Dean Joye Bowman and the HFA associate deans and department chairs welcomed a new cohort of faculty, including ITP alum Roopa Vasudevan, during its annual HFA New Faculty Reception on Monday, Sept. 18. During the ceremony, HFA faculty award winners were also recognized for their accomplishments during the past academic year.
Roopa Vasudevan, assistant professor in the Department of Art, is a South Asian-American new media artist, computer programmer, and researcher. Her work examines social and technological defaults; interrogates rules, conventions, and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on society.
Vasudevan has exhibited her work internationally, and she has participated in residencies, taught workshops and classes, and spoken about her practice around the world. She has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to artist-led organizations, and has frequently worked with or exhibited in spaces that exist peripherally to mainstream institutions, including Flux Factory (Queens); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn); SPACES (Cleveland); ABC No Rio (New York); AUTOMAT Collective (Philadelphia); Public Works Administration (New York); Space 1026(Philadelphia); Unrequited Leisure (Nashville); Icebox Project Space (Philadelphia); Dunkunsthalle (New York); and Vox Populi (Philadelphia), where she was a member of the artist collective between 2019 and 2023.
She was an Eyebeam Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future Fellow in 2020; is currently a community member at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator at the New Museum (New York, N.Y.), where she was a member of the Art & Code track (in partnership with Rhizome) between 2021 and 2023, and a recipient of the Next Web Seed Grant in 2022; and is a co-investigator on the Data Fluencies Project, an international research team funded by the Mellon Foundation, through which she will be curating three exhibitions in 2025 on the poetics and possibilities of data.
In 2023, Vasudevan earned her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation (and current book project) explores the complex and involved relationships between new media artists and the tech industry. She received an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013 and was selected as an ITP Resident Research Fellow in academic year 2013-14. Between 2016 and 2018, she was an assistant arts professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai.