Alexis Williams is a Canadian eco-artist, writer and teacher interested in mushrooms, birds and ecological associations. She currently experiments with paint and words while doing a string of artist residencies in Ireland. She continues to host online research programs for artists to study ecology at the Biophilium, facilitates 100 biology lectures and artists talks a year, gives regular ecology webinars and hosts a monthly Death Cafe for artists to discus mortality and grieving in art. She is an active naturalist, photographing wildlife daily and is a member of several field naturalist and mycology clubs. She is a forager, wild fermenter and native silk moth conservationist- in 2022 she released 300 Saturnid caterpilars in the Ottawa area.

Her writing has been published in the New York Mycological Society Journal, The Caterpillar, The Fungaphile, Trail and Landscape, the Earthkeeper's Handbook, the Germinating Herbarium Anthology and Atlas Obscura.

She hosts an annual art swap that produces 700 small works a year.

One of her sound pieces was selected to be in the 2014 Marrakech Biennale. She has a love for biology and frequently uses natural materials like mushroom spores, butterfly dust and spider webs to experiment with untraditional print-making techniques. Her work often highlights the kinship of Art, Science and Mysticism. In 2013 she had two solo shows of a collection of monumental sacred geometry made with graphite rubbings of man hole covers. Her most recent solo show was a collection of Shamanic masks that showcased art and science alliances as contemporary magic.

Williams holds a BFA and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal where she studied Art and its connections to meditation and biology and worked as a Teaching Assistant for undergraduate classes on Ecology & Art and Book Making.  She worked as a technician the digital print lab at Concordia for 3 years and has given workshops on letterpress, various experimental printing techniques, movement and biology.

Williams is an amateur mycologist. In 2011 she was commissioned by the Ottawa Art Gallery to construct a mushroom garden that would engage the community. The project was supported by a grant from the Awesome Foundation and was awarded the Mechtronix Graduate Fellowship for Innovative Excellence.  She was a Pukaskwa National Park Artist in Residence in 2013 where she studied the park’s mycology and lead public tours on the wild mushrooms and her relationship to them as an artist. In 2014 Concordia University awarded her a Graduate Mobility Award to photograph the wild mushrooms of Canada to illustrate a book she wrote on the subject, a project she continued as painter in residence at the Sachaqa Art Center, Peru in 2015. One of these paintings won the Ottawa Field Naturalists Club art competition in 2016.

In 2014 the Hexegram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies awarded her an internationalisation grant to participate in several artist residencies including a month in Finland at the Arteles Creative Center. While in Finland she studied with the Finish Bio Art Society and learned to print with living yeast. She also used the grant to participate in the Culture Vultures Sidi Ali residency in Morocco to study underground Sufi trance rituals and then produced the catalogue of work inspired by the group’s experience.

As an undergrad she ran the urban artist collective Metroglyph, which met weekly to produce work. The collective showed and hosted events in Montreal. From 2004 - 2007 Williams worked collaboratively as a performance artist with Fiona Annis. In 2005 - 2008 they ran the fire centric circus, Swan Vestas, with whom she wrote and performed across Canada and the states as well as running the administrative side of the business. From 2009 – 2012 she worked as a live Video Jockey performing at music festivals and events around eastern Canada. Between her BFA and MFA she studied event management at Algonquin College in Ottawa. In 2014 she founded the Ayatana Artist Residency Program as director and continues to lead international artists on science expeditions with Canadian scientists, pilots and naturalists.