De Angela L. Duff is an Associate Vice Provost at New York University and Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She also curates music symposia as polished solid, including the upcoming Prince #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 Prince #Come30 Virtual Symposium (2024), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s Come; writes about music most recently in Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls Super Deluxe Edition (2023), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022), and the edited book volume Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020); presents about music, design, and technology, internationally, at numerous conferences and events including the upcoming 2024 Pop Conference and Prince on Screen Conference at the University of Minnesota (2024), and the past All 7 Years: The Past, Present, and Future of Prince Studies at the University of Minnesota (2023), Black Portraiture[s] VII (2022), Pop Conference 2021, Prince 78-88: An Interdisciplinary Conference (2021) and 2nd Dayton Funk Symposium (2021); speaks about music, most recently at Prince’s Paisley Park (2023), and on radio and podcasts such as WNYC, Minnesota Public Radio radio, and BBC Manchester; appears in documentaries such as Prince: The Final Secret; and produces and co-hosts What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW, a weekly online book club series.

You can view her past and present work 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 and Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. She works closely with Vice Provosts Clay Shirky and Charlton McIlwain, organizing and leading conferences, workshops, and gatherings in three main areas: teaching and learning with generative AI, most recently through the NYU Teaching & Learning with Generative AI Virtual Symposium (2024), leadership in higher education through the annual, yearlong FRN Leadership Initiative, and time and project management through NYU’s Early Career Faculty Institute (ECFI). She also assists with other University-wide leadership, faculty development, or technology-enhanced teaching & learning initiatives managed by the Provost’s Office. 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).

De Angela L. Duff is an Associate Vice Provost at New York University and Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media (IDM) at NYU Tandon. She also curates academic and music symposia 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 (2024); presents about music, design, and technology, internationally, at numerous conferences and events, including the upcoming 2024 Pop Conference and Prince on Screen Conference at the University of Minnesota (2024), and speaks about music, most recently at Prince’s Paisley Park (2023), on podcasts and radio (WNYC, BBC Manchester, and Minnesota Public Radio); writes about music most recently in Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition)(2023), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022), and the edited book volume Prince and Popular Music: Critical Perspectives on an Interdisciplinary Life (2020); appears in documentaries such as Prince: The Final Secret (2023); produces and co-hosts What Did Prince Do This Week? #WDPDTW, a weekly online book club series; and leads workshops on leadership and time and project management; is one of the featured, educator interviews in the book, Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design (2021); and has judged Eyebeam’s Trust Residency, Tribeca Film Institute’s New Media Fund, and HOW’s Interactive Design Competition. 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. You can view her past and present work at polishedsolid.com or subscribe to her newsletter at polishedsolid.substack.com.

De Angela L. Duff is currently an Associate Vice Provost at New York University (NYU) and an Industry Professor in Integrated Design & Media at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.

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 in collaboration with others. She also serves a leadership role as a strategic advisor for the Faculty Resource Network (FRN). Additionally, she facilitates and hosts the yearlong FRN Leadership Initiative and the annual FRN Teach Share. She also assists with other leadership, faculty development, or teaching & learning initiatives managed by the Provost’s Office.

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. Over the last 15 years (and counting), one of her other passions is creating, developing, and evaluating higher education curricula in emerging media and technology, first at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and subsequently at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, and New York University. 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, 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 was the Program Director and an Associate Professor of Multimedia within the College of Media & Communication, as well as an 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 #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 Prince #Come30 Virtual Symposium (2024), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s Come.

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 Grown Folks Music.

Her past curated music symposia include:

• Prince #TripleThreat40 Symposium (2023) celebrating 40 years of Prince’s 1999, The Time’s What Time Is It? and Vanity 6’s eponymous debut and Prince
• #SexyMF30 (2022), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s o[+> album (Virtual)
• #1plus1plus1is3(2021),celebrating 40 years of Prince’s Controversy, 30 years ofDiamonds and Pearls,and 20 years ofThe Rainbow Children (2021) albums (Virtual)
• #DM40GB30 (2020), celebrating 40 years of Prince’s Dirty Mind and 30 years of Graffiti Bridge albums (Virtual)
• #Batdance30ATL (2019), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s Batman soundtrack at Spelman College in Atlanta, GA
• #Lovesexy30BK (2018), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s Lovesexy album at NYU Tandon in Brooklyn, NY, and
• Betty Davis–They Say I’m Different(2018) at NYU Tandon in Brooklyn, NY.

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

• (co-produced) a virtual event with the PRN Alumni Foundation, #PRNAlumni5 (2021), celebrating their five-year anniversary and the 2021 Record Store Day release of  Prince’s The Truth
• #W2AVC: Welcome 2 America Virtual Celebration (2021), celebrating Prince’s first posthumous, complete album release from his vault, Welcome 2 America
• #SOTTSDC: Peach + Black 2: Sign ‘O’ The Times Super Deluxe Virtual Celebration (2020), celebrating the release of the Sign O’ The Times Super Deluxe box set, and
• (co-produced) Peach + Black (#SOTT30BK) (2017), celebrating 30 years of Prince’s Sign ‘O’ The Times at NYU Tandon.

She was the lead organizer of the NYU Teaching and Learning with Generative AI Symposium (2024), Learning To Teach Creative Technologies with Generative AI Virtual UnSymposium (2024), NYU Teaching and Learning with Generative AI conference (2023) and the Learning To Teach Creative Technologies Remotely Virtual UnSymposium (2021), alongside IDM colleagues.

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 Diamonds and Pearls (Super Deluxe Edition) (2023), AMP: American Music Perspectives (2022), Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture (2022), 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 spoken at Prince’s Paisley Park 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.

She has appeared in the documentary, Prince: The Final Secret (2023);

De Angela also presents at numerous conferences internationally including the upcoming 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. You can view her past and present work 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. 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. 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 would play anything from Edgar Winter to Yes to Parliament / Funkadelic to Slave to Lynyrd Skynyrd. She is grateful to her uncles 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 would listen to Prince’s Dirty Mind in its entirety for the very first time at her Aunt Net’s home in North Carolina. Little would she know that this one album would totally change her life forever. This is when she split: the artist (she used to draw daily like she had to breathe) in her now had to make way for, not only, 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 there was no Prince. Possibly, saner 🙂 

On 19 December 1982 at twelve years old, she was able to see Prince in concert for the first time in Birmingham, AL, for the 1999 “Triple Threat” Tour that 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/or Prince 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 Prince (and, therefore, music) heads!

Her very first job as a teenager was as a “wrecka stow” clerk (a Prince reference from his film and De Angela’s favorite, Under The Cherry Moon) for Camelot Records at 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 1995–2016. She would, also, realize a lifelong dream of designing record covers for LaFace Records in Atlanta, GA, from 1996–1997. Projects included CD single packaging for Mary J. Blige, Donell Jones, and K.C. Hailey, as well as postcards and buttons.

After moving to NYC, she would secure a dream job with Nettmedia, an NYC interactive design firm from 1998–2003. Beginning as a senior designer and ending as the Art Director, she would design and develop user interfaces for hundreds of websites, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, primarily in the entertainment, sports, and arts industries. She art directed up to 40 designers at one time. Notable projects included art direction & lead design of BowieNet 2.0, davidbowie.com, where she got to meet David Bowie IN PERSON (a dream come true!), Sarah McLachlan’s Mirrorball DVD, websites/ecards for Avril Lavigne, Alicia Keys, Jimi Hendrix, The Roots, Dixie Chicks, and Doyle Bramhall II, Sum 41, and so many others.

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

However, curating the aforementioned Prince symposia has engulfed her radio show and podcast endeavors. She has put No Turn Unstoned on the backburner to concentrate on her current love of organizing music symposia and/or writing, presenting, or speaking about Prince. She hopes to jumpstart her 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 10 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. The first time she came to Minneapolis was for EYEO in 2012 and, within an hour of landing, the first place she visited was Electric Fetus. She even began an online radio show in 2004 in order 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. Of course, it makes little to no sense to physically own a music collection in this day and age of streaming and digital downloads. However, in this ignite talk, she may convince you that not only does music still matter, but that the physicality of the experience of music is paramount.

This talk is not very 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 tried to make sure she said everything she wanted to say before she ran out of time. She’s much calmer and measured when giving “normal” talks, unless she gets excited!

On April 21, 2016, the music died momentarily. For six months, De Angela did not listen to ANY music after Prince’s passing. She would feel empty and joyless without music in her life. When she was able to listen again, De Angela recognized how as an adult she had relegated music as a thing to “do” rather than deeply “experience” as she did as a child and teenager. So, now, whenever she can, she takes time out to truly listen to music again on vinyl WITHOUT doing anything else–no multitasking. Music should be in the foreground more often than not. She can not live without it!