Samantha Nye (born 1980) is an American video artist and painter. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, her work focuses on body image in elderly women and non-binary people.
Samantha Nye was born in 1980 in Hollywood, Florida, and raised in Miami, where she was "steeped in a South Beach aesthetic". She originally worked as a child model and actor, and she once unsuccessfully auditioned for The All-New Mickey Mouse Club by performing the Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". She recalled making "goddess" art in high school.
She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, where she obtained a BFA in 2010. In 2018, she obtained her MFA in painting from Columbia University School of the Arts.
In 2013, she started her "Visual Pleasure/Jukebox Cinema" series of scopitone video installations, later using some of them for her master's thesis. In March 2021, she had her first solo show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: a nightclub-like installation called My Heart's in a Whirl where a screen plays remakes of scopitone videos featuring nonbinary and trans people and elderly women. Boston Art Review called My HeartâÂÂs in a Whirl one of their "Favorite Art Happenings of 2021".
Her video Army of Love was featured in the 2022 Dutch exhibit Come Alive, The Power of Pleasure. In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video. In November 2024, the New Yorker reported that for her newest video project, she was doing a "lesbian takeover" of the Belvedere Guest House for Men in Cherry Grove, New York; titled Femininity, it required a casting call involving a few dozen middle-aged to elderly queer women.
In 2019, she started a series of paintings called Attractive People, Doing Attractive Things in Attractive PlacesâÂÂDouble Your PleasureâÂÂDouble Your Pleasure; named after Slim Aarons' remark about his own photographs, they are inspired by Aarons' poolside photographs and depict elderly nude queer women. She also worked with Todd Stong for the 2025 joint exhibition Split Fountain, where she did three oil paintings of nude women.
Her themes include body image in elderly women and non-binary people, inspired by her experiences of living with close friends of her mother and grandmother.
She works at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor of art and design.
Nye is based in Philadelphia. Nye is lesbian.