About

Biography

Scott Andrew (b. 1982, Waynesburg, PA) is a multimedia queer-oriented media designer, video, installation, animation and performance artist, educator, and curator. Recent works have incorporated AI generative animation, video mapping, visual effects and media design for collaborations with Dancers, Drag Queens, and Experimental Musicians. Scott's works have been exhibited at MoMA’s PopRally Performance Series (NYC), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), The Hammer Museum (LA), The J. Paul Getty Museum (LA), Whitechapel (London, UK), MIX (NYC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), and The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), among others. Media Design projects include ‘Sum of Y’all’ by PearlArts, ‘Ego’ by Ramin Akhavijou, ‘Dragonfly Dawn’ by Joanna Able, and ‘Underland x Alice by Kontara Morphis in the New Hazlett CSA series, an off-broadway run of ‘The Marthaodyssey’, a 2024 NDP finalist and work by Dance Artist Jesse Factor at the Marjorie S. Dean Little Theater (NYC). ‘The Marthaodyssey’ will be enjoying an upcoming dance festival tour and was also presented at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, where Scott has designed work for a Freshworks presentation of ‘I Am A Haunted House’, ‘Suite Life’ and ‘House Party’. Other media design has included ‘First Lady’ by The Pittsburgh International Classical Theatre company (Carnegie Stage), ‘Looking at You’ presented by CMU Opera (CMU Alumni Concert Hall), and The Diva Saga (featuring Veronica Bleaus). VFX projects include the documentary ‘Workhorse Queen’ by Angela Washko, the interactive music video ‘Gesture of Devotion’ by Congregation of Drones, and the visual album Bombici Live at Studio B. Scott is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, and frequently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He has co-curated TQ Live! (Carnegie Museum of Art) and the NEA funded Fail-Safe (KST) performance series.

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Artist Statement

Scott Andrew's work centers around queer futurity, divas and gay icons, LGBTQ+ histories and mythologies, and tensions between the celebrity image and the physical body. Recent works have fully moved into the realm of creating media design as support and integration into live performances that incorporated AI generative animation, video mapping, visual effects, live and pre-edited video and animation for collaborations with dancers, drag queens, experimental musicians, and theater makers for concerts, events, operas, musicals and plays. Scott’s work embraces a collaborative process within all aspects of making and he has found staged performance to be the most gratifying context for his work to exist within, as it intermingles with other mediums such as movement, sound, light, sets, and physical bodies. Scott’s work is enhanced by the collaborations with other designers and performers in conversation with each other to create wholistic performances. He feels lucky to have been able to find a niche in Pittsburgh where he can work consistently on projects that align with his politics and activism, specifically in support of LGBTQIA+ and POC narratives and expressions that span many genres. Working with institutions like the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, New Hazlett Theater, and the Pittsburgh International Classical Theater, to name a few, has been gratifying because they have made it part of their mission to highlight works by underrepresented voices and have chosen works and artists to present that challenge gender norms, queer representation, and often support other minority groups within the region.

These same themes and motivations have taken the form of curatorial projects like ‘TQ Live!’, a queer and trans focused multidisciplinary variety performance that first started at the Andy Warhol Museum and later was presented at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Over a 10 year period TQ Live! presented musicians, dancers, drag performers, and other performance art and night life acts from within the various LGBTQIA+ communities in our region and beyond, with outside guests like The Dragon Sisters, Silky Shoemaker, Mrs. Kasha Davis, Michiyaya Dance, Vanessa German, Ahya Simone, Yves, among many others. This showcase was curated by Scott Andrew, Suzie Silver, Joseph Hall, and sarah huny young.

‘Fail-Safe’, was another performance series organized by Scott Andrew, with Angela Washko and Jesse Stiles to present works-in progress in a safe space for failure and audience feedback. This series started out on a small scale at the Glitterbox theater, and had online iterations, eventually culminating in a two-day extravaganza with many local acts and guest artists Xina Xurner, Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye.

Additionally, Scott has facilitated and collaborated on the presentation of performances in Pittsburgh by Darrell Thorne, Jaimie Warren, Nick Cave, ESP TV, Elysia Crampton, Complex Movements, Jinx Monsoon, among others, always with intentionality to highlight queerness, absurdity, excessive beauty, and surreal experiences.

Scott has collaborated with many artists, like Jesse Factor, Veronica Bleus (John Musser), and Suzie Silver, among others. These works are rooted in shared interests in speculative fantasies that question constructions of sexuality, gender, and identity in a digital age, while peering through portals into other worlds, voids, and vortices.

Scott gained notoriety working in the Institute for New Feeling, an art collective masked as a faux research clinic founded by Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt, and Nina Sarnelle. The Institute exhibited works at MoMA, Ballroom Marfa, Whitechapel Gallery, Black Cube, the Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, with the mission to create new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. These artistic projects were framed as treatments, therapies, retreats, research studies and wellness products, with a critical eye on the health, and beauty industries, as well as concerns with humanity’s digital existence. These works were positioned between social practice and post internet art movements and aesthetics. Through this collaboration Scott was able to begin to realize interests in staging media and movement-based performance works, specifically in our culminating project, ‘Avalanche’ which was staged in Denver with the nomadic art museum Black Cube. This work involved a speculative narrative rooted in the pollution and filtration, misuse and use of water in America, and involved casting of local performers, choreography, sculptural constructions, video and sound production, and much more.

Scott views the trajectory of his career to be based in mergers between artistic creation, curation, and education. As an educator, he advises and teaches animation, video, digital imaging, visual thinking, wearable sculpture and performance courses at The University of Pittsburgh, and previously at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art, the CMU Pre-college program, and has conducted workshops at the Andy Warhol Museum, Mattress Factory, Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, and Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. Scott has also previously taught at Youngstown State University and Seton Hill University, and was a founding member of the Media Department at the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School.

It is important that his teaching and artistic practice overlap by inviting students to engage in performative and media-based public programming, like in his class ‘Activated Anamorphs: Performative Inhabitables and Interactive Prostheses’, which has performed at Phipps Conservatory, The Andy Warhol Museum with Jaimie Warren, on Carnegie Mellon Campus with Nick Cave, and in Subsurface: Site Specific Sight and Sound, a music, media, and wearable sculpture performance in Brady’s Bend Limestone Mine, with Jesse Stiles’s ‘Exploded Ensemble’. Scott’s performance, animation, and video classes at the University of Pittsburgh have also performed at WQED Studio A, presented work online and across campus. With many of these events Scott will perform alongside his students and/or direct the work and he views this process as another extension of his intense desire to collaborate, create, and share vibrant, humorous, and politically relevant works with new audiences spanning diverse multigenerational audiences.

One final past collaboration is ‘The Drift’, presented with Steve Gurysh, which showcased a series of performances, installations, and public video-mapped screening events along the three rivers of Pittsburgh. These events involved many student and community artists from the Pittsburgh region and beyond, and also partnered with Alisha Wormsly’s Afronaut(a). ‘The Drift’ was a collaborative platform that explored bodies of water as a context, site, and material for temporary art in public space.

After working on so many different types of projects over the past 15+ year that Scott has identified as a professional artist, he takes interest in reflecting on the overlaps and throughlines, the things that stick to the walls of his heart and practice, and those that fall by the wayside. What he has learned is that at the core he is about creating socially engaged collaborative multimedia performance events and spaces that explore queer themes through sublime spectacles. Scott’s mission is to continue to make new relationships and work within the realm of media design to aid in the elevation, embellishment, and exaggeration of new staged works by finding the potential within each new project for media to serve in its ideal realization.