Nancy Nowacek

Bio

Investigating relationships between labor and leisure, and the built and the natural environment, Nancy Nowacek actively engages with the world around her.

She makes task-based encounters between people, spaces, and things. Research-based, her practice is shaped by observation of, dissatisfaction with, and great optimism for the world around her. Her work examines the relationship between late capital post-industrial time sense and body sense, where physical anatomy has been surpassed by man-made machines as useful—or valuable—technology.

Expanding beyond exercise to the grammars of functional movement, architecture, engineering, and labor systems, she makes sculpture, performance, and drawings that collapse thinking into doing; and to reinstate the body’s relevance: as functioning object, tool, channel for experience and site of imagination. 

She is currently the assistant professor of design at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Previously she has been a Culture Push Fellow, and a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency recipient. She has shown in New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Canada, and Europe. Her commissioned projects have featured in the San Jose Art & Technology 2006, 2010, and 2012 Biennials. She has an MFA in Visual Communication from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MFA in Social Practice from California College of Art, and she is certified in Personal Fitness from the National Academy of Sports Medicine.