Stephanie Owens is an interdisciplinary artist, creative researcher, and curator interested in the influence of digital networks on contemporary aesthetics and the production of subjectivity.

Stephanie is currently Associate Professor and Dean of Arts, Design and Media at Arts University Plymouth in Plymouth, England. At AUP she leads its Making Futures Research Group and is curator of Making Futures, the university’s international biennial research conference on material practice and innovation. In 2020, she founded the StudioLab for Embodied Media,  a research initiative that bridges matter and computation by examining embodied perception and knowledge production in immersive and augmented environments. In 2019 as Head of School, School of Arts + Media, she wrote and validated a technology-focused studio curriculum which is currently offered as the university’s BA (Hons) in Creative Technology course.

As Dean, Stephanie has led the institution’s implementation of a new undergraduate curriculum focused on placing learners at the interface between creative practice and the many current social and environmental challenges we face as a society. She has also led the development of a new curriculum and common learning framework for the university’s postgraduate programme which features flexible, hybrid and research-based pathways of study. She sits on the university’s Academic, EDI, Learning & Teaching and Academic Standards & Quality steering committees and is Chair of its Research and Innovation team.

Prior to moving to the UK, Owens was Visiting Professor at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA). As CCA Director, she organized the university’s first art biennial and led its inaugural focus on intersections between art, design and nano science. This landmark event for the university included a site-specific, 46-foot sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Kimsooja made in collaboration with the Wiesner Nanomaterials Lab and was the subject of “Collaboration on Campus: Nanotechnology and Contemporary Art“,  a documentary by Art21 (Art in the 21st Century) produced by Ian Forster and Eve Moros Ortega.

She is a founder of Mobile Geographies, a locative-media initiative at Parsons The New School for Design (NYC) and co-founder of the storefront new media art space MediaNoche (NY), the first artist-run gallery for digital art in Upper Manhattan. Some of Owens’s curatorial projects include Technologies of Place, funded by New York Foundation for the Arts,  SELF[n]: Art & Distributed Subjectivity, Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology (Cornell University), and Abject/Object Empathies (Cornell University).

Owens exhibits her work internationally including shows at the First Beijing International Media Arts Exhibition (Beijing, China), Dashanzi Art Festival (Beijing, China), 5th Ewha Media Art Exhibition, (Seoul, Korea) and the Machinista International Arts and Technology Festival. Frequently a speaker on art and technology, she recently presented papers at College Art Association (CAA), SIGGRAPH (Los Angeles) and Consciousness Reframed: Art, Identity and the Technology of Transformation (Lisbon).

She has taught digital media, art, aesthetics, interaction design and contemporary art theory at Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Parsons The New School for Design, MFA Design & Technology Program and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Owens has a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For consulting or curatorial inquiries she can be reached at: owens.stephanie1@gmail.com