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
 

Bethany Collins (American, b.1984) is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work is fueled by a critical exploration of how race and language interact. Language is both her subject and primary material—from dictionaries and encyclopedias to literary journals and newspaper archives. Language is also a prism through which she explores American history and the nuance of racial and national identities.

Collins’ work has been exhibited at: The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Locust Projects, Miami; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; and The Center for Book Arts, New York, among others. She has also received grants, awards, and residencies from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Hyde Park Art Center, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, and the Rural Alabama Initiative, among others. Collins was the 2015 recipient of the Hudgens Prize at the Hudgens Center for the Arts in Duluth, Georgia, and a 2018 recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship.

bethanyjoycollins.com

Elisabeth Hogeman works in photography and video to consider conventions of still life. Her practice seeks the slow excavation of domestic subjects through repetition and variation. By steeping her viewers in environments with shifting and uncertain architectures, she tries to parse the relationship between mind, body, and space. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago and her BA in Studio Art and English Literature from the University of Virginia. By steeping her viewers in domestic environments with confining and confusing architectures, she tries to parse the relationship between mind, body, and space. Her projects have been supported by the Versailles Foundation, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago.

elisabethhogeman.com

Trained as a painter, Desjardins gained critical attention for works that question social and political mores through re-purposing the vernacular language of 50's-era encyclopedias, coloring books and behavior-modification manuals. Functioning as palimpsests, these works defy a superficial read and subvert the content of the original source material through layered juxtaposition.

Her recent project-based work expands upon these interests through the creation of site-inspired speculative situations which---to varying degrees-- engage painting, drawing, video, and collaborative performance---in layered response to tensions between internal, psychological/imaginative space and external, physical/political reality.

Desjardins earned her MFA in painting in Florence, Italy, where she worked closely with mentors who came out of the Italian Radical Design movement, and with whom she continues to collaborate. This parallel “social” practice engages experiential pedagogy toward the collective creation of objects of speculative design. These projects are intended as catalysts for discussion--rather than answers or solutions--of shared topics of social concern, including gang violence, immigration, and the global climate emergency.

Fellowships include residencies at the Fondazione Lac o Le Mon/Lecce, Italy; American Academy in Rome, Bogliasco Foundation/Genova, Italy; VCCA/France; Ucross; Exhibitions include: Giardino Botanico, University of Florence; Salone La Stanzetta, Rome Italy; Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence Italy; DeCordova Museum, MA; M.Y. Art Prospects, NYC; PBS/ArtAssignment; Awards include: Massachusetts Cultural Council; Berkshire-Taconic ART Award.

katherinedesjardins.net

I am a Chicago based artist teaching at the University of Chicago in the Department of Visual Arts. 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 orients 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 the fields of botany, political activism, biology, legal scholarship and activism, and science fiction.

Always interested in history, more recently, I have been drawn to imagined futures, specifically a future that includes human survival. Looking to past feminist strategies, including collective action and equity politics, I work in large-scale sculptural forms that allow audiences a role in thinking through the making or completing the work. The boundary between human and nonhuman agency is pressing thinner. I follow specific material lineages, sometimes a tree species, sometimes porcelain, to map our varied and complex relationships. In doing so, I  work in concert with objects as collaborators, agent-provocateurs, and narrative instigators.

amberginsburg.com
 

Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes, Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo, University of Chicago Press, 2022

Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsburg, Invitation to Tea, Bridge Press, 2022

Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes, Remaking the Exceptional Podcast, 2022

"7000 Marks," text by Sara Black and Amber Ginsburg, in Antennae, Journal of Nature and Visual Culture, Issue 44, Summer, 2018. Download text

"The Labor Issue: Questionnaire," Interview with Sara Black and Amber Ginsburg, in Open Set, May, 2017. View text

"In a Tea Ritual, Stopping Time and Reflecting on War with a Veteran," text by Gretchen Combs, in Hyperallergic, February 5, 2016. View text

Emergency INDEX: An Annual Document of Performance Practice. Vol. 3., edited by Yelena Gluzman  and Matvei Yankelevich, 2014

"Rooting: Interview with Amber Ginsburg," Interview by Sarah Benning, in Rooting: Regional Networks, Global Concerns, March, 2013. View text

Scott Wolniak is a multidisciplinary artist, teacher and occasional curator based in Chicago. Working in a variety of media including drawing, sculpture and animation, his work uses humor and phenomenology to present everyday life within a cosmic context. Wolniak utilizes the open-ended theoretical models of landscape and the artist’s studio to produce relational works, which range from opulent fields to cartoonish figuration.  Immersion in the environment or the studio can be equally pleasurable and overwhelming, cathartic and laden with responsibility.

Wolniak began his teaching career at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002.  Since then, he has taught across media, developing curriculum for classes such as Conceptual Drawing, Collage, and Experimental Animation: Exploring Manual Techniques. Wolniak won the Janel M. Mueller Award for Excellence in Pedagogy in 2014.

Wolniak launched Screen Share Video Gallery at the University of Chicago in 2016 as a platform for student work in Video, Animation and New Media.  He founded and directed Suitable Gallery between 1999 and 2005.  An alternative exhibition space located in Wolniak’s residential garage, Suitable provided important early exposure for many significant artists.

Scott Wolniak has exhibited or screened his work at the Elmhurst Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; MCA Chicago; devening projects and editions, Chicago; White Columns, New York; Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee; the Chicago Underground Film Festival; and the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, among others. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Art News, USArt, the Chicago Tribune, and New City, and is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, Video Data Bank, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee WI.

scottwolniak.com