Tony Balko: November 2025
Tony Balko is an artist, educator, and curator from Smithton, Pennsylvania, USA. He works across a variety of mediums – from moving images, to sculpture, to performance, to whatever feels right. His practice illustrates a commitment to meticulous, time-intensive labor, and embraces the notion that your idea doesn’t have to be serious, so long as you take your idea seriously.
He received his BA in Film Studies from the University of Pittsburgh, his MFA in Film/Video/Animation from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. A former longtime volunteer at the ACRE artist residency and co-founder Light Stroke micro cinema, he now serves on the board of Film Pittsburgh, and co-curates the bi-annual Open Concept exhibition series.
His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in museums, cinemas, galleries, film festivals, warehouses, bars, basements, chat rooms, magazines, and, on occasion, buffet tables.
I’m drawn to a silly idea taken to the extreme - when the commitment, effort, and process behind it transform it into something else. My hope is that when folks encounter my work, they don’t walk away with a precise understanding, but maybe they stop trusting their bath towel, or their medications, or their disco balls, or their car. Not in a scary way - not even a cynical way - just in a way that’s a little more critical than before.
To that end, my work tends to be loosely narrative and process-driven(ish), hiding the serious bits with humor, psychedelia, and sometimes vulgarity. Usually this takes the shape of rigorous explorations of form, and tries to ask questions like, how much is too much? Or, ok, it is too much - but YOLO, right?
For me, there's a lot of joy in my work - along with love, death, sex, food, drugs, nature, technology, pop culture, and politics - because those are some of the things I think about a lot and am interested in.
