Fine Arts degree, which he obtained in May 2004.