Margo Machida
Associate Professor of Art History
and Asian American Studies
Fine Arts Building - Rm 217
860 486. 2678

kini2@pipeline.com

Granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2006, Margo Machida received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 2004, she received a major grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a Symposium on Contemporary Asian American Art, Creativity and Culture Division (2003-2005), and the School of Fine Arts New Scholar Award. She is a scholar, educator, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture. Dr. Machida was Director of the Cultural Dialogue Project at the Asian / American Center, Queens College, CUNY, from 1994-96, where she developed interdisciplinary programs and humanities-based scholarship devoted to the study of Asian diasporic communities in the Americas. Prior to her appointment at UConn, she had been teaching courses on contemporary Asian and Asian American art and social issues for the A/P/A Studies Program at NYU. She most recently co-organized two exhibitions: Uncommon Traits: Re/Locating Asia for the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY; and Japanese and Japanese American Contemporary Printmaking for Brandywine Workshop, Inc., Philadelphia, PA.

Research Interests include: Asian American art and social issues; contemporary Asian and Asian American art; Asian/Pacific/American experience; Art and community formation; Asian American women artists; themes of Migration and the social construction of identity in art; Social Memory and Trauma; and Asian American visual art and social relations. Among her upcoming publications is: "Art and Social Consciousness: Asian American and Pacific Islander Artists in San Francisco, 1965-1980," for Asian American Art: Starting from Here, eds., Gordon Chang, Mark Johnson, and Paul Karlstrom (Stanford University Press, 2008). Her book, Art, Asian America, and the Social Imaginary: A Poetics of Positionality will be published by Duke University Press (2007). Machida's anthology on Asian American identity and social issues in the visual arts, co-edited with Elaine Kim and Sharon Mizota, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (University of California Press, 2003) won the 2005 Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award.

Selected Publications:
"Reframing Asian America" in One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (New York: Asia Society, 2006); distributed by Yale University Press.

"Culturalist Conceptualism and the Art of Ming Fay," Transcultural New Jersey: Diverse Artists Shaping Culture and Communities. (Rutgers: The State University of New Jersey, 2005)

"The World as Home" in Zarina: Mapping a Life, 1991-2001 (Oakland: Mills College Art Museum, 2001), 19-27.

"Whose 'Asia?' Whose 'America?': Visual Art and the Imagining of Asian America," catalogue essay for Shifting Perceptions: Contemporary L.A. Visions, Pacific Asia Museum, May-September 2000.

"Out of Asia: Negotiating Contemporary Asian Identities in America," catalogue essay for ASIA/AMERICA: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, co-published by The Asia Society Galleries and The New Press, New York, 1994.