Cody
Tracy

Cody Tracy is an interdisciplinary media artist, writer, and scholar whose work examines labor, mortality, memory, and the cultural archive of the working class. Raised in a multi-generational iron-worker and Slavic immigrant family in west-central Illinois, Tracy's practice emerges from both personal and collective histories of work, labor, and social precarity.

Tracy works across photography, cyanotype, essay film, poetry, documentary, performance, and audio narrative to construct layered, research-driven projects that investigate recurring questions of attention, circulation, and the relationships between material labor and lived experience. His writing and projects have appeared in Aeonian Magazine (including Issue #14), Protean Magazine, Catch Magazine, Uncle Projects, and Digital America (No. 26, Orientation), and his audio narratives have been featured on Wave Farm. His essay "Semiotics of The Bear: Kitchen as Content Factory" was presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in 2026, and his workshop "Walking with Light: A Solargraphy Workshop for Community-Based Image Making" has been accepted for presentation at the Society for Photography Education's 64th Annual Conference in March 2027. His artist book, Sklad, was completed in 2026.

Tracy has exhibited and performed throughout the Midwest — including a 2024 exhibition of cyanotype work at Artspace 304 — and has contributed to panels on sound narratives for Global Fusion (2020) and GLASS (2021). He is also the recipient of the Davenport Prize in Nonfiction (2018). Across his career, he has held diverse roles — from cinema instructor and academic advisor to arts director and paralegal — and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, teaching Photography and Film & Media Studies, including the inaugural offering of FMS 274: Expanded Media/Cinema. His newest project Prothonotary, a hybrid analog & digital essay film about the experience of birding in Southern Illinois, has just wrapped up and is being submitted to the global festival market this fall.

Through these varied projects and professional experiences, Tracy's work continually explores how interdisciplinary, essayistic practices can interrogate cultural memory, working-class life, and the circulation of images, text, and sound, creating an archive that foregrounds both inquiry and aesthetic experimentation.