Lecturers

Nazafarin Lotfi (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores body, space, and how they inhabit each other in connection with notions of belonging, presence, and identity formation. Through sculptural forms, architectural drawings, and performative photography, her work addresses the hierarchies inherit in formalism and aesthetic subjectivity in relation to power, worth, and ability. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007.

Lotfi is the recipient of 2023 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Regards, Chicago, IL; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, CA; MOCA Tucson, AZ; Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; University Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal, IL; and The Arts Club of Chicago, IL, among others. In 2021-22, Lotfi served as the Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. Her practice has received support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts (2024, 2023, 2022); the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona (2024, 2022, 2018); Night Bloom: Grants for Artists through the Andy Warhol Foundation and distributed by MOCA Tucson (2021); Sally & Richard Lehman Award, Phoenix Art Museum (2019); and CAAP Grant from the City of Chicago (2012). Lotfi is the founder of Hamrah Ars Club, a creative placemaking program mentoring refugee-status youth.

 www.nazafarinlotfi.com
 

Chris Bradley is an artist based in Chicago, IL, USA. He has presented his work in solo exhibitions at Ackerman Clarke Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Shane Campbell Gallery, Roberto Paradise, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Raleigh, and has been included in group shows at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023, the Renaissance Society, Atlanta Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the NRW-Forum. He received his MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.  In 2017, he was the recipient of the Meier Achievement Award. In addition to his studio practice, he is an instructor of sculpture at the University of Chicago. Over the past two decades, Bradley has developed a sculptural language around representation, poetics of ordinary subjects, trompe l’oeil techniques, and exhibition as site for the imagination. He aims to use this creative language to encourage his audience to practice the suspension of disbelief as a method for reconsidering and understanding this shared common world.
 

Bethany Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice examines the relationship between race and language. Centering language--its biases, contradictions, and ability to simultaneously forge connections and foster violence--her works illuminate America's past and offer insight into the development of racial and national identities. Drawing on a wide variety of documents, ranging from nineteenth-century musical scores to US Department of Justice reports, she erases, obscures, excerpts, and rewrites portions of text to bring to the fore issues revolving around race, power, and histories of violence. 

Collins’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including At Sea, Seattle Art Museum, WA (2024); Accord, Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, AL (2024); America: A Hymnal, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2023); and My Destiny Is In Your Hands, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, AL (2021), among others. Collins has participated in many group exhibitions including Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home, New Orleans, LA (2024); The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2021), traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2022), and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2022); and Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2020), traveled to Seattle Art Museum, WA (2021), and The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2021). Collins’s work is represented in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY, among others. She is the recipient of many awards and grants, including the 3Arts Next Level Visual Arts Award (2024); Gwendolyn Knight & Jacob Lawrence Prize (2023); Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022); and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015), among others. Bethany Collins is also represented by PATRON, Chicago, IL.

bethanyjoycollins.com

Artist, curator, and translator, Katherine Desjardins earned her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, where she worked with mentors associated with Italian Radical Design. 

Her project-based practice expands upon her training as a painter through creation of installations, drawing, video, and performance. Culture shock, political indignation, cognitive dissonance, humor—all find expression through a collage sensibility that privileges abrupt cuts, layering, and collision between raw and refined, familiar and unknowable material.

In 2013 she founded "Re/visible Cities", a parallel art practice that engages experiential pedagogy towards creation of collaborative projects that spark dialog on climate change, immigration, and gang violence. She exhibits internationally and is recognized by awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Since 2021, Katherine divides her time between Chicago and Florence, where she is converting a former factory into an international arts incubator dedicated to developing new models for cross-disciplinary, experiential learning in the Humanities.

katherinedesjardins.net
 

I create site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engage present day histories to imagine alternative futures. My background in craft orient my projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. I often work with long-term and ongoing collaborators and together we engage multiple communities and elicit working relationships with experts in political theory, biology, legal scholarship, and speculative fiction. Always interested in history, more recently, I have been drawn to imagined futures, specifically a future that includes human survival.  I work in large-scale sculptural forms that engage a specific site, such as a rapidly changing forest, or a material, like porcelain which beautifully archives history, to train out of habituated patterns, always working towards new policies. 

amberginsburg.com

narrowbridgeartsclub.net 

projectfielding.org 
 

Scott Wolniak is a multidisciplinary artist and occasional curator. His diverse practice has involved drawing, sculpture, video and animation, and his teaching reflects this range. The primary focus of Wolniak’s work since 2018 has been the creation of experimental pattern-based paintings that can be seen as outward projections of interior spaces, manifesting the ways in which abstraction can convey a sense of rhythm, transformation, groundlessness, and internal movement. Based on motifs of the natural world, as well as tropes of consciousness, the paintings are intended to function as immersive energy fields that invite slow looking.

Wolniak has exhibited extensively throughout the US. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art in America and the Chicago Tribune, and is part of numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee. Wolniak received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2002.

Since the mid-90's, Wolniak has been active in the Chicago art scene, consistently exhibiting as well as organizing and curating shows. He ran the influential alternative project space, Suitable, in his Humboldt Park garage between 1999 and 2004, and has recently curated shows at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Logan Center for the Arts. Wolniak received the Illinois Arts Council’s Creative Accelerator Award in 2025, and the Janel M. Mueller Award for Excellence in Pedagogy from the University of Chicago in 2014.

scottwolniak.com