De Angela 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, 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 primary role within NYU’s Office of the Provost, she works closely with Clay Shirky, Vice Provost of AI and Technology in Education. She advises, guides, and evaluates university-wide, technology-enhanced teaching and learning initiatives, including those involving generative AI. She also contributes to other leadership, faculty development, or teaching & learning initiatives managed by the Provost’s Office. Additionally, she leads conferences, workshops, and gatherings in three core areas: teaching and learning with generative AI, leadership in higher education, and time and project management. She also serves as the provostial liaison to the NYU Production Lab.

Concurrently, De Angela continues to educate students and craft higher education curricula in emerging technology. She has been teaching in higher education since 1999, passionately educating students at the intersection of design, art, and technology. Her dedication to student learning was recognized with NYU Tandon's 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award.

With a background in administrative leadership since 2009, she, also, brings over seventeen years of expertise in curriculum development for emerging media and technology first at the now defunct University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, and subsequently at New York University, Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, and the University of South Florida.

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 life mission is to share her passion for Prince with others. As polished solid, she organizes Prince symposia and other events, including the upcoming #IWonderU40 Hybrid Prince Symposium (2026), commemorating ten years since Prince’s passing and celebrating forty years since his visionary 1986 releases, the Parade album and his second narrative film Under the Cherry Moon.

She has appeared in the documentaries, We Want The Funk (PBS, 2025) and Prince: The Final Secret (2023), spoken at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2026), Prince's 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.

Her creative work has been featured in publications such as HOW & Print magazines, and the books, Now Loading (2001) & www.animation: Animation Design for the World Wide Web (2001). She is, also, one of the featured, educator interviews in the book, Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design (2021).

De Angela also presents at numerous conferences and events, internationally, including Pop Conference (2025 USC, 2024 USC, 2021 Virtual), Prince on Screen at the University of Minnesota (2024), All 7 Years: The Past, Present, and Future of Prince Studies 2024 (Minneapolis, MN), the 2nd Dayton Funk Symposium (Dayton, Ohio), 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. 

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.