Jeanette Andrews
2024–25 CAST Visiting Artist
Exploring the bounds of perception and interpretation through magic
About the Residency
Jeanette Andrews defies the boundaries of creative expression and illusion, using magic as a medium for contemporary art and academic inquiry. As a CAST Visiting Artist, Andrews collaborates with faculty members Graham M. Jones and Arvind Satyanarayan to develop an original, interactive, site-specific public performance.
Magic performers use carefully devised framing devices to produce experiences of the visually fantastical. If viewers receive different framing information, what might their responses to a magic performance reveal about the place of trust and belief in constructing experience? Might their metacognition be harnessed to actively explore how we arrive at knowledge in the face of uncertainty?
Schedule
Class Visit to 21A.520 Magic, Science, and Religion
Offered by MIT Anthropology Department
Taught by Graham M. Jones
As part of her fall 2025 campus residency, Jeanette Andrews visited Graham Jones’s 21A.520 Magic, Science, and Religion class, in which cross-cultural perspectives on magical practices are explored and students design and perform their own illusions.
The Attestation: A Performance of Illusions
October 3, 2025 / 5–6:30pm
October 4, 2025 / 3–4:30pm
MIT Kresge Little Theater, Building W16
48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
What will you believe? Join CAST Visiting Artist Jeanette Andrews for an experiential performance that culminates in a twist ending!
Audience engagement is critical to the final outcome of the piece, where Andrews invites you to examine your own perceptions through the lens of illusion, by combining acts of magic with a study of visual and social systems that guide human behavior. This unforgettable experience was informed by research with MIT Faculty members Graham Jones and Arvind Satyanarayan, and explores the cognitive science of belief polarization.
On Wonder
MIT Museum
September 2024
An evening featuring the Boston/MIT premiere of Andrews’ In Plain Listen, which uses a Morse-code-based musical notation system to create a musical score depicting the secret of one of the oldest pieces of magic in history purely in music form, performed in tandem with the original magic effect. MIT PhD student Valerie Chen accompanied on cello.
Following the performance, Jeanette Andrews was joined by MIT Professor of Anthropology Graham M. Jones and MIT Professor of Computer Science Arvind Satyanarayan in a conversation about magic, culture, and visual communication.
Co-produced by MIT Anthropology, MIT CSAIL, and Morningside Academy for Design. Supported by Amar G. Bose Research Grants. In Plain Listen was originally commissioned and funded by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.
Collaborators at MIT
Graham M. Jones is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist who explores how people use language and other media to enact expertise in practice, performance, and interaction. He has written two books on magic: Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft (University of California Press, 2011), which describes day-to-day life and everyday talk within the insular subculture of contemporary French illusionists; and Magic’s Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which examines the meaning of magic in Western modernity, shuttling between the intellectual history of anthropology and the cultural history of popular entertainment. Jones is a Professor of Anthropology and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT.
Biography: MIT Anthropology
Arvind Satyanarayan is an associate professor (pre-tenure) of computer science at MIT, where he leads the Visualization Group at MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). The group’s research uses interactive data visualization as a petri dish to study intelligence augmentation, or how computational representations and software systems help amplify our cognition and creativity while respecting our agency.
Biography: Arvind Satyanarayan
Website: Visualization Group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Studio Assistant: Eli King
Cinematographer: Ari Isenberg
Cognitive Science Advisor: Kartik Chandra
Biography
Utilizing her decades-long technical training in sleight-of-hand magic, Jeanette Andrews creates interactive, surreal vignettes that explore the nature of perception and cognition. She invites audiences to co-create her illusory performances, which function as live thought experiments. Often utilizing refined yet common items, such as glassware, paper, plants, and fabric, her works investigate perceptual anomalies, expectation violation, and the nature of belief. She also works in sound, installation, film, and objects to bring her ideas about hidden worlds to life. Artnet says, “Andrews’s avant-garde approach to magic transforms it into performance art.”
Website: www.jeanetteandrewsstudio.com
Social: Instagram | YouTube
In the Media
Working Artist: An illusionist makes magic to probe our minds’ susceptibility to disinformation, Boston Globe, September 23, 2025
Magic will help explain an age of misinformation as MIT brings on its first illusionist-in-residence, Cambridge Day, November 16, 2024