“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.