Vanity Project is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary art studio founded by the husband-and-wife artist duo Heather Besemer-Schulz and Jeff Schulz. Positioned at the intersection of architecture, image-making, and cultural critique, the studio privileges hybridity over fixed disciplinary boundaries, evolving into a practice defined by agility, experimentation, and critical intent.

Their name, Vanity Project, serves as both provocation and manifesto: a reclamation of “vanity” from its dismissive connotations and a pointed affirmation of the value of creative labor. Here, making is not indulgence but necessity, a deliberate act shaped by the tension between play and purpose, conviction and curiosity. Through this lens, their work becomes a way of navigating the layered terrain of identity, desire, care, and mediated experience.

The studio’s aesthetic moves fluidly between the polished and the raw, drawing from both commercial vernaculars and experimental forms. Each project functions as both personal archive and public intervention, forming an evolving body of work that privileges reflection over resolution. Refusing easy classification, their practice exists in the liminal space between disciplines, where ambiguity and friction are not barriers, but generative tools.

Their work is not concerned with resolution but with resonance. In resisting genre, they invite complexity. In embracing risk, they make space for meaning. The result is a practice that defies categorization while affirming the urgency of both aesthetic and intellectual risk.

IG: @vanityprojectdesign