Andrea Wollensak is an artist, designer and educator. Her work spans multi-media from traditional and digital fabrication, to generative-interactive systems and includes digital storytelling with community partner collaborations, programmers, and poets. Themes in her work explore design for social impact through place-based public narratives, mapping, and site-specific installation works for civic participation.

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Wollensak has exhibited internationally, most notably at the Göteborg International Biennial (Sweden), Nova Scotia Art Gallery (Canada), Brno Design Biennial Moravian Gallery (Czech Republic), Brown University’s Granoff Center Gallery (Rhode Island), Anchorage Museum (Alaska), Burchfield Penney Arts Center in Buffalo (New York).

 

Selected awarded grants and artist residencies include a U.S. Fulbright Scholar grant to Tallinn, Estonia (2023), a Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, the International Artist Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), the National Science Foundation, Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Andrew W, Mellon Foundation. She also held an artist residency at Hafnarborg Contemporary Art Museum (Iceland), and received artist fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism (CCT) in New Media.

 

Wollensak has presented her work at numerous conferences including ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Arts), ACM SIGGRAPH, Generative Art Conference, CAiiA (Center for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts), CAA (College Art Association), among others.

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Wollensak’s creative and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications including Computers and Graphics, Zed, VisibleLanguage, Artbyte, Parachute, Fuse, and Computer Enhanced Learning: Vignettes of Best Practices. Her work has been mentioned in Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, by Karen O’Rourke [MIT press, 2013], and in Acting Bodies and Social Networks, A Bridge Between Technology and Working Memory, edited by B. Pirani and I. Varga, in the chapter “Social Bodies and Locative Technologies” by Gianni Corino [UPA, 2010].

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Wollensak has held visiting faculty/visiting critic positions at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Concordia University in Montreal, Rhode Island School of Design, Purchase College, Maine College of Art, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has served on design education boards and initiatives including Graphic Design Education Association (GDEA), and Connecticut Art Directors Club (CADC).

 

Wollensak is currently a member of the Advisory Council of the Winterhouse Institute, a community of design educators committed to promoting excellence in design education for social impact. In Connecticut, she is on the Advisory Board for Digital Media Connecticut (DMCT), a regional collaborative of CT higher education institutions dedicated to supporting students in digital media. Wollensak received her BFA from the University of Michigan (1983) and MFA from Yale University (1990).