De Angela L. Duff

De Angela L. Duff holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She is also an internationally recognized Prince scholar and cultural curator whose work bridges technology, art, design, music, and culture. Explore her work at .

De Angela L. Duff is an internationally recognized Prince scholar who curates academic symposia centering his musical legacy and cultural impact, including the upcoming Prince #IWonderU40 Hybrid Symposium (2026), commemorating ten years since his passing and celebrating forty years of his Parade album and Under The Cherry Moon film. Her Prince scholarship reaches audiences through conference presentations, radio programs, podcasts, and documentaries, including We Want The Funk! (PBS, 2025).

She also holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Explore her work at polishedsolid.com.

De Angela L. Duff holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She leads conferences and workshops across three core areas: generative AI in teaching and learning, leadership in higher education, and time and project management. At IDM, she educates students at the intersection of design, art, and technology through project-based courses. De Angela is also an internationally recognized Prince scholar, curating academic symposia examining his musical legacy and cultural impact. Her work has reached audiences through conference presentations, radio shows, podcasts, and documentaries. She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Photography) from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MiCA), a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University, and a BS in Textiles from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Explore her work at polishedsolid.com or subscribe to her newsletter at polishedsolid.substack.com.

De Angela L. Duff is an internationally recognized Prince scholar and cultural curator who centers Prince’s musical legacy and cultural impact. As polished solid, she curates annual interdisciplinary symposia that bring together scholars, musicians, podcasters, and fans, including the upcoming Prince #IWonderU40 Hybrid Symposium (2026), which commemorates ten years since his passing and the fortieth anniversary of his Parade album and Under the Cherry Moon film. She also produces and co-hosts the weekly online book club series and salon What Did Prince Do This Week? (#WDPDTW), exploring Prince’s work week by week.

Her writing on Prince appears in Prince’s Grammy-nominated Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition (2023), Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020), and leading scholarly journals including the Journal of Popular Music Studies (2025, 2022, 2021), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), and Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022). She presents and moderates at conferences, most recently at Pop Conference (2025) and Prince on Screen (2024), and speaks on radio, podcasts, and other public programming through outlets including WNYC, Minnesota Public Radio, BBC Manchester, and Prince’s Celebration at Paisley Park (2023). Her insights also appear in documentaries, such as We Want The Funk! (PBS, 2025) and Prince: The Final Secret (2023).

She also holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Explore her work at polishedsolid.com.

De Angela L. Duff holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon.

In her primary role within the Office of the Provost, she works closely with Clay Shirky, Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education, advising and evaluating university-wide initiatives in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, including those involving generative AI. She also contributes to other leadership, faculty development, or teaching & learning initiatives managed by the Provost’s Office, and serves as the provostial liaison to the NYU Production Lab.

De Angela leads conferences and workshops in three core areas: generative AI in teaching and learning, leadership in higher education, and time and project management. Concurrently, she continues to educate students and craft higher education curricula in emerging technology. She has been teaching project-based courses at the intersection of design, art, and technology, since 1999. Her dedication to student learning was recognized with NYU Tandon’s 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award.

Through her interdisciplinary work, De Angela is advancing NYU’s commitment to innovative teaching with technology, while fostering faculty growth across the university.

De Angela L. Duff holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. Since 1999, she has taught at the intersection of design, art, and technology, earning NYU Tandon’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018 for her student-centered pedagogy.

With administrative leadership experience since 2009, she brings over sixteen years of expertise in curriculum development for emerging media and technology programs at institutions including The University of the Arts (UArts), NYU, Spelman College, and the University of South Florida. Her work in computational art and design is featured in Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design (2021), and she has served as a juror for leading programs such as Eyebeam’s Trust Residency, Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund, and HOW’s Interactive Design Competition.

De Angela is also an internationally recognized Prince scholar, curating academic symposia examining his musical legacy and cultural impact. Her scholarship reaches audiences through conference presentations, documentaries, radio programs, and podcasts.

She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Photography) from MiCA, a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University, and a BS in Textiles from Georgia Tech. Explore her work at polishedsolid.com.

De Angela L. Duff holds a dual appointment as an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She is also an internationally recognized Prince scholar and cultural curator whose work bridges technology, art, design, music, and culture. With more than 25 years in higher education, she develops forward-thinking curricula and programming that reflect the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Before entering academia, she was a part of the first generation of designers and developers shaping interactive online experiences. As an art director and senior designer, she created websites for iconic artists including David Bowie, Alicia Keys, and Britney Spears. Today, that same forward-looking sensibility now drives her leadership in generative AI at NYU, where she helps shape university-wide strategies for integrating emerging technologies into pedagogy, faculty development, and creative practice.

In her primary role within the Office of the Provost, she collaborates with Clay Shirky, Vice Provost of AI and Technology in Education, to advise, guide, and evaluate technology-enhanced teaching and learning initiatives. She also leads conferences, workshops, and gatherings in three core areas: teaching and learning with generative AI and other educational technologies, leadership in higher education, and time and project management. Additionally, she also serves as the provostial liaison to the NYU Production Lab.

Alongside her administrative work, De Angela remains deeply engaged in teaching and curriculum development. Her project-based courses integrate design, art, and technology, and she was honored with NYU Tandon’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2018.

As an internationally recognized Prince scholar, De Angela curates annual interdisciplinary symposia that bring together scholars, musicians, podcasters, and fans, including the upcoming Prince #IWonderU40 Hybrid Symposium (2026), which commemorates ten years since Prince’s passing and the fortieth anniversary of his Parade album and Under the Cherry Moon film. She also produces and co-hosts the weekly online book club series and salon What Did Prince Do This Week? (#WDPDTW), exploring Prince’s work week by week. Her writing on Prince appears in publications such as Prince’s Grammy-nominated Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition (2023), Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020), and leading scholarly journals including the Journal of Popular Music Studies (2025, 2022, 2021), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), and Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022). She frequently speaks about Prince’s legacy on radio, podcasts, and public events, including appearances on WNYC, Minnesota Public Radio, BBC Manchester, and Celebration (2023) at Prince’s Paisley Park. Her insights also appear in documentaries such as We Want The Funk! (PBS, 2025) and Prince: The Final Secret (2023).

She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Photography) from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MiCA), a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University, and a BS in Textiles from Georgia Tech. Explore her work further at polishedsolid.com or subscribe to her newsletter at polishedsolid.substack.com.

De Angela L. Duff is an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She is also a noted Prince scholar and culture whose work bridges technology, art, design, music, and cultural scholarship. With more than 25 years in higher education, she develops forward-thinking curricula and programs that reflect the ever-evolving digital landscape.

Before entering academia, she was a part of the first generation of designers and developers shaping interactive online experiences. As an art director and senior designer, she created websites for iconic artists such as David Bowie, Alicia Keys, and Britney Spears.

That same forward-looking sensibility continues to inform her leadership at NYU, where she works alongside Clay Shirky, Vice Provost of AI and Technology in Education, to advise, guide, and evaluate technology-enhanced teaching and learning initiatives. She also leads conferences, workshops, and gatherings in three core areas: teaching and learning with generative AI and other educational technologies, leadership in higher education, and time and project management. She also serves as the provostial liaison of the NYU Production Lab.

Concurrently, De Angela continues to educate students and craft higher education curricula in emerging technology.

Teaching in higher education since 1999, she is very passionate about educating students 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.

With administrative leadership experience since 2009, De Angela also has over 16 years of expertise in curriculum development for emerging media and technology—first at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, then subsequently New York University, Spelman College, and the University of South Florida.

Prior to returning to NYU in 2019, she was the Co-Director of Spelman’s Innovation Lab from 2018-2019, and, prior to joining Spelman, 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, De Angela served as Program Director and an Associate Professor of Multimedia in the College of Media & Communication, and as Interim Co-Director of the School of Design at The University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia, PA.

De Angela’s mission is to share her passion for music, photography, design, technology, creativity & productivity with others. Thus, she organizes and curates music and academic symposia and events as polished solid, including the upcoming Prince #IWonderU40 Hybrid Symposium (2026), which commemorates ten years since Prince’s passing and the fortieth anniversary of his Parade album and Under the Cherry Moon film.

She currently produces and co-hosts the weekly online book club and salon What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW. In the past, she also produced, co-hosted, and edited the Prince & Prince-related podcasts for Grown Folks Music.

Her past curated music symposia include:

Other Prince events she’s produced or co-produced include:

She was the lead organizer of the:

Since 2011, she has been conducting Time Warrior workshops on time & project management.

Her words have been published in the accompanying hardcover book for Prince’s Grammy-Nominated Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition) (2023), Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020), and in leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Popular Music Studies (2025, 2022, 2021), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022), and 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 spoken at Prince’s Celebration at Paisley Park (2023) and on WNYC, BBC Manchester, Minnesota Public Radio, and WURD Philly, and has judged Eyebeam’s Trust Residency, Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund, and HOW’s Interactive Design Competition.

Her insights also appear in documentaries, including We Want The Funk! (PBS, 2025) and Prince: The Final Secret (2023);

De Angela also presents at numerous conferences internationally including the 2025 and 2024 Pop Conference and Prince on Screen Conference at the University of Minnesota (2024). She has presented at the 2nd Dayton Funk Symposium (Dayton, Ohio), Pop Conference 2021 (Virtual), Prince 78-88: An Interdisciplinary Conference (Virtual), Black Portraiture[s] VII (Express Newark at Rutgers University-Newark), V (NYU), IV (Harvard), III (South Africa), II (Florence, Italy) & II: Revisited (NYU), the Prince from MPLS symposium (University of Minnesota), Purple Reign: An interdisciplinary conference on the life and legacy of Prince (University of Salford in Manchester, England), EYEO (Minneapolis, MN), NYC’s Creative Tech Week & Raising The Bar, AIGA’s Social Studies: Educating Designers in a Connected World (MiCA in Baltimore, Maryland), AIGA’s Massaging Media 2: Graphic Design Education in the Age of Dynamic Media (Boston, MA), and HOW’s Annual Design Conference.

From 2016–2019, she produced, edited, and co-hosted, the Prince & Prince-related podcasts for the defunct Grown Folks Music podcast network and, from 2004-2017, she hosted No Turn Unstoned, an online radio show of curated mixes.

She holds an MFA in Studio Art (Photography) from MiCA, a BFA in Graphic Design from Georgia State University, and a BS in Textiles from Georgia Tech.

Presently, she lives, works, and plays in New York City and its surrounding areas. Explore her work further at http://polishedsolid.com or subscribe to her newsletter at https://polishedsolid.substack.com.

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.

In 1996, while working for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, she started fiddling around with the WWW, reverse engineering HTML using Mosaic, the first widely accessible web browser. In 1997, she moved to New York City to fulfill her dreams of becoming a world-class designer. By 1998, driven by a desire to inspire and help shape others as others had for her, she began sharing her love of design, art, and technology through teaching at the University of The Arts (UArts) in Philly.

Currently, she continues to share this passion with students at New York University.

What gets De Angela out of bed every morning is music! Music has been the constant thread throughout De Angela’s life and creative work.

At a very early age, her uncles exposed her to a wide range of music. On any given day, they might play anything from Edgar Winter to Yes, Parliament / Funkadelic, Slave, or Lynyrd Skynyrd. She is deeply grateful to them for exposing her to the one thing that continues to give her so much joy and fuel for living, even when the world doesn’t make any sense and her gas tank is low: music.

At age 11, she listened to Prince’s Dirty Mind in its entirety for the very first time at her Aunt Net’s home in North Carolina. Little did she know that this one album would completely change her life forever. This is when she split. The artist, who used to draw daily like she had to breathe, now had to make room for her instant, full-blown music-collecting obsession but also her growing interest in design. Everything she learned about design, she learned from Prince albums). She often wonders who she would be if Prince had never existed. Possibly, saner 🙂 

On 19 December 1982 at twelve years old, she saw Prince in concert for the first time in Birmingham, AL, on the 1999 “Triple Threat” Tour, which also featured the Time and Vanity 6. Witnessing Prince perform live cemented the transformative power of music in her life. Ever since, she has integrated music, and Prince in particular, into her life and work by any means necessary. Music is how she has gotten through this thing called life. Her true friends, and even her husband, are all devoted Prince (and, therefore, music) heads!

Her very first job as a teenager was as a “wrecka stow” clerk (a Prince reference from her favorite film, Under The Cherry Moon) at Camelot Records in Southwest DeKalb Mall in Decatur, GA, in 1987. She would go on to create flyers and the first several website iterations for FunkJazz Kafé, an arts, music, and cultural institution spearheaded by her dear friend, Jason Orr, from 1995 to 2016. She also realized a lifelong dream of designing record covers for LaFace Records in Atlanta, GA, from 1996 to 1997. Projects included CD single packaging for Mary J. Blige, Donell Jones, and K.C. Hailey of Jodeci, as well as postcards and buttons.

After moving to NYC, she secured a dream job at Nettmedia, an NYC interactive design firm, where she worked from 1998 to 2003. Beginning as a senior designer and eventually becoming Art Director, she designed and developed user interfaces for hundreds of websites, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, primarily in the entertainment, sports, and arts industries. She art directed up to forty designers at one time. Notable projects included art direction & lead design of BowieNet 2.0 (davidbowie.com), where she met David Bowie IN PERSON (a dream come true!), as well as Sarah McLachlan’s Mirrorball DVD, and websites and e-cards for musicians including Avril Lavigne, Alicia Keys, Jimi Hendrix, The Roots, Dixie Chicks, Doyle Bramhall II, and Sum 41, among so many others.

Once she transitioned to academia full-time, integrating music into her creative practice was paramount. From 2005 to 2017, she genre-hopped on her online radio show, No Turn Unstoned, as DJ Polished Solid. From 2016 to 2019, she produced, edited, and co-hosted, the Prince & Prince-related podcasts for the now-defunct Grown Folks Music podcast network. Currently, she produces and co-hosts, a weekly, online book club series and salon, What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW.

Curating Prince symposia eventually took precedence over her radio show. No Turn Unstoned was placed on the back burner so she could focus on organizing music symposia and writing, presenting, and speaking about Prince. She hopes to jumpstart the radio show again someday.

“Ever Since I Was A Kid It Seemed I Collected Something” ~Fink

De Angela is an avid music collector. In fact, it is an obsession. She’s been collecting music since she was ten years old. As a college student in the late eighties, her passion was catapulted by weekly visits to Wax ’N Facts, Fantasyland, and later Criminal Records in Atlanta, Georgia. Her first trip to Minneapolis was for EYEO in 2012, and within an hour of landing, the first place she visited was Electric Fetus. She even launched an online radio show in 2004 to justify her music-buying habits. And yes, she still buys vinyl and CDs! Why? Because music still matters! Music is a powerful medium that elicits emotions and memories, brings people together, and ultimately changes lives. In an age dominated by streaming and digital downloads, physically owning music may seem unnecessary, but this Ignite talk argues that not only does music still matter, but that the physicality of the experience of music is paramount.

This talk is not representative of her standard delivery as this was super stressful. The ignite (AKA Pecha Kucha) talk format advances the slides automatically: 20 slides, 15 seconds each. She had to work very hard to say everything she wanted to say before she ran out of time. Under normal circumstances, she is far calmer and more measured, unless she gets excited!

On April 21, 2016, the music died momentarily. For six months after Prince’s passing, De Angela did not listen to ANY music at all. Without it, she felt empty and joyless. When she was finally able to listen again, she realized that as an adult she had relegated music to something she merely “did,” rather than something she deeply experienced, as she did as a teenager. Now, whenever possible, she sets aside time to listen to music on vinyl without doing anything else—no multitasking. Music belongs in the foreground more often than not. She cannot live without it.