MARGO MACHIDA RETIREMENT ANNOUNCEMENT
CONTACT: CATHY SCHLUND-VIALS, director
ASIAN/ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE
UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT / CLAS
cathy.schlund-vials@uconn.edu / fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu
860-486-9412 / 860-486-5083
Storrs, CT – The Asian/Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Connecticut announces the retirement of core faculty member MARGO LANI MACHIDA, Professor of Art and Art History and Asian American Studies, at the close of Fall Semester 2016.
Considered the leading authority on contemporary Asian American visual art, Margo Machida received the 2005 Cultural Studies Book Award from the premier/national Association for Asian American Studies for the breakout Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (University of California Press, 2003), co-edited with Elaine Kim and Sharon Mizota. She also contributed the lead essay for One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (Yale and Asia Society, 2006).
In 2011, Professor Machida’s sole authored Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2009) won the prestigious AAAS Cultural Studies Book again amid a strong slate of competing publications that positioned the scholarly bona fides of the field firmly in the academy.
Margo Machida has received numerous grants and fellowships for her scholarship, including support from the Smithsonian Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, with a mid-career example from the latter – the 2004 Rockefeller funded ($50,000) Asian American Art Symposium she organized, co-sponsored by UConn’s Asian American Studies Institute and the Dept. of Art and Art History, New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies program, and the Dept. of Art, University of California at Irvine, that brought together nationally and internationally prominent scholars, curators, museum directors and artists. She is a past board member of the College Art Association and a member of the advisory committee for Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, a PBS documentary series on contemporary visual art in the United States. Additionally, she is co-organizer of the Diasporic Asian Art Network (DAAN) and the East Coast Asian American Art Project (ECAAAP), as well as a member of the Founding Executive for the International Network for Diasporic Asian Art Research (INDAAR). In 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the national Women’s Caucus for Art.
Professor Machida joined the UConn community in Fall Semester 2002 as a joint appointment Assistant Prof. of Art and Art History and Asian American Studies. Professor Machida’s reputation as a New York based educator, independent curator, researcher and writer specializing in Asian American visual art was already well established when she earned her doctorate in American Studies from SUNY Buffalo. A founding member of the Asian Contemporary Art Consortium (NYC) and co-founder of Godzilla: Asian American Art Network (1990-2001), she curated the groundbreaking 1994 Asia Society group exhibition ASIA/AMERICA: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art.
Professor Machida also directed the Cultural Dialogue Project at the Asian/American Center, Queens College at CUNY from 1994 to 1996, where she developed interdisciplinary programs and humanities based scholarship devoted to the study of Asian diasporic communities in the Americas, as well as teaching courses on contemporary Asian and Asian American art and social issues for NYU, Brandeis (as Madeleine Haas Russell Distinguished Visiting Professor of Non-Western and Comparative Studies), SUNY Buffalo (as Presidential Fellow), the Parsons School of Design, and the Cooper Union in New York. Professor Machida continues to be a widely sought after speaker across the United States and Canada, giving invited lectures for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Stanford Humanities Center, Brandeis University, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., to name a few.
While this forthcoming retirement represents a profound loss for the university, and whereas her absence is most certainly something that cannot be filled, the Institute remains fully and absolutely supportive of Professor Machida’s current and future endeavors. The Institute will host a formal celebration of Professor Machida’s retirement in fall 2016.
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For more information, contact: Ms. Fe Delos-Santos at fe.delos-santos@uconn.edu