Jenik Adriene

born in 1964

teacher, media artist, visual artist, curator, painter, musician, videographer, director, performer

Adriene Jenik is a media artist who has been working for over 10 years as an artist, teacher, curator, administrator, engineer and community activist. She received her BA in English from Douglass College, Rutgers University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechhnic Institute. Prior to joining the UCSD Faculty, Jenik was employed as an engineer in the Blast Jr. development team for Disney Online's Daily Blast. Over the past 8 years she has taught a broad range of electronic media classes at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), UC Irvine, University of Southern California (USC), and UCLA's New Media Lab.
From her initial painting series, through her involvement with Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV (1985-1990), the band Snakes & Ladders (with Mary Feaster, Chris Stansfield, Genevieve Hayes, and Helen Granger), the 'zine collective SCREAMBOX (with Pam Gregg and Bryn Austin), video productions like What's the Difference Between a Yam & a Sweet Potato? (with J. Evan Dunlap), and live satellite TV like EL NAFTAZTECA: Cyber-Aztec TV for 2000 A.D. (with Guillermo Gómez-Peña).

Jenik's artistic projects exist outside of the purely aesthetic or entertainment realms. Instead, they serve as catalysts of community, social movement and interpersonal understanding during both their creation and reception. To this end, much of Jenik's work has been collectively or collaboratively produced.

Jenik has consistently moved among and between media. This insistence on expressing herself and her ideas on many levels (musical composition, math/logic/programming, telecommunication, drawing/painting, videography) is at present finding its home in the development of computer-based interactive work.

Jenik's work has been reviewed and discussed in such publications as Parachute, The Independent, Jumpcut, The Village Voice, Afterimage, Art Papers, Artlink, and Cyberstage. In addition, her creative writing and essays have been published in High Performance, Felix, The L.A. Weekly, Off Video, Heresies, and The Utne Reader.
Her current projects include the online performance (with Lisa Brenneis) of waitingforgodot.com, the development of a multi-user multi-generational online world inspired by a feminist science fiction text, and the founding of the Smokey Johnson Memorial Center for Research and Development.
She is a 1997 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in New Media.

http://www.adrienejenik.net/ http://visarts.ucsd.edu/ajenik http://www.specflic.net/