Rate My Professor Grisha Coleman

Grisha Coleman serves as Adjunct Faculty in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. She previously held the position of associate professor of movement, computation, and digital media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering, with affiliate appointments in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre, the Design School, and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society. Coleman earned a B.A. in College of Letters from Wesleyan University, an M.F.A. in Music Composition and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts in 2004, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University's STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, in 2005. Early in her career, she performed as a dancer with Urban Bush Women and founded the music performance group Hot Mouth, which toured internationally and was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. Her research specializations encompass movement, digital media, performance, choreography, music composition, and human-centered computer interaction, focusing on relationships among physiological, technological, and ecological systems, human movement, machines, and inhabited spaces.

Coleman's major projects include 'echo::system,' a performance work fusing choreography, music, and experiential technology, and 'The Movement Undercommons,' utilizing mobile motion-capture to create repositories of vernacular movement portraits from underrepresented Arizona communities, rendered into animations, sonic narratives, and hybrid performances. The latter received a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Media Arts grant and underpinned her 2021–2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowship. Additional honors and fellowships include support from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, MAP Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University's Mohr Visiting Artist program, and Surdna Foundation. Key publications feature 'Blk as Tek | echo::system and Black Performance Technologies,' 'Experiential Ecologies: A Transdisciplinary Framework for Embodiment and Simulacra' (2015), 'Listening as the land talks back: Ecology, embodiment and information in the science fictions of echo::System,' and 'Decolonizing the Machine: Race, Gender and Disability in Robots and Algorithmic Art.' Her interdisciplinary contributions advance digital media art, performance studies, and human-computer interaction.