Research Expertise and Interest

art, sculpture, photography, ceramics, social practice, craft, activism, public art, feminism, capitalism, material culture, informal economies, black markets, hacker culture, digital culture, design culture, zines, alternative publishing, archives, libraries, museums, museum display, postcolonial studies, labor history, American history, globalization, the Philippines, Asian American studies, empire, textiles, fashion, ethnography, 1904 World's Fair, Filipino and Filipino American studies, trade routes, science fiction, camouflage, DIY culture

Research Description

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. For 2019/2020 she was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include "Being: New Photography" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; "Public Knowledge," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; "Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States," at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and "Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, The 12th Havana Bienal, The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. 

A long-time educator, she has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, The San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, Carnegie Mellon University, and most recently joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in January 2014 as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture. At Berkeley she is working to expand a conceptual and materials-based pedagogy, combining methods of the handcrafted with digital technologies and social engagement in order to speak of the frictions within late-capitalist society. She lives and works in Oakland, California.