Rafael Fajardo

Rafael Fajardo (he/him/his) is an artist, designer, researcher and educator. Through his collaborative, SWEAT, Fajardo has been creating boundary blurring videogames as an art form since the year 2000. These games have been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide. Fajardo’s research and creative projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, by the Colorado Council on the Arts, and by MTV in excess of one million dollars. In 2004, I.D. Magazine named Fajardo among the top fifty designers in the United States. With Adán De La Garza and Justin Ankenbauer he curates a series of popup artist’s games arcades as Dizzy Spell. At the University of Denver, where he is an Associate Professor of Emergent Digital Practices, he also serves as a founding member of the Board of Advisors for the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality (IRISE) and is core faculty of the LatinX Center. Fajardo earned both a BA and a BFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He was born in Colombia and migrated to the US with his parents in 1968. He was raised in San Antonio, Texas. Fajardo’s earliest games, Crosser and La Migra, are featured in ReVisión, an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum on display through July 2022 that is reimagining 2000 years of art history from what we now call Latin America.