Heidi Kumao

Former Microsoft Research fellow at the STUDIO, Heidi Kumao is an interdisciplinary artist who creates video, machine art, and installations to explore ordinary social interactions and their psychological undercurrents. Emerging from the intersection of sculpture, theater and engineering, her “performative technologies” generate artistic spectacle in order to visualize the unseen: power structures, emotions, compulsions, thinking patterns, and dreams. By placing simple actions (e.g. gardening, writing, wearing clothes, watching tv) within a construct (e.g. family home, government institution, prison, traditional gender roles) she demonstrates how small gestures, even the most private and poetic, can become political acts. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.