Stephanie Owens is an interdisciplinary artist, creative researcher, and curator interested in the influence of digital networks on contemporary aesthetics and the production of subjectivity.
Since 2019 Stephanie has been Head of School of the School of Arts + Media at Plymouth College of Art (PCA) in England where she also leads its Making Futures Research Group which is aligned to PCA’s Making Futures Biennial, an international conference that investigates contemporary craft and maker movements as ‘change agents’ in 21st century society. At PCA she has recently developed its ‘StudioLab for Embodied Media’ which is a new project-based research initiative in immersive media that unites the School’s BA courses in Fine Art and Creative Technologies.
Prior to moving to the UK, Owens was Visiting Professor at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA). As CCA Director, she organized the university’s first art biennial and led its inaugural focus on intersections between art, design and nano science. This landmark event for the university included a site-specific, 46-foot sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Kimsooja made in collaboration with the Wiesner Nanomaterials Lab and was the subject of “Collaboration on Campus: Nanotechnology and Contemporary Art“, a documentary by Art21 (Art in the 21st Century) produced by Ian Forster and Eve Moros Ortega.
Currently, she is developing a new art research platform for the future of art, design and matter with collaborators from universities in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
She is a founder of Mobile Geographies, a locative-media initiative at Parsons The New School for Design (NYC) and co-founder of the storefront new media art space MediaNoche (NY), the first artist-run gallery for digital art in Upper Manhattan. Some of Owens’s curatorial projects include Technologies of Place, funded by New York Foundation for the Arts, SELF[n]: Art & Distributed Subjectivity, Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology (Cornell University), and Abject/Object Empathies (Cornell University).
Owens exhibits her work internationally including shows at the First Beijing International Media Arts Exhibition (Beijing, China), Dashanzi Art Festival (Beijing, China), 5th Ewha Media Art Exhibition, (Seoul, Korea) and the Machinista International Arts and Technology Festival. Frequently a speaker on art and technology, she recently presented papers at College Art Association (CAA), SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles) and Consciousness Reframed: Art, Identity and the Technology of Transformation (Lisbon).
She has taught digital media, art, aesthetics, interaction design and contemporary art theory at Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Parsons The New School for Design, MFA Design & Technology Program and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Owens has a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For consulting or curatorial inquiries she can be reached at: owens.stephanie1@gmail.com