Recent Accomplishments: Faculty
Congratulations to the FVNMA community on their recent achievements! Read all about them, below.
Additionally, we are excited to announce that Peter Burr will be our Full-Time Visiting Artist for the next academic year. We look forward to welcoming him to our community.
Melika Bass
Melika Bass presented her newest film, Creature Companion, in the Praire Gothic solo program at the Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA. A feature story about the film appeared in the Pittsburgh City Paper. Creature Companion was screened on opening night of the Onion City Film Festival, alongside works by FVNMA alum Deborah Stratman. The Chicago Reader called Bass' film “A standout of the entire festival… strange and funny …the film brims with it the energy of a story about to be born.” Creature Companion also showed at the FLEX Film Festival alongside work by FVNMA alum Ben Russell, and in the showcase program, The Female Gaze, at Images and Views of Alternative Cinema in Cyprus, Greece.
Joel Benjamin
Joel Benjamin was promoted to the rank of Adjunct Associate Professor. His latest animation, Relax, It’s Probably Just a Parasite, has been presented at the Athens International Film and Video Festival; CutOut International Animation Festival, Querétaro, Mexico; ANIMASIVO Festival de Animacion, Mexico City, Mexico; St. Louis International Film Festival, Kinofilm Festival: Manchester Int. Short Film & Animation Festival; GIRAF Festival of Independent Animation, Calgary, Canada; and Phenomena Festival, São Paulo, Brazil.
Jason Boulware
Jason Boulware was named Volunteer of the Year by the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. Boulware teaches Social Practices: Video Collaboration in the Prison System at SAIC in collaboration with Illinois Youth Center Chicago, where he also works as a volunteer.
Jon Cates
Jon Cates has an upcoming solo screening of his film 鬼鎮 (Ghosttown), the Glitch Art Western at DISJECTA Gallery in Portland, OR on Thursday May 2, 2019. Tickets are available here. Check out the official trailer.
John Chambers
Jon Chambers is currently the artist resident at the Museum of Surgical Science. His solo exhibition is up until May 12, 2019.
Thomas Comerford
Thomas Comerford will be taking the songs from his latest record, Blood Moon, on tour in late June. The tour will feature Comerford on vocals and acoustic guitar, with Crystal Hartford (Hartford-Focht) also on vocals; Kip Rainey (Golden Horse Ranch Band) on electric guitar and bass guitar; and Erik Sowa on drum kit and percussion. The Chicago homecoming show will be on Friday June 28 at the Hungry Brain, and is free! Blood Moon was dubbed "worth the 4-year wait" by the Chicago Reader, and a "notable new release" by No Depression Journal, a leading national publication on Americana music. For more information on the tour and Comferford's music, visit www.thomascomerford.net.
James Connolly
James Connolly has been promoted to the rank of Adjunct Assistant Professor. His video, Aesthetic Catharsis, was screened at "The way things are. The way things are going to be." at the Dikeou Pop-Up in Denver, CO on Friday, January 25, 2019. His video, 2019 Romp Through the Sandin Image Processor, was exhibited at Indiana University South Bend's Performing Media exhibition, February - March, 2019. The same piece was also presented inThe Midst exhibition at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in February. James performed his project RGB.VGA.VOLT at Indiana University South Bend on February 18, 2019 for their Performing Media Festival. An essay he wrote was published in the exhibition catalog for the 2019 Fuse Box Festival, running from April 16 - April 21. And excerpts of his project, Cracked Ray Tube, was screened at the "Video Worship" program at Comfort Station on April 17.
Tirtza Even
Tirtza Even premiered her new feature film, Land Mine, at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC during the Doc Fortnight Festival. Her film was selected as one of the Five Films to See at Doc Fortnight. Even recently presented a month-long solo exhibition, Half Truths and Full Lies, at Casa de Rosado in Lansing, Michigan. Even and her collaborator on Half Truths and Full Lies, Meg McLagan, will speak at the University of California Santa Cruz, May 16 - May 19, on the topic of Evidence and Storytelling at a Poetics and Politics symposium entitled "Against Story." She will give a masterclass at UnionDocs, Brooklyn, NY, on May 5. In June, 2019, Even will exhibit, in collaboration with SAIC alum Nadav Assor, an immersive installation work-in-progress version of her new project, Chronicle of a Fall, at Currents New Media, in Santa Fe, NM. Even is the winner of a 2019 Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship in Media Arts.
Snow Yunxue Fu
Snow Yunxue Fu has accepted the position of Assistant Arts Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. We are incredibly sad to see her go, but we celebrate her success! Snow had a solo exhibition at the Chazan Family Gallery at Rhode Island College, Providence RI. She also presented her work in the Re-figuring Binary exhibition at Pioneer Works in NYC, which was reviewed in the New York Times; the An Inch of Time exhibition at the International Video and Animation Exhibition at the Art Gallery of the Cleveland University; and the touring exhibition of the Recommended Screening Unit of the 4th Shenzhen Animation Biennial in over two dozen of universities and art schools in China. Snow was a member of the jury of the Onion City Film Festival.
Claudia Hart
Claudia Hart is in multiple group exhibitions, including: Interpretations 30 at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY; Tech Art For Collectors: Artjaws Special Guest Exhibition at Zürcher Gallery in NYC (as part of this exhibition, Hart will take part in a panel on Curating Media Arts on May 4, 2019); Re-Figuring Binaries, curated by Kelani Nichole at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, February 22 - April 21, 2019; and Ties, Tales and Traces, curated by the Realismus Studio, Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art Studio, Berlin, Germany. She has co-written a chapter in Augmented Reality Games with Olivia Davis, published by Springer Publishers, NY. Claudia was interviewed in Sedition and in Bomb magazine. In September, Hart will be a resident at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale University.
Gitanjali Kapila
Gitanjali Kapila's first academic paper, Stuck in a Labyrinth (or a Tower) with the Minotaur and trying to get out: Princess Aurora and Imperator Furiosa as the heroes of the Multimyth, was jointly published by Columbia College Chicago and The University of Palermo in Buenos Aires as part of a two-volume series, one on Diversity and Design, the other on Gender and Narrative.
Meredith Leich
Meredith Leich's short film, Scaling Quelccaya, will screen at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on May 16 as part of Chicagoland Shorts Volume 5. Scaling Quelccaya also screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Leich is one of seven Chicago artists selected to participate in Third Coast Disrupted: Artists + Scientists on Climate, a year-long artist-scientist partnership culminating in a show at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery in the fall of 2020.
Sara Ludy
Sara Ludy has a solo exhibition titled, Unearth, at bitforms gallery in NYC, which runs through May 5. Ludy is also the commissioned artist for Lifewtr's Series 7: Art Through Technology.
Mev Luna
Mev Luna has an upcoming solo exhibition funded by an Illinois Arts Council grant at the Chicago Artists Coalition, which opens on Friday May 31.
Frédéric Moffet
Frédéric Moffet presented his new film, Horsey, at the Onion City Film Festival where it won one of the three Best of Fest Awards. The film also played at the Athens International Film and Video Festival. Another film, Fever Freaks, was presented in the Opening Night Program of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival and ZINEGOAK, Bilbao International LGBTQI Film and Performing Arts Festival, with upcoming screenings at La Fête du Slip, Gender and Sexuality Festival in Switzerland and Alchemy, Film and Moving Image Festival in Scotland.
Marlena Novak
Marlena Novak was awarded a Faculty Enrichment Grant by the Dean’s Selection Committee. Her work is included in The Universal Sea: Pure or Plastic!? – The Art and Innovation Guide Against the Plastic Epidemic. The book was launched on March 15 at Universität der Künste, Berlin DE, Foundation for Entrepreneurship and The Institute for Art and Innovation. In April 2019, Novak was invited by UK co-editors, Rae Earnshaw and Susan Liggett, to co-author a chapter in their forthcoming book Art, Design and Technology, regarding a computer-generated 3D project she is currently completing that will address coral reefs in crisis. In November 2018, her work was part of The Universal Sea: Abu Dhabi Station, Abu Dhabi art fair, Center for Contemporary Art.
Mary Patten
Mary Patten was part of the Hite Gallery's group exhibition, Organize your own: The Politics and Culture of Self-Determination Movements, at the University of Louisville, January - February 2019. In January of 2020, the exhibition will travel to the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture/PNCA, Portland, OR. Lisa Hughes reviewed the exhibition in Ruckus. In October, Patten spoke at Visual AIDS & QUEER, ILL + OKAY’S “Documents: Art, AIDS & Activism in Chicago,” at the Pride Arts Center, Chicago, IL. She also screened two works during this event, Hokey Sapp Does Spew (1991) and “Where’s ACT UP?” from ACT UP: the Outtakes (1995). She also presented work at Day With(out) Art, “Alternate Endings, Activist Risings” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Patten wrote two articles: “From the Speculative to the Living: Chicago Torture Justice Memorials” published in Walls Turned Sideways, edited by Risa Puleo and “Pictures from an Epidemic” published in Art AIDS America Chicago, edited Staci Boris. Patten also presented “A mirror, a hammer, or neither? Art and the fact of the prison” on the panel “Art and Justice: New Pedagogical Approaches” at CAA Annual Conference (organized by Courtney Long and Risa Puleo. The panel also included SAIC alum Ashley Hunt).
Mikey Peterson
Mikey Peterson has work in Post Human: The 5th International Exhibition on New Media Art at the CICA Museum in Gimpo-si, South Korea. He will also be featured in their publication, New Media Art: 2020, later this year.
Casey Puccini
Casey Puccini premiered his new film, I Don’t Know When the Armageddon Is, at the Onion City Film Festival, which was highlighted in the Chicago Reader. The same film also screened at the Denver Underground Film Festival. His feature film I Don’t Care was screened in March at The Nightingale.
Kerry Richardson
Faculty member Kerry Richardson gave an artist talk for the Lorado Taft Lecture Series at the University of Illinois School of Art + Design in Champaign-Urbana.
Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez
Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez will have a solo exhibition, Past Continuous Present, opeining August 22 at Terremoto - La Postal in Mexico City, Mexico. He will be part of a group show titled Dead Future(s) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago, IL beginning August 2 with faculty member Mev Luna, and SAIC alum Marcela Torres and Santiago X. Rodriquez will also be a fellow resident at Skowhegan this summer.
Nicholas Sagan
Nicholas Sagan was awarded a Faculty Enrichment Grant by the Dean’s Selection Committee. Nicholas is the current resident of the Sketchup residency on Instagram. He will also be a resident at The Roger Brown Home in New Buffalo this summer. This fall he will participate in the New Media Caucus Borders Exhibition and Symposium in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Chris Sullivan
Chris Sullivan was a jury member at the Athens International Film and Video Festival and presented his acclaimed feature film Consuming Spirits.
Thorsten Trimpop
Thorsten Trimpop received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Film and Video.
Meredith Zielke
Meredith Zielke was promoted to the rank of Adjunct Assistant Professor. Congratulations on becoming a mother in February!