Vanessa is a queer Franco-Asian American writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Their writing practice—spanning lyrical nonfiction, art criticism, and hybrid fiction—explores the fluid dimensions of identity through intimate engagements with memory, loss, and opacity. Their visual art practice bridges intermedial installation and photo poetics to take up questions of diasporic and ecological disappearance. Holyoak’s first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, published in 2023 by Sming Sming Books, explores the longing for forestial darkness in an era of hyper-illumination. They are currently working on an essay collection on archiving the loss of their childhood home in the Los Angeles fires. Holyoak’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, Artforum, BOMB, e-flux, East of Borneo, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, frieze Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California in comparative media and culture. They received their MFA in writing and photography/media from the California Institute of the Arts and their BA from Barnard College of Columbia University.