Megan Michalak
Megan Michalak, Bloomington/Indiana (USA), 1971
Period of residency: October – December 2014 (international residency).
Long term stay: July 2015 – July 2017
Megan Michalak is a queer transmedia artist living and working between New York City and Toronto. Inspired by William Burrough’s statement, “If you cut into the present, the future leaks out,” Megan Michalak’s work is a public invitation. She asks: if we, the public, held the historical-record hostage, what would the ransom note say? What would get reinserted? Through addressing the performance of historiography in multiple registers of media, her work creates counter-sites where citizens can perform and contest histories of cultural and community memory.
Michalak’s studio practice spans sculpture, performance, digital media and drawing. International exhibits include: the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, the 2nd Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Galarie Titanik (Turku, Finland), Fonds Regional D’Art Contemporain Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpelier, France), and the International Festival of Choreography in Paris. She has additionally screened works in film/video festivals in France, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil. Within the US she has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Artists Space, and Smack Mellon Gallery in New York City. She is the co-recipient of a Film, Media and New Technology Grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, three Finishing Fund Grants from the Experimental Television Center, two residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and funded residencies at Harvestworks, and Smack Mellon Gallery in New York City.
In 2006 Michalak received an MFA in Studio for Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art, and an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2001. From 2007-2013, she was an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Department at the State University of New York, Buffalo.
