Adriene Jenik (she/they) is an artist, educator, activist-scholar and end of life doula who resides in the desert. In her work she develops and shares creative processes that support personal introspection, social critique, community building, and cultural transformation. Her computer and media art spans 3 decades, including pioneering work in interactive cinema and live telematic performance. Her mediated performance projects have been written about in The New York Times, published in The Drama Review, and recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Adriene’s current creative research projects include “data humanization” performances; crowd-sourced tools for learning and healing; immersive learning experiments; and street performances reading “climate futures” with her ECOtarot deck. These socially engaged projects have been recognized in exhibitions, papers, presentations, and publications. This new work has been exhibited by UNESCO world headquarters in Paris, at IEEE 2017 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and as part of a travelling exhibit celebrating the ACLU. More than 1300 ECOtarot readings have been performed in a wide variety of contexts including the Joshua Tree Farmers Market (Joshua Tree), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), The Berkeley Ecology Center (Berkeley), Aalto University (Finland), and the Plaza de San Pedro de Atacama (Chile). Recent video work has screened at the Big Muddy Film Festival, RESET NOW/RESET FUTURE (Istanbul, Turkey), International Festival of Video Art (Madrid, Spain), Global Peace Film Festival (Orlando), and Channels Festival (Melbourne, AUS). Recent Conference presentations include National Womens’ Studies Association (NWSA) 2018 (Atlanta), ANTICIPATION (Tempe, AZ), Annual World Environmental Education Congress (WEEC) 2021 (Virtual/Czech Republic), ASEAN University Network on Ecological Education and Culture 2022 (Virtual Keynote), with workshop presentations offered at Creative Time’s SUMMIT X (NYC) and Autonomias en Practicas/ Autonomies in Practice (Chiapas, MX). Jenik was included in the first North American cohort of Creative Climate Leadership led by Julie’s Bicycle, and in 2021 they were awarded the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities Tuttle Creative Residency at Haverford College.
Jenik received her BA in English from Douglass College, Rutgers University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At Arizona State University, she serves as Professor of Expanded Arts in the School of Art; is affiliate faculty with the Desert Humanities Initiative and the Global Drylands Center; and is a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. Adriene is currently pursuing a PhD in Sustainability at ASU.
Keywords: telematics performance, interactive media, freedom of expression, art.tech, desert, water scarcity, ECOtarot, death doula, grief, sustainability.