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Angela Washko

She // Her // Hers

Media Artist

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Headshot of a cisgender woman with short purple hair wearing a yellow, black, and white tile-patterned shirt. The woman has pink tinted skin and dark red lips with a high gloss finish.

Photo by Gray Swartzel.

After becoming a mother, I was concerned that I would never be able to get all of my work done and that I would have to make compromises in my practice that I didn’t want to make. Motherhood has become an asset to my practice — it has created a clarity around what projects I urgently pursue (and which opportunities I don’t), and it has shifted my work in surprising, personal, new directions.”

As a feminist media artist working in a variety of forms, Angela Washko is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. Washko's interdisciplinary practice spans interventions in mainstream media and virtual environments, performance art, digital works, video art, documentary film, and video games. In 2012, she founded The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an intervention inside the popular online video game. Her recent project, The Game: The Game, is a critical video game focused on holding pickup artists accountable for their coercive antifeminist practices. She most recently completed Workhorse Queen, a documentary film exploring the impact of reality television on public understandings of gender, sexuality, aging, and community. The film has won numerous awards at international film festivals and is currently being broadcast on STARZ, Amazon Prime, AppleTV, and more.

A recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the Impact Award at Indiecade, and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund grant, her practice has been highlighted in The New Yorker, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, Art in America, The New York Times, Rhizome, and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), 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 is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Donor -This award was generously supported by the USA Ambassadors.

This artist page was last updated on: 07.08.2024

In a​​ windowless room bathed in red light, three people sit with their backs to the camera and facing a computer monitor. In the background is a floating wall covered in tiled images.

Installation view of The Game: The Game by Angela Washko at STUK in Leuven, Belgium.

Photo by Kristof Vrancken, courtesy of STUK Arts Center.

<em>The Game: The Game</em> playthrough by Angela Washko thumbnail.

Playthrough video documentation of The Game: The Game by Angela Washko.

Video courtesy of the artist.