Nina Yankowitz
| Nina Yankowitz | |
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| Born | Newark, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | School of Visual Arts |
| Known for | New Media Technology, Feminist, Installation Art, Public Art Works, and Robotic Sculptures |
| Awards | Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship |
| Website | http://nyartprojects.com/content/links2012.pdf |
Nina Yankowitz is an American visual artist known for her work in new media technology, site specific public works, and installation art. She is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award recipient.
Yankowitz was born in Newark, NJ, and later lived in South Orange, NJ. She graduated from Columbia High School, and later from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1969. Yankowitz became a faculty member in the graduate school at UMass Amherst in 1971. During the fall of 1975, Yankowitz was a visiting artist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago where she first met her future husband, architect Barry Holden. Yankowitz and Holden met again in the 1980s in New York, and married in 1986. They had a son, Ian, in 1989 who is an award-winning film and documentary editor.
Yankowitz creates video projections, and/or time-based artwork installations and permanent artworks sited in the public realm. She sometimes works with technology teams to create interactive games. She states:
Criss~Crossing The Divine is a virtual sanctuary that addresses the ever-expanding religious intolerance fueling ISIS and global wars. Visitors play the team's interactive games while robotic mannequins, representing devotees from each faith, perform a quintessential gesture like actors onstage communicating in her video projecting on a wall. People use interactive wands to curate topics and assign more or less importance to each topic they select while the team’s software parses and integrates all the more or less importance assignments the person makes. This process ultimately determines which three hundred color-coded scriptures will appear. The participant is often surprised by what they find after visiting a website to learn from which religions their color-coded scripture results were sourced. Playing the games developed with the global team, acknowledges that as the world turns, our personal perspectives change and accordingly what we search to find within the scriptures shifts. This insures this kind of search can never settle into a permanent groove. The goal is to ask new questions that yield new perspectives from individual quests, ad infinitum and with no amen. It is an updated version of “CROSSINGS”—An interactive installation with games developed with her team during 2007-08. It premiered at the Thessaloniki Biennale in Greece 2009. She conceived and designed the art project as “House of Worships Not Warships” in 2000.
She directed The Third Woman interactive performance film/game, a collaboration with the original filmmakers Pia Tikka and Martin Rieser and interactive costume designer Margarita Jahrmann, technologist Rasmus Vuori and Mauri Kaipainen, at Galapagos theater space in Brooklyn in NY during May 2012. Prior team versions were created with other original team members: Anna Dumitri, Barry Roshto, Nita Tandon, Cliona Harmey, and shown at the Kunsthalle, Vienna, Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece. Other “Third Woman” interactive film/Performance Interventions occurred at various venues.
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