Margo L. Machida

Professor Emerita of Art History and Asian and Asian American Studies


Margo Machida is Professor Emerita of Art History (School of Fine Arts) and Asian and Asian American Studies (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) at the University of Connecticut. She served as Acting Director of AAASI during Fall Semester 2014.

Born and raised in Hawai`i, she is a scholar, independent curator, and cultural critic specializing in Asian American art and visual culture. Her most recent book is Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary, published by Duke University Press in 2009. This book received the prestigious Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in 2011. She also co-edited the award-winning volume Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (University of California Press, 2003).

Professor Machida is an Associate Editor for the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal (Brill). Recent publications include: “Trans-Pacific Sitings: The Roving Imagery of Lynne Yamamoto” (Third Text, Spring 2014); “Devouring Hawai’i: Food, Consumption, and Contemporary Art” in Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013); and “Convergent Conversations – The Nexus of Asian American Art” in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

Margo Machida has received numerous grants and fellowships for her scholarship, including support from the Smithsonian Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. 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.

In 2021, she received the College Art Association Award for Excellence in Diversity.