Since 1979, Ginny Sykes has built a career in the arts in a wide array of media including public art, performance, painting, video, ceramics and more. She began her research into questions of gender and female empowerment in high school, painting her first portrait of a woman at 6 feet tall. She engages collaboratively with musicians, dancers, video artists, and other performers to bring to life the complexity of identities women negotiate and to critique patriarchal codes that have over-determined artistic content through much of history. Her work incorporates Jungian ideas, symbol, and myth to resist classifications of a (non-existent) universalized female experience.

Sykes’s awards include First Prize for Video Art from Art Performing Festival, Naples, Italy (2022), Chicago DCASE grants (2021, 2016), Loyola University’s Community and Global Stewards Fellowship for performance (2013), and an Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Artists for her public art project Rora (1999). She has received artist residencies with Artegiro, Conzano, Italy (2019), Water Tower Arts Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria (2021, 2016) Traffic Jam #4 in Binissalem, Mallorca (2015), Ragdale Foundation and Vermont Studio Center.  In 2023 she studied with Gary Brackett of Living Theatre (founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina), culminating in two live performances of Paradise Now in Naples, Italy. She studied performance art with Martha Wilson (2021) and Ernesto Pujol (2015). From 2016-2018 she worked with Teresa Mangiacapra of the Italian feminist performance collective le nemesiache in Naples, Italy, on a trilogy of performance works. In 2021, she partnered with Joel Hall Dancers & Center to create Minerva, a performance and sculpture happening, and in 2023 recreated She’s Only Sleeping for the exhibition Feminist to the Core. Sykes has an MA in Women and Gender Studies from Loyola University (2013), a BFA from Washington University (1979), and studied painting and art history in Florence, Italy (1988-1991). Sykes has completed over 40 public art projects, and exhibits and performs her work in the US and internationally. She divides her working time between Chicago and Naples, Italy. 

  Selected exhibitions in the United States include: Chicago Cultural Center, Loyola University Art Museum, Noyes Cultural Center, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL; LACE, Los Angeles, CA; APW Gallery, Long Island City, NY; Italian Cultural Institute, San Francisco, California; International exhibitions include: The Tangle of Existence, Castel dell’Ovo, Naples, Italy;  The Incandescent Ephemeral, top Schillerpalais, Berlin, Germany; Pieno e Vuoto, Pinacoteca Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Gaeta, Italy; Water Tower Art Festival, Sofia, Bulgaria; HearteartH Festival, Berlin, Germany, and Milan, Italy; Traffic Jam #4, Saltillo Contemporary, Saltillo, Mexico and Can Gelabert Casal de Cultura, Mallorca, Spain; Supermarket, Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden.