Michelle Trudo ////// Philosophy

I am a graphic designer interested in all facets of design and media; I tend to describe myself as an interdisciplinary designer. While most all of my personal projects use motion and time-based, my professional design practice balances my interest in interactive design, print design, and publication design. What I find to be exciting is all the overlapping connections; each informing another as I move between projects.

I believe in creating spaces for cross-pollination to occur. I have remained committed to creating circumstances needed for process and innovation focused on change and growth to erupt out from spaces of collaboration. The collaboration between a multitude of disciplines and the wider community can create an inspiring environment for possibility and imagination. To design together requires us to listen and develop a dialogue for what can be possible.

Design, most importantly, is all about process. In the end, process is the single thing a designer can create that is a framework for an end product. Process has always been my primary focus professionally and as a professor.

Personal Research Projects

As an artist and feminist, I am compelled to question and critique socially prescribed gender roles. By re-contextualizing with digital video, I deconstruct social norms and reconstruct them in a performative experimental narrative, which is playful and humorous, demonstrates their absurdity, while quietly pinching back culture.

My digital videos stem from autobiographical narratives, however, many of us share similar narratives. It is the intersection of private and public that narratives become shared and connect us through a culture, community, socially and even on a very human level of emotions. As an artist I rely on these shared connections to communicate a narrative.

My projects explore the use of narrative storytelling through both image making and spoken words. I fragment the narratives in a non-linear method, often utilizing repetition, which then asks viewers to construct and reconstruct a narrative over time. I rely on public and cultural narratives to emerge from the images. I also am investigating postures and performances of gender to tell a story about an identity, community and culture.