Bernadette Birzer is a multidisciplinary, post-materialist feminist artist who has lived in the Gulf South for over twenty years and creates work that explores the deconstruction of capitalist traditional tropes found within American pop culture, society, and built environment. Themes of decolonizing spaces and vocabulary carry over into all of their work (research, sculpture, ceramics, installation, and collage) with a visual and metaphoric emphasis on exploring the definition behind the term “abject” and consequences this description has on subjects in American society. Their creations reference the human condition and the body dysmorphia experiences and relationships in a post-colonial world create. Biomorphic and anthropomorphic abstractions often emerge in their work, visually commenting on human relationships within pop culture, commercial products, the natural environment, and what it means to be an animal. Bernadette’s work is about the human condition, nature, and their experience in space.

Bernadette is also a professional archivist who has spent most of their career and artistic energy managing and processing special collections centered on women's history, women in higher education, their activism, and art in the Gulf South. As a feminist archivist and artist, Bernadette's research focus has been centered on feminist reflections of the abject and how stereotypes regarding "others" have manifested and affected our way of seeing in American history and culture. Utilizing this research, Bernadette was inspired to amplify DIY feminism materials found in the Newcomb Archives collection they managed from 2018-2026. While this connection between the abject and women's archives may seem arbitrary to some, for Bernadette, the connection is very strong.

Another inspiration that influences Bernadette's work is their relationship to the environment especially as a survivor and evacuee of Mt Pinto in 1991.