Artist Statement

Madoka Wada is a Japanese interactive and mixed-media artist living in the United States. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interactive Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 and a Master of Fine Arts in Digital Technology at Arizona State University in 2022. She has been practicing a variety of visual languages, including drawing, painting, and digital media. For the past six years, she has worked to incorporate interactivity so that viewers and participants can engage with her art and be a part of it

Her work draws on her multicultural background, interactivity, whole-body engagement, and a range of media from traditional feminine crafts and children’s toys to embedded microcontrollers. She continues the challenges of combining these elements to create magic with others. Her work draws inspiration from her everyday experiences as an immigrant woman of color and a new parent. She highlights such marginalized identities through autoethnographic approaches that connect her stories with larger contexts. By combining interactivity with autoethnography, she extends the celebration of her communities’ beauty, uniqueness, and achievements.