Mindy Seu (born 1991) is an American designer, researcher and technologist whose work focuses on public engagement with digital archives. [1] [2] She is best known for her Cyberfeminism Index project and publications, and is currently on the faculty at UCLA's Design Media Arts Department. [3]
Seu grew up in Orange County, California, where her parents ran a flower shop after immigrating from South Korea. [4] [5] She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in Design Media Arts in 2013 and later graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with an M.Des in 2019. [2]
After graduating from UCLA, Seu worked at the Museum of Modern Art's Design Studio, as well as the design studio 2x4 on the Interactive Media team. [5] She also taught at the California College of the Arts, and published her own archival projects, including the web-based archive of Avant Garde Magazine and a digitization of Emmett Williams' 1968 concrete poem Sweethearts. [6] [7]
From 2017 to 2018, Seu published the web archives for Eros and Fact magazines, completing the digitization of Ralph Ginzburg and Herb Lubalin's iconic publications. [8] [9] In 2018, Seu also became a fellow at the Internet Archive and Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society. [10] [11] Starting in 2019, she began work on an archive of cyberfeminism, which later received the Design Studies Thesis Prize from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. [12] Seu's Cyberfeminism Catalog project began as a spreadsheet, a medium she often employs for its legibility and longevity, and was supported by Rhizome and a grant from the Graham Foundation. [13] [14] [15] The project was exhibited virtually through the New Museum in 2020 [16] and ultimately published as a 700-page print book, Cyberfeminism Index, in January 2023. Cyberfeminism Index featured contributions from academics and collectives including VNS Matrix, Donna Haraway, Legacy Russell, Sadie Plant, and the Old Boys Network. [17] [18] [19]
In 2022, Seu received a MacDowell Fellowship. [13] She has previously served as an assistant professor at Rutgers' Mason Gross School of the Arts, and as a critic at Yale School of Art. [20] [21] [13]
She is currently serving as an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Design Media Arts Department. [22] [23] She is also curating an exhibition titled Cantando Bajito: Chorus at the Ford Foundation Gallery [24] [25] and developing a series of lecture performance pieces titled A Sexual History of the Internet, in collaboration with Julio Correa. [26] [27]