Patricia Olynyk is an artist, writer, and educator whose work explores science and technology-related themes and the ways in which social systems and institutional structures shape our understanding of the world. She was appointed inaugural director of the unified Graduate School of Art and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in 2007. Olynyk currently teaches in Time Based + Media Art and holds courtesy appointments in the School of Medicine, Medical Humanities, Performing Arts, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Olynyk received her MFA Degree with Distinction from the California College of the Arts and then spent four years as a Monbusho Scholar and a Tokyu Foundation Research Scholar in Japan. She is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Helmut S. Stern Fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, and a Francis C. Wood Fellowship at the College of Physicians, Philadelphia. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally including: Venice Design 2018 at Palazzo Michiel dalle Colonne; the Los Angeles Biennial; The Brooklyn Museum; the Saitama Modern Art Museum, Japan; Museo del Corso, Rome; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
For fourteen years, Olynyk has co-chaired the NY LASER Talks program in New York with Ellen K. Levy, a branch of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and technology (Leonardo/ISAST). In 2020, she was appointed the inaugural Medicine + Media Arts Fellow at UCLA’s Art | Sci Center. Her writing has been featured in publications that include Public Journal, the Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture, Technoetic Arts, Leonardo Journal, the Angewandte Book Series, DeGruyter, and Bio/Matter/Techno Synthetics, Actar Press.