Expertise

Topics:  Documentary Film, Performance Art, Digital Works, Mainstream Media, Video Games, Video Art

Industries: Performing Arts, Media - Online

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 practice spans interventions in mainstream media, performance art, digital works, documentary film, video art and video games. A recent recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the Impact Award at IndieCade and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund, Washko’s 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 at the New Museum and more. Her projects have been presented internationally at venues including 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.

Media Experience

The politics of play at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360  — The Boston Globe
As a child in the 1990s and early 2000s, Angela Washko played video games. Her video “Don’t Leave Me” from the “Heroines with Baggage” series — artfully installed over her wallpaper, “Heroines with Baggage: Setting the Stage” — dissects how the games amplified the gender binary. It’s horrifying. Wasp-waisted women swoon as hulking, weapon-wielding men work to save them. In the wallpaper, Washko parses the images with text: “saved by a knight,” “perpetually apologetic,” “women dying while men watch.”

PAM CUT's Doc-O-Rama Shines a Spotlight on Queer Performers  — Willamette Week
Mrs. Kasha Davis appeared in Season 7 of RuPaul’s Drag Race for only a few episodes, but her story and persona were enough to inspire Angela Washko to become a film director. “Kasha was such a casting anomaly,” says Washko, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and artist in the fields of new media, fine arts installations and video game design. “She’s a queen who found drag much later in life, with a very specific persona, which wasn’t like a pop star or model, but a 1960s housewife. That was radical to me as a feminist artist, to see a drag performer doing this as an homage.”

Forget Making Art in the Studio. Artists Are Now Developing Their Latest Works in the Metaverse  — artnet
Traveling through the bloodied lands of Azeroth, a warlock might be surprised to find the different races of the World of Warcraft game singing kumbaya around a campfire. But something like that became a regular occurrence when the artist Angela Washko, 35, started leading regular conferences on gender sensitivity in the virtual world in 2012. “I had been working with interventionist artists like the Yes Men and Flux Factory doing performances in public spaces,” explained Washko, who started playing video games when she was five years old. “I started thinking about how some of the gaming environments I was in—specifically the multi-user gaming environments—would benefit from the practices of those activist-oriented communities.”

Stamps Speaker Series lecturer discusses misogyny, video games  — The Michigan Daily
Angela Washko, an artist, writer and activist, began her lecture speaking about her project targeting hate speech in public video games — specifically World of Warcraft — at a crowded Michigan Theater. “I thought that I could use my background in performance art, grassroots activism and collective organizing to directly talk to players about why the community had become so homophobic, misogynistic, and racist in its public communication channels, at least on all the servers that I’ve played on,” Washko said.