Susan Rankaitis (born 1949) is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing.
[1][2] Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography.
"[3][4] Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
[1][5] Rankaitis draws on science in her work—particularly ideas generated through research in the fields of biology and neuroscience and she collaborates regularly with scientists on interdisciplinary projects.
[6] Rankaitis has served since 1990 as Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California.