Faculty Directory

Cynthia Pachikara is a video installation artist who received an MFA and an M.Arch from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her video installations conceive of viewers' "shadows bodies" as perceptual voids waiting to be filled with implicative video and photographic projections. Influenced by architecture, theater lighting, and modern dance, these installations rely on the spectators' movement to spatialize otherwise compressed imagery and to visualize the notion of a "body-as-screen."

Pachikara has exhibited nationally in venues including the Forum for Contemporary Art in St. Louis, Consolidated Works in Seattle, Fassbender Gallery in Chicago, SPACES in Cleveland and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Cynthia is currently developing her shadow installations as temporal public art works designed for unwitting pedestrians in outdoor, urban settings. For the last few years Cynthia has been teaching video installation, sculpture, and architecturally based courses in various schools including Purdue University, Reed College, the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Currently she is an Associate Professor in the School of Art & Design with a joint appointment in the TCAUP. She teaches two interdisciplinary advanced video courses that consider the potential of video to represent complex spatial conditions.