![A white man with sandy blonde hair, curved eyebrows, and a full red-and-gray beard. His head tilts up at the viewer with slightly raised brows. He is smiling with his mouth closed showing his dimples.](https://usa-p-36588810407f.b-cdn.net/0ef0ea4b-c4d6-4e9a-a628-046a938b011a/andy-slater-3.jpg?crop=500%2C500%2C0%2C0&width=500)
Photo by Tressa Slater.
Andy Slater is a Chicago-based media artist, sound designer, teaching artist, and disability advocate. Slater is the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists and director of the Sound as Sight accessible field-recording project.
He holds a master’s in sound arts and industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022–23 Leonardo CripTech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts / Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago. In 2020, he was acknowledged for his art in The New York Times (“28 Ways to Learn About Disability Culture”).
As a blind member of the extended and virtual reality community, he is using his voice as a creator and advocate to help shape the industry to be more accessible for disabled people. His current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, alt text for sound and image, sci-fi, spacial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film and video games. He is a teaching artist with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and Experimental Sound Studios. He is also a member of the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young Sound Seekers advisory board.
Slater has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the Transmediale festival in Berlin, the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, Critical Distance in Toronto, Experimental Sound Studios in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, Flux Factory in New York, and the Momenta dance Company in Oak Park, Illinois.
Donor -This award was generously supported by the Walder Foundation.
This artist page was last updated on: 08.26.2024