Steen has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; the Printmaking Workshop in New York City; and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA); among others.
Her work is in the collections of several public art collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Robert McGlaughlin Gallery in Canada, and the Library of Congress.[2]
Experience of synesthesia
She is notable for her artworks which make use of her experiences of synesthesia and for her work in making the knowledge of synesthesia available to people, particularly through the American Synesthesia Association. Steen experiences colors while viewing letters and numbers (grapheme-color synesthesia), music (timbre-color synesthesia), and touch-color synesthesia in response to acupuncture and pain.[3] She has shared her synesthetic experiences on the first website about synesthesia created by Karen Chenausky, Adam Rosen and her in 1996 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[4][5][6]
Along with Greta Berman and Daphne Maurer, she contributed to and edited Synesthesia: Art and the Mind (2008), which documents an exhibition of artists who were known or thought to be synesthetic. This exhibition was held at the McMaster Museum of Art. It was co-curated by her and Greta Berman and ran from September 2008 through December 2008.
Steen has presented her work at numerous conferences on synesthesia including; The University of Edinburgh, 2008; University of Granada, 2007; University of California Berkeley, 2004; University of California San Diego, 2002; Yale 1999; and the University of Cambridge, Trinity College, 1997; among many others. She has been a co-chair and panelist for talks on Synesthesia and Art at the College Art Association’s annual conferences in 2005 and 2009. She has presented her work at the School of Visual Arts in NYC in 2007, at The Juilliard School every year since 2000, and at M.I.T. in 1997.
She has been in numerous television and radio documentaries including “60 Minutes”, the BBC, and NPR, and in many books, magazines and newspapers including, the Smithsonian Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
The character of the synesthetic painter in Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's play The Valley of Astonishment, 2014, was based on part of Steen's life.[8]
Selected Listing of Public Appearances
Date of Appearance
Event Description
June 2014
Young Vic Theatre, London, UK
March 2014
Keynote Speaker South Carolina Federation of Museums, Camden, SC
Steen, Carol; Berman, Greta (December 2013). Synesthesia and the Artistic Process. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-960332-9.
Berman, Greta; Steen, Carol; Maurer, Daphne (October 25, 2008). Synesthesia: Art and the Mind. McMaster Museum of Art / ABC Art Books Canada. ISBN978-0-9783585-8-7.
Von Klängen und Schmerzen: Nützliche Farbe, (Chapter 6 in Part II) Pages: 227234 in “Synästhesien – roter Faden durchs Leben?”, Edited by Alexandra Dittmar,Publisher: Die Blaue Eule, Essen (Germany), October 2007, English edition, January 2009.
Synesthesia, Carol Steen and Lawrence E. Marks, World Book Encyclopedia, Nicholas V. Kilzer, editor, 2013.