De Angela Duff

De Angela L. Duff is currently an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM, formerly Integrated Digital Media) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn. From 2013-2018, she was the former Co-Director of IDM.

In her role as Associate Vice Provost, De Angela works closely with Vice Provosts Clay Shirky and Charlton McIlwain. She advises, guides, and evaluates University-wide, technology-enhanced teaching and learning initiatives, including generative AI, in collaboration with others. Additionally, she facilitates and hosts the yearlong FRN Leadership Initiative and the annual FRN Teach Share for NYU's Faculty Resource Network. She also assists with other leadership, faculty development, or teaching & learning initiatives managed by the Provost’s Office.

She is currently the lead organizer of the upcoming Learning to Teach Creative Technologies with Generative AI Unsymposium (2024) and NYU Teaching & Learning with Generative AI Virtual Symposium (2024). She was also the lead organizer of the NYU Teaching and Learning with Generative AI conference (2023) and other generative AI workshops, and co-organized the Learning To Teach Creative Technologies Remotely UnSymposium (2021) alongside her IDM colleagues. Since 2011, she has also been conducting Time Warrior workshops on time & project management.

Teaching in higher education since 1999, she is very passionate about educating students and developing higher education curricula at the intersection of design, art, and technology. She was acknowledged for this passion by being awarded the NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award. She has designed, developed, and evaluated higher education curricula in the emerging media and technology space, first at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and subsequently at Spelman College, New York University, and The University of South Florida. She has also been in higher education administration since 2009. 

De Angela has a lot of academic and industry experience at the intersection of design, art, and technology. Prior to returning to NYU in 2019, she was the Co-Director of Spelman's Innovation Lab from 2018-2019. Prior to joining Spelman, she was the Co-Director of the undergraduate and graduate programs in Integrated Digital Media (IDM) and an Industry Associate Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering in Brooklyn from 2013-2018. Prior to joining NYU Tandon, she was the Program Director and an Associate Professor of Design, Art & Technology (formerly Multimedia), and Web Development & Interaction Design within the College of Art, Media & Design, as well as an Interim Co-Director of the School of Design at The University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, PA. Prior to UArts, she was an Art Director for Nettmedia, an NYC interactive design firm. Notable projects included art direction and lead design of BowieNet version 2.0, davidbowie.com, as well as the design and development of a myriad of websites for the likes of The Roots, Britney Spears, Alicia Keys, and many, many others.

De Angela's mission is to share her passion for music, photography, design, technology, creativity & productivity with others. She organizes @polishedsolid music and academic symposia and events, including the upcoming #EroticCity40 Symposium (2024) celebrating 40 years of Prince's Purple Rain, The Time's Ice Cream Castle, Sheila E.'s The Glamorous Life, and Apollonia 6's eponymous debut and #Come30 Virtual Symposium (2024) celebrating 30 years of Prince's Come.

Her words have been published most recently in Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition (2023), Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2021), Journal of Popular Music Studies (2021), Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020) & the Black Magnolias Literary Journal's Special Issue on Prince (2020). Her creative work has been featured in publications such as HOW & Print magazines, and the books, Now Loading & www.animation: Animation Design for the World Wide Web. She is, also, one of the featured, educator interviews in the book, Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design (2021). 

She has appeared in the Prince: The Final Secret documentary (2023), spoken at Paisley Park (2023) and on WNYC, BBC Manchester, and Minnesota Public Radio, and has judged Eyebeam's Trust Residency, Tribeca Film Institute's New Media Fund, and HOW's Interactive Design Competition.

De Angela also presents at numerous conferences and events, internationally, including the upcoming Prince on Screen Conference at the University of Minnesota (2024) and the past All 7 Years: The Past, Present, and Future of Prince Studies (Minneapolis, MN), the 2nd Dayton Funk Symposium (Dayton, Ohio), Pop Conference 2021 (Virtual), Prince 78-88: An Interdisciplinary Conference (Virtual), Black Portraiture[s] VII (Rutgers University-Newark), V (NYU), IV (Harvard), III (South Africa), II (Florence, Italy) & II: Revisited (NYU), the Prince from MPLS symposium at the University of Minnesota, Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince at the University of Salford in Manchester, England, EYEO in Minneapolis, MN, NYC's Creative Tech Week & Raising The Bar, AIGA’s Social Studies: Educating Designers in a Connected World at MiCA in Baltimore, Maryland, AIGA's Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media in Boston, MA, and HOW’s Annual Design Conference. She currently produces and co-hosts What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW. In the past, she also produced, co-hosted, and edited the Prince & Prince-related podcasts for the now defunct Grown Folks Music podcast network.

How did she get to where she is today? As a child growing up in Eutaw, Alabama, drawing wasn’t something De Angela decided to do on occasion. Drawing was something she did every single day, just like breathing, eating, and sleeping. By the time she was a teenager, her love of drawing had to make way for the power of typography, photography, and music. By 1996 while working for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, she started fiddling around with the WWW by reverse engineering HTML on Mosaic, the first public web browser. By 1997, she moved to NYC to fulfill her dreams of becoming a world-class designer. By 1998, she wanted to inspire and help shape others, as others had for her, so she started sharing her love of design, art, and technology through teaching at The University of The Arts (UArts) in Philly. Now, she continues to share this passion with students at New York University.

Discover more details about her work at polishedsolid.com and stay updated by subscribing to her newsletter at polishedsolid.substack.com.