Faculty Profiles
Jason Dunda
Jason Dunda is a Chicago-based Canadian painter. He is currently working on a project entitled “Various Incidents” in which he translates imagery of authority and control into portraitive abstractions. Recent projects include “A Hall of Unflattering Portraits,” a solo exhibition at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario, Canada; “Highly Illogical,” a two-person collaborative installation at langeroverdickie in Chicago; “Everything Paper” at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; “Eating Cultures” at SOMArts in San Francisco. International exhibits include the Heine-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, and the Kuwait Art Foundation in Kuwait City. His work is represented in the collections of Todd Oldham, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto. Recent residencies include the Corporation of Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the SÍM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, and a four-month research and production residency in Paris sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts. He is currently completing a series of sequential drawings to be published by Phaidon Press. Jason Dunda’s cultural practice is led by a sense of dry wit and satire combined with an affinity to craft. He considers the undercurrent of polite dissent in his work to be indicative of the Canadian mindset.
Sarah and Joseph Belknap
Sarah and Joseph Belknap are Chicago-based interdisciplinary artists and educators who received their MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working as a team since 2008 their art has been exhibited in artist-run exhibition spaces in Springfield, Brooklyn, Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis. In addition, they have presented performances at institutions throughout Chicago, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Links Hall, and the MCA. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at SFAI Galleries (San Francisco, California) the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, Ohio), The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Western Exhibitions, and solo shows at The Arts Club of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
David Joel Thomas
David Joel Thomas is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and designer working at the crossroads of visual art with special focus on digital media, critical and creative writing, and design at the object and architectural scales. His interests and training reflect his commitment to bridging the gap between critical research and creative synthesis. His current projects include “Paint and Print,” a word and watercolor meditation; “Threshold,” a collaborative poetic and philosophical dialogue exploring issues of photography, geography, architecture, and experience; “The Perfect Hours,” a collaborative series of short, free-spirited liturgical fictions; and “The Ur Project,” an improvisatory design exploration of Ancient Mesopotamian architectural typologies. He has exhibited at a range of venues including the Chicago Cultural Center, the New York Hall of Science through the SciArt Center in collaboration with the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, the Northern Illinois University Art Museum, and the Bridgeport Art Center. As an educator, David provides students with contexts and conditions in which they explore and express their own sensibilities and interpretations. He challenges them with open art and design propositions that they may approach, resolve, and communicate in a variety of ways. He provides them opportunities for problem solving and creative risk taking, and for integrating the material with the conceptual, the traditional with the contemporary, and current cultural production with their own interests and emerging skills.
Oli Rodriguez
Oli Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, photography, performance, installation and writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department (Photography) at California State University, Los Angeles. His intersectional research and interdisciplinary projects conceptually focus on queerness, notions of passing, visualizing the performativity of gender, explorations in appropriation, performative interactions with the public as collaborator, visualizing other representations of the AIDS pandemic while referencing historical movements in gender, racial and feminist histories. He curated the exhibition, The Great Refusal: Taking on New Queer Aesthetics at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He is apart of the monograph Confronting the Abject, named from his research themed class that he co-taught with Catherine Opie at SAIC. His forthcoming publication, Papi, Papi Papi, archives the AIDS pandemic through his queer, POC family in Chicago during the 1980s. He also just finished his short documentary film, LYNDALE, exploring toxic masculinity, cyclical familial trauma and queerness. LYNDALE is currently distributed by Video Data Bank (VDB). Rodriguez has screened, performed, lectured and exhibited his works internationally and nationally.
Megan Euker
Megan Euker has been represented by Linda Warren Projects in Chicago since 2008 and featured in The International Museum of Surgical Science; Matthew Rachman Gallery, Chicago; The University Club of Chicago; Chautauqua School of Art, New York; Prince Street Gallery, New York; The Storefront Project, New York; Togonon Gallery, San Francisco; College of DuPage, Illinois; Beverly Arts Center, Chicago; and Western Exhibitions, Chicago and other prestigious venues.
In 2017, at Casa Cava in Matera, Italy, a world heritage site, she, along with The Orphan Dream Band, presented the first Orphan Dream Award to Dr. Franco Locatelli. Her sculptures have appeared on Italian television including Canale 2 and TRM24. She presented the second and third Orphan Dream Awards to Dr. Michel Sadelain of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Dr. John Tisdale of the National Institute of Health.
She has been the recipient of such honors as a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy; two Faculty Enrichment Grants from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; a Compassion and Belonging Grant from SAIC; the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. Grant; Change, Inc. Grant;. Artist Assistance Grant; two CAAP (Community Arts Assistance Program) and two DCASE grants. Euker received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Euker is a Lecturer in the departments of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Designed Objects; Contemporary Practices; and Continuing Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
