Jennifer Angus is a professor in the Design Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin -Madison where she teaches textile design, specifically, everything to do with the dyeing and printing of cloth, including natural dyes.  She is an artist described by Art Daily as “one of the top contemporary installation artists in the country.” Jennifer creates some of the most provocative work most people have ever seen in an art museum setting. She composes patterns using hundreds of insects, placing them in arrangements that suggest wallpaper and textiles. Angus was one of nine leading contemporary artists selected for the landmark exhibition Wonder at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in 2015.

Jennifer has been the recipient of numerous awards including Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Wisconsin Arts Board grants.  More recently she received the inaugural Forward Art Prize, an unrestricted award for outstanding women artists of Wisconsin.  At the University of Wisconsin-Madison she has received annual grants from the Graduate School, as well as the Vilas Associate Award, the Emily Mead Baldwin-Bascom Professorship in the Creative Arts, the Romnes Fellowship, the UW Arts Institute Creative Arts Award, Rothermel Bascom Professorship,  the Kellett Mid-Career Faculty Researcher Award and most recently the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award. In 2013, Albert Whitman and Company, Chicago, published her first novel, In Search of Goliathus Hercules.

At the University of Wisconsin – Madison she is the faculty leader of the Global Artisans Initiative which launched an interdisciplinary outreach program that connects students with artisans who have requested assistance with microenterprise development.  The program leverages the relationships that University of Wisconsin has built over many years at global health field course sites in Ecuador, India, Kenya Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam to create a product design and marketplace system to support the economic wellbeing of local artisans.