ZACH VERDIN is an American artist and a fourth-generation Los Angeles Jew born on Texas soil who now lives in Tennessee. His work privileges tactics over objects, nurturing diverse constellations of collaborators to produce vital networks, brands, and artifacts. Informed by his professional experience in the fields of technology, media, academia, and politics, much of this work aims to challenge entrenched power structures and overturn common assumptions about the flow of influence in these spaces.
Verdin’s core artistic project is developing new cultural infrastructure for America. An important precursor was NewHive, a multimedia publishing platform and community for internet art, which he founded in 2009 and helped grow to millions of users over its eight-year lifespan. Today he works to activate existing communities across America and to cultivate new ones, developing physical and online spaces while elevating individuals whose visionary work is rooted in their unique geography. In Glass Farms, TN, he is developing American Sanctuary, the first in a series of structures that employ the language of architecture to literalize the human need for refuge, reflection, and communion.
Similar tactics guide Parable, an entertainment brand launched in 2024 to invest in sacred American stories and the people who tell them. Many of Parable’s initiatives bridge the new-media and entertainment sectors, like Doomscroll, a political talk show created and hosted by the online-culture critic and artist Joshua Citarella. Parable also invests in narrative films and documentaries about the multifarious experience of life in the United States, most recently The Brutalist (2004), winner of three Academy Awards, four BAFTAs, and three Golden Globes. Verdin is the executive director of Knowledge Futures, founded in 2019 at MIT with a mission to make information useful, and he sits on the Board of Directors at Institute 193, founded in 2009 and based in Lexington, KY, which collaborates with artists, musicians, and writers to document the cultural landscape of the modern South.
Motivating Verdin's practice is a theory of power that centers on vital culture and its role in transforming society. In response to our current cultural and political inflection point, Verdin has launched the American Cultural Project, a twenty-year intervention to empower each and every inhabitant of this country, with the goal of transitioning away from extraction and inflammation and toward a future of vitality and connectedness.
Verdin’s work has been covered in a range of media outlets, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, Buzzfeed, Fast Company, The Verge, and Rolling Stone. He was also the subject of a 2018 QAnon drop accusing him of being part of the Silicon Valley Illuminati.