Libby Atkins was birthed in the summertime by a lioness inside of a large fish. The large fish gifted her a long shiny tail and vivid dreams. Today she has human legs, a problem with clock time, and struggles to sit still.

NYC- based multidisciplinary artist-researcher Libby Atkins’ (she/her) impulsive creations come from stimming and a desire to archive memories. As a PhD student in Anthropology at New York University, her doctoral research centers the lived experiences of psychiatric survivors (like herself) in the U.S. in critically examining strategies of care work.

Passionate about queering access to art spaces, she is self-taught and has learned adjacent to institution. Libby experiments by using everyday “whatever works” mediums, like drawings on airplane barf bags or collages made from “spell jar purse-trash”. She believes inspiration is everywhere (on a good day), and that everything can come alive with enough attention.

Her writing practice began with gossiping to her childhood diaries. Later, she was a teen staff writer for Sex, Etc, a “For Teens, By Teens” queer-inclusive sexual education magazine, and she continued to write op-eds about mental and sexual health access and consent culture in her university newspaper. Libby graduated with a B.A. in anthropology, sociology, and environmental studies from Rice University in 2022. Her undergraduate anthropology thesis research explored the experiences of neuroqueer artists creating in crip time and used patchwork ethnography as a method for revolutionary wandering.

Mercury Journals is her creative non-fiction newsletter published semi-regularly on Substack.