Nancy Mauro-Flude

Nancy Mauro-Flude is an artistic researcher and design anthropologist with international recognition in electronic media art. Her research-creation and research-integrated teaching are deeply embedded in the socio-cultural dynamics of Southern Oceania. Nancy’s aesthetic application of networking infrastructure and custom-built toolsets in live performances compel in situ engagement with the public, aiding shared activities and galvanising researchers to advance future literacies in Speculative and Critical Art and Design.
 
The impact of her artistic contributions is featured in pivotal books, such as “Parallel Realities: Development of Performance Art in Australia (2017)” (London: Thames & Hudson); endorsement by industry experts Linux News (2009) "performance artist who has used mobile Linux as part of a device intended as an artistic and political statement...The subversive possibilities of such a device are clear...Others will certainly follow this particular artist's lead; expect to see more mobile devices which record their immediate environments and put the results on a server for all to see. It is going to be interesting."; accolades from respected peers and elders Akomfrah & Eshun ‘Certain Received Wisdoms’ (2019); and regular commentary and coverage in reviews and broadcast media. 


Mauro-Flude’s proficiency in nurturing a community of culture has received numerous awards and industry accolades. She’s been acknowledged in significant impact reports, such as Creative Australia’s Real Life: Mapping Digital Cultural Engagement in the First Decades of the 21st Century (2021), and was recognised in Ars Electronica’s ‘Women in Media Arts’ keynote (2020). 

Nancy’s extensive experience with the intercultural dimensions of creative arts and holistic computing literacies spans tertiary contexts to grassroots activism. She develops, designs and delivers innovative research-integrated pedagogy from traditional syllabi to studio-based curricula. The quality of her research-integrated pedagogy is evidenced by international recognition, peer teaching awards, and invitations by senior colleagues to examine and collaborate in supervising high-quality HDR candidates.

From 2015 to 2024, she has guided sixteen Master of Research and PhD candidates to completion.
 
Her knowledge-sharing initiatives in Critical Historial and Theoretical Studies in Art and Design are detailed to “…focus on the effects of social, cultural, and intellectual diversity (among other factors) within online communities and their dynamics through nurturing nuanced concepts of identity …within the electronic space Nancy Mauro-Flude is a facilitator whose actions are those of a medium, whether on a computer in a hacklab in Romania, a voodoo ceremony in Haiti or in a classroom in Tasmania. Witness the superb action in her performance work Error_in_Time()…” - Utopias of Technological Art Fifty Years On (2013), Artnodes Journal, Prof. Alcalá Mellado, José Ramón.
 
Since 2003, she has secured over $1.4 million in competitive funding through her innovative, collaborative, and creative practice research. She devises projects focusing on cooperative knowledge sharing and participatory codesign for holistic applications of interfaces in computing arts (permacomputing) that are context-based and culturally centred. Informed by sustained involvement in free software projects, crafting tools, and sharing practices to empower artists in more inclusive, aesthetic, and culturally informed interactions with code. Initially trained in dance and Theatre Anthropology, she deploys this expertise in tacit knowledge in the empirical fieldwork she conducts to listen to and amplify the voices of the Oceanic diaspora. 
 
As a transdisciplinary artist and creative practice scholar, she is described by Anne Goldenberg, editor of Free Culture: “Hacker, feminist, performance artist and theorist, Nancy Mauro Flude brings us in a world ...where utensils, instruments, endowments and accessories have the right to be discovered, examined and transformed. Gray magics, hijackings, driftings and seizures of power are many of the sensitive and subversive subterfuges by which the artist urges, twist and explores the esthetic politic of the open source spirit.” .DPI Feminist Journal of Art and Digital Culture.