Professor of Art Andrea Wollensak has been named one of 13 recipients of the Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) Artistic Excellence Award. The award, the only given to a digital artist, comes with a $5,000 grant from the state for Wollensak to “pursue new work and advance her artistic careers.” 

Wollensak, who joined Conn’s faculty in 1993, is an artist, designer and educator whose work bridges traditional and digital fabrication, generative and interactive systems, and digital storytelling. She collaborates with community partners, programmers and poets to create multimedia projects that center on social impact, civic engagement and place-based narratives. Her practice engages mapping, site-specific installations, and public storytelling as tools for participatory design and cultural memory.

“I'm both grateful and humbled to receive this grant, which will allow me to deepen my ongoing commitment to collaborative and socially engaged multimedia design,” she said.

Other recipients are active across all artistic disciplines including theater, sculpture, and writing creative non-fiction. The professor was selected a pool of over 430 applicants by 46 peers who reviewed and evaluated each application.

While Wollensak does not have a specific plan for her grant at this time, she has a very good idea of the kind of work she’ll be doing.

She pledges, “In response to ongoing federal cuts to the arts, humanities, and sciences, I plan to continue to develop activist design projects that elevate collective voices and foster community resilience.”

In addition to teaching at Connecticut College for more than 30 years, Wollensak has been actively collaborating and creating. Her work has been exhibited around the world, from as close as the Granoff Center at Brown University and New York’s Burchfield Penney Art Center to the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art in Sweden and the Czech Republic’s Brno Design Biennial at the Moravian Gallery. She has additionally presented work for leading academic and professional institutions as diverse as the Estonian Academy of Arts, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), ACM SIGGRAPH, and the Generative Art Conference.

Currently, Wollensak is working with Ukrainian poet and translator Katja Novak on Drawing the Land’s Memory, “a multimodal project that translates spoken poetry into real-time, audio-reactive visualizations—exploring cross-sensory connections between language, image, sound, and gesture.” The work is leading to two presentations, “Trextuality 2: Material Turns in Translation” at University of Galway in September and “World Poetry Today: Production, Translation, Reception” in October at the University of Tartu.

She is also currently serving on a statewide consortium supporting digital media students across higher education, the Advisory Board for Digital Media Connecticut (DMCT), and the Advisory Council of the Winterhouse Institute, a national community of design educators focused on social impact.

In addition to the Artistic Excellent Award, Wollensak has received numerous awards and residencies, among them a 2023 U.S. Fulbright Scholar grant to Tallinn, Estonia; the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy; International Artist Studio Program in Sweden; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada; the National Science Foundation; and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was also an artist-in-residence at Hafnarborg Contemporary Art Museum in Iceland and a year-long artist residency at the Anchorage Museum. She is a two-time recipient of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism Fellowship in New Media.