Angela Washko Appointed Director of MFA Program

Portrait of Angela Washko — Angela Washko

The Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan is pleased to announce that Angela Washko has been appointed as the next director of the MFA in Art program. Washko will begin her three-year appointment on July 1, 2025.

“Angela is a thoughtful colleague and educator who is deeply committed to the Stamps mission to deliver the nation’s premier art and design education to the next generation. As MFA Director, Angela will be able to build from her international artistic and design-oriented practice of feminist and politically engaged interventions that span digital and new media technologies,” said Stamps Dean Carlos Francisco Jackson. “The Stamps MFA program is a dynamic studio-based research program that has the potential to deepen its leadership of avant garde and impactful artistic praxis at the university, nationally, and internationally.”

The Stamps master of fine arts degree is a two-year multidisciplinary program focused on culturally relevant creative work, driven by research and inquiry. The Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design is ranked among the top eight graduate schools in the nation for fine arts, according to the U.S. News and World Report Education Rankings.

“It is an honor to be appointed to the role of MFA Program Director at Stamps School of Art and Design. I feel deeply aligned with the program’s ambitions to support research-based, interdisciplinary, and materially sophisticated artistic work — often in dialogue with critical theory and urgent social movements,” said Washko. “I am looking forward to supporting graduate students in finding contexts for their work that align with their aspirations and intentions, while working alongside University of Michigan students, faculty, staff, and broader regional art communities to collaboratively reimagine what artistic research could look like in the complex contemporary moment we are in today.”

Washko joined the Stamps faculty as the Catherine B. Heller College Professor of Art in 2024 after nearly a decade at Carnegie Mellon University.

A politically-engaged feminist media artist, Washko is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives, with a practice that spans documentary film, interventions in mainstream media, performance art in virtual environments, net art, video art, and video games. Her recent work includes The Council is in Session, a tabletop roleplaying game and participatory improvisational performance experience inviting players to reimagine a community’s governance in the midst of catastrophe; Workhorse Queen, a documentary film exploring the complexities of mainstream television’s impact on queer performance culture; and The Game: The Game, a critical video game focused on holding pickup artists accountable for their coercive antifeminist practices.

Washko is a recipient of the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Creative Capital Award, Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism Fellowship, the Impact Award at Indiecade, and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund grant, and her projects have been presented internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Centre Pompidou-Metz, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan Design Triennale, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, and the Korean Film Archive.

Washko holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California — San Diego, and a BFA in Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art of Temple University in Philadelphia.