Angela Washko Appointed to Stamps Faculty
One of the country’s leading interdisciplinary feminist artists and educators has been appointed to the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design faculty at the University of Michigan.
Angela Washko will be the Catherine B. Heller College Professor of Art at Stamps. After nearly a decade at Carnegie Mellon University, Washko will take on this new role.
“The University of Michigan’s commitment to transdisciplinary and community-engaged pedagogy and explicit acknowledgment of the many roles that art and design can have within culture have made it an institution that I have long admired,” said Washko. “I am absolutely thrilled to be joining an academic community whose mission and values so clearly match my own as an educator, artist, organizer, and activist.”
With a compelling portfolio of creative work that ranges from multimedia installations to films, video games, creative writing, and more, Washko is an internationally renowned artist and an experienced educator whose research deploys methodologies that span the interdisciplinary structure of art and design. Her work challenges conventions and offers a critique of mass media. Washko’s body of work has garnered critical acclaim and significant honors, including the 2020 Creative Capital Award and the prestigious United States Artist Fellowship in 2023, which “…recognizes the most compelling artists working and living in the United States.”
Workhorse Queen is Washko’s most recent documentary film project, “…explores the complexities of mainstream television’s impact on queer performance culture” through the perspective of a cast member of RuPaul’s Drag Race as well as local Rochester, NY based performers who have not been cast on the show. The award-winning film was screened at many international film festivals, had a broadcast première on STARZ, and received numerous awards, including Best Documentary Feature Film at the American Film Festival in Poland, Buffalo International Film Festival, and the San Francisco Documentary Film Festival.
In Johanna Fateman’s ArtForum review of Angela Washko’s video game project The Game: The Game she describes the project as “a choose-your-own-adventure narrative in the radical tradition of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s early interactive works — an intensely researched nightmare world based on the toxic pedagogy of pickup-artist (‘PUA’) gurus…Washko is dealing with ugly and important material in ingenious ways — she’s one to watch.”
With recent solo exhibitions at STUK in Belgium and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Washko has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in critically acclaimed group exhibitions at venues including Centre Pompidou-Metz, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan Design Triennale, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Belvedere 21 Museum (Vienna), Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial, Portland Art Museum, and the Korean Film Archive.
In the announcement of Washko’s position approval by the University of Michigan Board of Regents on May 16, 2024, Stamps Dean Carlos Francisco Jackson noted that Washko has “specific expertise in digital technology and performance, and is well-suited to engage many existing facets of the undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Stamps and, most importantly, to assist in expanding the time-based and technology-driven infrastructure at the school.”
“I can’t wait to join the University of Michigan and begin collaborating with students, faculty, staff, and the broader Ann Arbor and Detroit surrounding communities on new modes of artistic research, cultural production, and critical imaginings around our shared digitally mediated futures,” said Washko.
Washko begins her appointment in late August and will begin teaching courses at Stamps in January 2025.