Dr. Micha Cárdenas, PhD, MFA, is an artist, author, and Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the director of the Critical Realities Studio. Her debut novel Atoms Never Touch (AK Press 2023) imagines trans-Latina love crossing multiple quantum realities. Her academic monograph Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media (Duke UP 2022) was the co-winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize in 2022 from the National Women’s Studies Association “for groundbreaking monographs in women’s studies that make significant multicultural feminist contributions to women of color/transnational scholarship”. cárdenas was a winner of the 2022 Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Award. She is currently working on her next academic monograph After Man: Fires, Oceans and Climate Justice, as well as The Probability Engine, a multi-disciplinary artwork imagining futures of climate justice. She is a first-generation Colombian American.
Cárdenas is an artist/theorist who was the winner of the 2020 Impact Award at the Indiecade Festival and the 2016 Creative Award from the Gender Justice League. She is a member of the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Her artwork has been described as “a seminal milestone for artistic engagement in VR” by the Spike art journal in Berlin. She was the recipient of the inaugural Otherwise Fellowship in 2014, a fellowship to provide support and recognition for the new voices in science fiction who are making visible the forces that are changing our view of gender today. She has been described as one of “7 bio-artists who are transforming the fabric of life itself” by io9.com.
Cárdenas’ solo and collaborative artworks have been presented in museums, galleries, and biennials including the SUR Biennial (2023), Outfest Fusion (2023), Tangled Arts + Disability in Toronto (2022), Transmediale in Berlin (2021), the alt_cph Copenhagen Biennial (2020); the Stamps Gallery (2020) in Ann Arbor; the Thessaloniki Biennial (2019) in Greece; Arnolfini Gallery (2019); De La Warr Pavillion (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); House of Electronic Arts Basel (2018); Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen (2018); Henry Art Gallery (2017); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2011); Centro Cultural del Bosque, Mexico City (2015); the Zero1 Biennial, San Jose, CA (2012); and the California Biennial, Newport Beach, CA (2010). She has given keynote talks at the Allied Media Conference, the Association of Internet Researchers, the Digital Gender Conference at Umea University in Sweden, the Dark Side of the Digital Conference, and the Vera List Center at the New School in New York.
Cárdenas is an editor of the journal Transgender Studies Quarterly from Duke University Press. She was a founding editor for NYU Press’ Queer/Trans/Digital series. Her co-authored book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities (2012) was published by Atropos Press. cardenas’ poetry has appeared in the anthologies Troubling the Line, The &Now Awards 3, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves and Writing the Walls Down. She has published book chapters in Plants, Androids and Operators – A Post-Media Handbook, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Queer Geographies, The Critical Digital Studies Reader and the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader. Her articles have been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, CTheory, the Media-N Journal, the Ada Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the AI & Society Journal, as well as the magazines Terremoto, No More Potlucks, Mute Magazine and Make/Shift Magazine.
Cárdenas has previously been on the editorial boards of Art Journal and Art Journal Open, and on the advisory boards of FemTechNet and the York University Center for Feminist Research. She holds a PhD from the University of Southern California in Media Arts + Practice, an MFA from University of California, San Diego in Visual Art, an MA in Communication from the European Graduate School and a BS in Computer Science from Florida International University.
She microblogs on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@michacard.
