Patricia Olynyk

Patricia Olynyk’s prints, photos, sculptures, and time-based media works 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, architects, and sound engineers.

Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles International Biennial; Vienna Art Week; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; Museo del Corso, Rome; and The Brooklyn Museum. Solo exhibitions and performances include: “A Cure for Immortality,” Center for Contemporary Art, UC Irvine; “Sensing Terrains” at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.; “Dark Skies” at the Art I Sci Center Gallery at UCLA; and “Transfigurations” at Galeria Grafica, Tokyo, Japan. Group exhibitions include “Venice Design 2018” at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne; “Umwelt” at BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn; “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.

Olynyk earned her Master of Fine Arts with distinction from the California College of the Arts before she was awarded a Monbusho Scholarship and Tokyu Foundation Research Scholarship to pursue her artistic research in Japan. In 2007, she was appointed inaugural director of the unified Graduate School of Art and named the Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School. She is core faculty in Medical Humanities and holds courtesy appointments in WashU’s School of Medicine; Bursky School of Public Health; women, gender, and sexuality studies; and performing arts. Olynyk is also a faculty scholar in the Living Earth Collaborative and the Center for the Environment, two interdisciplinary hubs that facilitate research across fields. In 2023, Olynyk was nominated for a College Art Association Award for Distinction in Teaching.

Olynyk co-chairs the Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks program in New York with Ellen K. Levy, which promotes cross-disciplinary exchange between artists, scientists, humanists, and scholars. She is the producer of the Creative Disturbance podcast series, “Emergent Habitability,” a program that explores the dynamic entanglement of humans, technologies, and cultural systems. Conversations with artists, scientists, and humanists probe how creative practice intersects with planetary resilience, shifting values, and evolving technologies. Her writing is 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), Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics (Actar Press), and Visions of Scale (Bloomsbury).