Patricia Olynyk
Artist
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Patricia Olynyk is an artist who is based in St. Louis and New York. She directs the Graduate School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is also the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art. She has a strong commitment to bringing disciplines together and has programmed art, science and technology curricula, symposia and fellowships at several research institutions, including Washington University, UCLA, and the University of Michigan, where she formerly held joint appointments in the School of Art & Design and the Life Sciences Institute. Working across campus and with university partners to develop “third culture” collaborations, she was one of the first artists in the US to be appointed to a scientific unit. Olynyk is also Co-Director of the NY LASER program in New York with Ellen K. Levy and former Chair of the Leonardo Education and Art Forum (Leonardo/ISAST).
Olynyk completed her undergraduate studies in Canada, received her MFA degree with Distinction from the California College of the Arts and then spent four years as a Monbusho Scholar and Tokyu Foundation Research Scholar in Japan. Her work explores art, science, and technology-related themes that examine the dialectics of natural/artificial, cognition/affect, and mind/body. She has exhibited her work widely and her solo and two person shows include: Sensing Terrains at the National Academy of Sciences, Transfigurations at Galleria Grafica Tokio, Probe at Bruno David Gallery, and Some Provocations from Skeptical Inquirers at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery in New York. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Museo del Corso in Rome, the Universität der Künste in Berlin, the Saitama Modern Art Museum in Japan and the L.A. International Biennial Invitational. She has held residencies at the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, The Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, Villa Montalvo in California, and the Design Media Arts Department and the Art Sci Center at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.
