Theresa Devine, MFA, is an Associate Professor in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. A Canadian-American and member of the Québécois diaspora, she is both an artist and scholar whose interdisciplinary work engages games, play, psychology, aesthetics, ethics, and social transformation. Devine earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi and her MFA in Painting from the University of Houston. Her studio practice has long examined games, toys, and play as aesthetic systems—structures through which agency is rehearsed and meaning is made. Her scholarship similarly positions play not as entertainment, but as a cultural and ethical framework that shapes how we negotiate power, responsibility, and freedom. Her recent body of work, Freedom / Liberté, extends this inquiry inward. Emerging from an internal struggle with the loss of freedom, the series of abstract drawings, paintings, and collages traces emotional states—compression, resistance, rupture, and fleeting release. Here, play shifts from object to condition: the mark itself becomes a site of negotiation. Repetition, pressure, erasure, and gestural refusal mirror the tension between control and disruption, revealing freedom not as a stable state but as something contested moment by moment. Across both her creative and academic work, Devine explores how play and constraint coexist. Whether through games or abstraction, she investigates how movement persists under pressure—and how the act of making becomes a rehearsal for reclaiming agency in fragile, lived realities.

https://theresadevine.com/