Aya Karpińska is an artist who works with words by stretching, breaking, and reshaping them through technology, sound, and image. Her practice includes video poems, interactive media, and printed matter, all rooted in a long engagement with poetry and storytelling. Much of her work draws on myth and folklore as a way to counterbalance the speed, efficiency, and flattening of language in contemporary digital culture.
After early international recognition in digital poetry and electronic literature, Karpińska spent many years balancing artmaking with a parallel career in experience design. Decades of working with interactive systems inform her art practice, exploring how language and technology impact and wrestle with meaning.
Karpińska was an early innovator in digital literature, creating one of the first literary iPhone apps, *Shadows Never Sleep* (2008), and co-founding the electronic language arts festival Interrupt. Her work has been exhibited, performed, and presented internationally. She holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and an MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, as well as a black belt in aikido and a certificate in The Alchemy Method™ group facilitation through storytelling. Her recent book published by 811 Press, The Red Shoes She Wore, brings together text and image to explore femininity, pleasure, and power.
