Hannah O'Hare Bennett is a Madison-based multidisciplinary artist with nine years of professional practice since completing her MFA in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2017. She came to graduate school after fifteen years in sustainable agriculture and food systems, including two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, a country and community she has continued to return to and work with ever since. That life before art runs through everything she makes.
She makes medium-scale multimedia tapestries (described aptly as "extremely low relief sculptural textiles") involving bead weaving, yarn, handmade paper, and found inclusions. The work is rooted in the disorientation, translation, and hard-won connection of cultural integration, drawn from her experience living in a rural Ecuadorian community where Spanish was new, the social codes were unfamiliar, and friendship was built slowly across real difference. The series titled, People, Places and Things, reflects that grounding in language, story, and the particulars of human experience. In her own words, the work is a celebration of incongruity, imperfect language, and incredible luck.
She is the recipient of a 2025 Women's Artist Forward Art Prize, a UW-Madison Division of the Arts Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award and a UW-Madison University Fellowship. Her residency record includes Penland School of Craft, Women's Studio Workshop, Tides Institute, Playa Summer Lake, and Kimmel Harding Nelson. She has taught at Arrowmont, Pyramid Atlantic, the Paper and Book Intensive, and the Morgan Conservatory. She has held college teaching positions at Mount Mary University, University of Montana Western, and UW-Madison.