Wyman Visiting Professorship

Public Lecture: THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY: How Advanced AI is Transforming Art, Motion Design and Marketing

Wednesday, Oct. 9, 5:30 p.m. (North Hall 222): View recording.

Elizabeth Steinberg is an Emmy-winning Art Director from South Africa, renowned for her ability to create captivating design experiences that seamlessly blend motion with branding, experience event design, and user interactions. Her expertise is evident in her work on major projects, including Microsoft’s flagship events and high-profile campaigns for Apple TV, Maxon and Netflix to name a few.

Elizabeth’s diverse portfolio features a range of visual storytelling achievements, such as title sequences for “Candy” on Hulu, “The New Look” on Apple TV, and “Masters of Air” on Apple TV, as well as brand and event packages for top platforms like Apple TV, Disney, Amazon, Prime Video, Maxon, Motorola, Nat Geo, Netflix, Starz, The CW, and the NFL.

In addition to her freelance work, Elizabeth co-founded Martian & Sons in 2016 with her husband, Kendall Reid. This creative studio combines Elizabeth’s art direction expertise with Kendall’s software development skills to invent, prototype, launch, and scale innovative products from the red soil up.

When she’s not working on client projects, Elizabeth channels her passion for motion design and art direction into teaching on her platform, Friends of Motion, where she inspires and empowers designers and animators of all skill levels.

Personal website: www.elizabethsteinberg.com
Instagram: @ja.coba
Martian & Sons: www.martianandsons.com 

Travis Crow is a business consultant who has worked with brands such as LVMH, Hershey, Harley Davidson, and various medical companies. He has been recognized for his work in branding, design thinking, and overall strategy and execution to cultivate diverse and profitable ecosystems where creativity flourishes.

Danielle Mužina is an artist and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. As an artist, she makes paintings that explore place, identity and crisis, inspired by her experiences as a member of a family that immigrated from Croatia. She received her B.F.A at Ohio Wesleyan University, her M.A. at Eastern Illinois University, and her M.F.A. at Miami University. Mužina has studied at the Jerusalem Studio School in Civita Castellana, Italy, and completed residencies at Chautauqua School of Art, the Vermont Studio Center, and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation. 

Her paintings have been shown at numerous galleries nationally including juried exhibitions at First Street Gallery, Blue Mountain Gallery, Bowery Gallery, The Untitled Space, and Prince Street Gallery in New York, NY, Woskob Family Gallery in State College, PA, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, GA, and Verum Ultimum Gallery in Portland, OR. Her current series was recognized with an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and national scholarly organization SECAC’s Outstanding Artistic Achievement Award in 2021, and has been exhibited multiple times nationally in the past three years. 

Mužina recently pivoted from her position as Assistant Professor of Painting and head of painting at Murray State University, where she was recognized with her institution's Emerging Scholar Award in 2019, Excellence in Teaching Award in 2021, and Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award in 2022. The opportunities for leadership and activism that professorship offered Mužina inspired her to co-found reframe52, a women-owned DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) education company. The reframe52 program is launching this year. Mužina currently lives and works in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio as a proud rust-belter, amateur mixologist and dog mom. 
 

Kunsman is a photographer, book artist, fine printmaker, educator and collaborator. While Kunsman claims “there’s no ‘given’ formula” for his work, he is interested in the unwritten stories of objects left behind in neglected, struggling landscapes from the American southwest to the upper northeast. His current work explores one of those relics: working payphones. 

Bierbaum, a UWRF alum (2017 BFA in photography and graphic design) and past assistant to Kunsman, is an alternative photographer and glass artist. Bierbaum specializes in wet plate collodion in combination with blown glass and uses optical properties to create and alter light in her image-making process. She is currently an MFA candidate in photography and related media at Rochester Institute of Technology.
 

Artist, educator, and winner of the Netflix hit series, Blown Away (Season 3), John Moran, Ph.D., will visit UWRF as its 2022 fall Walker D. and Helen Bryant Wyman Visiting Professor. Moran is a socially and politically engaged artist who works in variety of mediums including glass sculpture. Moran has participated in several residency programs and has exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe. His work focuses on his interests in politics, pop culture, social awareness, and contemporary art.

Cybèle Young is a renowned artist and author whose work is exhibited and collected internationally. She works in a diverse range of mediums, but always at the root is a close connection to the hand, to paper and to the drawn line. Young has both written and illustrated eight picture books to date.

Engaging with abstract and familiar motifs, she juxtaposes sculptures to create a sense of dialogue or play between them. Her intricate sculptural artworks are inspired by seemingly insignificant day-to-day experiences, where objects imply human interactions and small observations become fantastic.

“Engaging with abstract and familiar motifs, I juxtapose sculptures to create a sense of dialogue or play between them. I approach my work in series and components, ultimately building an ongoing inventory of personal experience and observation. I compile these in various arrangements to create communities that interact and form new relationships—much like the small seemingly insignificant moments in our everyday lives that come together to create unexpected outcomes," Young said.

Chris Gustin is a studio artist and was a emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where he retired in 1998. Gustin received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1975, and his MFA from Alfred University in 1977. Gustin lives and works in South Dartmouth, Mass. 

Gustin’s work is published extensively and is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation in Icheon, Korea, and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. 

With over 40 solo exhibitions, he has exhibited, lectured and taught workshops in the United States, Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowships, and three Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowships, the most recent in 2009. Gustin is cofounder of the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine, and currently serves as vice president on its board.

Doug Casebeer is chair of the artist in residency program at Anderson Ranch. He is in his 32nd year of running workshops at the arts center. He received a Master of Fine Arts in ceramics from Alfred University and a Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree from Wichita State University. He has served as pottery consultant to the United Nations and the German government. 

He teaches, lectures, builds kilns and exhibits his artwork worldwide. Casebeer’s service to the field has involved outreach in rural Jamaican schools, technical support and assistance for Nepali potters, and advice to art centers in Chile and Hawaii. In 2009, he was elected to the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva, Switzerland, and was a featured artist at the Chinese Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.

Sterling Hundley is an illustrator and educator based in Richmond, Va. He is a professor in the Communication Arts Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Founder of Legendeer, an international community dedicated to embedding artists back into the world.

For nearly 20 years, Hundley's work has garnered International acclaim with commissions for clients as varied as Rolling Stone, Marvel, the Grammys, GQ, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Red Bull, Harper Collins, Penguin, Random House, and Major League Baseball. Sterling's work has been recognized by Graphis, Society of Illustrators NewYork, Society of Illustrators Los Angeles, Victoria and Albert Museum, 3x3, Communication Arts Magazines, Step Inside Design, Print and many others. He is the recipient of numerous medals from the Society of Illustrators New York, the Illustrators Club in Washington, D.C, and the "Best Overall" and "Best Illustrated Book" awards from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England. 

In 2014, Hundley illustrated the classic "Treasure Island" for The Folio Society in London, England. Hundley is currently pursuing a career as a painter, creating personal work for exhibition. Hundley recently completed O Captain, My Captain written by Robert Burleigh for Abrams in New York. This illustration book tells the story of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman in Washington D.C. during the American Civil War. The 33 full color illustrations to be released in April 2019.

Kelli Anderson is an interactive designer who explores how design can harness invisible forces in the world. She is known for her design, animation, and illustration work for NPR, “The New Yorker,” “Wired,” MoMA, and the “New York Times,” as well as her redesign of brands such as Russ & Daughters, Momofuku, and Munchery. Anderson is the author of two experimental and interactive pop-up books: “This Book is a Camera,” which transforms into a pinhole camera, and “This Book is a Planetarium,” which houses a tiny planetarium and other contraptions. Some of her other projects include a paper record player, Tinybop’s award-winning app and animations for The Human Body, and a counterfeited “The New York Times” with The Yes Men. Whenever she can, she uses humble, lo-fi materials to expose the invisible magic of the world and make abstraction concepts "real" and tangible for people. 

Anderson’s work operates in the space between conceptual art, graphic design, tech, and poetry. Drawing inspiration from harder-edges fields like math, physics, and computing, she applies their logic to the sensory, tactile realm of craft. By using these forces in unorthodox ways, she pushes materials like paper to realize new functional—and oftentimes magical—possibilities.

James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His most recent book is "What Photography Is." He writes on art and non-art images; recent books include "Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History" (Hong Kong University Press) and "Art Critiques: A Guide" (New Academia). In October 2015, he will stop writing monographs in order to concentrate on an experimental writing project that is not related to art.

Danielle Krysa has a BFA in Visual Arts from The University of Victoria, and a post-grad in design from Sheridan College. She is the writer/curator behind the contemporary art site The Jealous Curator. Krysa has curated shows from Washington D.C. to Los Angeles, San Francisco to Toronto. In 2014, she published two books, both with Chronicle Books, titled "Creative Block" and "Collage." Her third book, "Your Inner Critic Is A Big Jerk," was released in October 2016. Krysa has spoke at TEDx, PIXAR, Creative Mornings, CreativeLive, and was interviewed for several video segments on oprah.com. The Jealous Curator has been featured by Oprah Magazine, The Huffington Post, Fast Company, Brain Pickings, Frankie Magazine, InsideOut Magazine, Flow Magazine, Apartment Therapy, Glamour Paris, and more.

Dan Estabrook was born and raised in Boston where he studied art at city schools and the Museum of Fine Arts. He discovered photography in his teens through the underground magazines of the punk rock and skateboarding cultures of the 1980’s. As an undergraduate at Harvard he began studying alternative photographic processes with Christopher James. In 1993, after receiving an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Estabrook continued working and teaching in Illinois, Boston, and Florida, eventually settling in Brooklyn, NY. 

Estabrook has continued to make contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the 19th century. He has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist's Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1994. The Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago represents him. A documentary on Estabrook and his work was recently produced for Anthropy Arts' Photographers Series. His work can also be seen at www.danestabrook.com

Janine Antoni is a visual artist who employs an amalgam of mediums including performance, sculpture, photography, installation, and video. Her body is both her tool for making and the source from which her meaning arises. She is known for transforming materials like chocolate and soap, and uses everyday activities like bathing, eating, and sleeping into sculptural processes. She carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the body. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body. 

Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas, in 1964 and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Anonymous Was A Woman Grant, Creative Capital Artist Grant and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. 

Einar (b.1963, Guadalajara, México) and Jamex de la Torre (b. 1960, Guadalajara, México) are Mexican-American artists that currently live and work in Ensenada, México, and San Diego, Calif. Their work is in countless public and private collections and has been shown at museums such as the Walker Art Center, the Glazenhuis Museum in Belgium, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

Kinji Akagawa is an American sculptor and arts educator best known for sculptural constructions that also serve a practical function. A pioneer in the public art movement, Akagawa has examined the relationship between art and community throughout his career, most notably the concept of art as a process of inquiry. His sculpture and public artworks are noted for their refined elegance and use of natural materials such as granite basalt, fieldstone, cedar, and ipe wood.

Akagawa trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Tamarind Institute of Lithography, and the University of Minnesota where he earned his MFA degree in 1969.

From 1973 to 2009, Akagawa taught sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, installation, and conceptual art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Akagawa’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is found in numerous public and private collections including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Akagawa received awards and recognitions including the McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award and the Bush Foundation Fellowship.

In spring 2015, the UWRF Art Department proudly welcomed Chilean Artist Benjamin Lira as the first Wyman Visiting Professor. Lira is an internationally acclaimed sculptor, painter, and printmaker, whose work has been exhibited in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Columbia, Greece, Spain, Japan, and throughout the United States. Inspired by pre-Columbian traditions, Lira’s works employs a contemporary vocabulary of form, color, and texture to explore the human figure and by extension the human condition. Lira spent a week on campus. During his visit, he delivered two public lectures, created a collaborative piece with advanced printmaking students and led student critiques.