Patricia Olynyk

Patricia Olynyk’s photographs, prints, videos, and installations investigate science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of our place in the world. Working across disciplines to develop “third culture” projects, she often collaborates with scientists, humanists, programmers, and engineers. Her multimedia environments frequently call upon the viewer to expand their awareness of the worlds they inhabit — whether those worlds are their own bodies or the spaces that surround them. 

In 2007, Olynyk was appointed inaugural director of the Graduate School of Art and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. She currently holds courtesy appointments in the university’s School of Medicine; women, gender & sexuality studies; and performing arts programs, and fellowships in The Institute for Public Health and Living Earth Collaborative, two interdisciplinary hubs that facilitate research across a wide range of fields. She serves on the executive committees for Medical Humanities and the Center for the Humanities. Prior to joining WashU, Olynyk taught in the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, where she also directed and oversaw the endowments for the Penny W. Stamps Distinguished Visitors Program and the Roman J. Witt Visiting Faculty Program. In 2005, she became the first non-scientist appointed to the university’s renowned Life Sciences Institute.  

Olynyk earned her Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the California College of the Arts before she was awarded a prestigious Monbusho Scholarship and Tokyu Foundation Research Scholarship to pursue her artistic research and studio work in Japan. She is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Helmut S. Stern Fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, the R. D. Richards Memorial Faculty Award for outstanding teaching and service in the Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, and a Francis C. Wood Fellowship at the College of Physicians, Philadelphia. In 2023, Olynyk was nominated for a College Art Association Award for Distinction in Teaching. 

Olynyk has been awarded residencies at UCLA’s Design Media Arts department and Art/Sci Center, the Banff Center for the Arts, Villa Montalvo, California, and the Narrenturm Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Her work has been featured in Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne; the Los Angeles International Biennial; The Brooklyn Museum; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; and Museo del Corso, Rome. Her solo exhibitions include: “Sensing Terrains” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., “Dark Skies” at the Art | Sci Center Gallery at UCLA, and “Transfigurations” at Galeria Grafica, Tokyo, Japan. Other exhibitions include: “Skeptical Inquirers” at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York, “Sleuthing the Mind” at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, and “Interplanetary VR Sustainable Futures,” Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. 

For the past fourteen years, she has co-chaired the Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks program in New York, which promotes cross-disciplinary exchange between artists, scientists, humanists, and scholars. In 2020, she was appointed the inaugural Medicine + Media Arts Fellow at UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. Her writing has been featured in publications that include Public Journal (York University), the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (Routledge Press), Technoetic Arts (Intellect Press), Leonardo Journal, the Angewandte Book Series (DeGruyter), and Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics (Actar Press).