Please join me in welcoming 13 new full-time faculty members to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this fall. The new faculty members represent a diverse range of practices, media, and methodologies and exemplify SAIC’s focus on interdisciplinary studies.
In the last two years, six of the new full-time faculty members joining SAIC were former part-time faculty. The new faculty members, who will teach in six departments across the School, include Danielle Andress (Fiber and Material Studies), Jeremy Biles (Liberal Arts), Julietta Cheung (MFA 2012, Contemporary Practices), Mike Cloud (Painting and Drawing), Ryan Edwards (Liberal Arts), Maura Frana (Visual Communication Design), Marie Herwald Hermann (Ceramics), Suma Ikeuchi (Liberal Arts), Salvador Jiménez-Flores (Ceramics), Piotr Michura (Visual Communication Design), Hương Ngô (MFA 2004, Contemporary Practices), Kirin Wachter-Grene (Liberal Arts), and Jade Yumang (Fiber and Material Studies).
With the addition of these new faculty members, SAIC continues its legacy of excellence in art and design education. Information about each faculty member can be found below.
Martin Berger
Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs
Salvador Jiménez-Flores
Assistant Professor
Ceramics
Salvador Jiménez-Flores is an interdisciplinary artist born in Mexico and an assistant professor in the Department of Ceramics. In his work he explores the themes of colonization, migration, “the other,” stereotypes, and futurism. Most recently he completed a two-year artist residency at the Harvard Ceramics Program, Office for the Arts at Harvard University. He also served as the artist-in-residence for the city of Boston. Jiménez-Flores is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and was awarded the Kohler Arts Industry Residency for 2019.
Marie Herwald Hermann
Assistant Professor
Ceramics
Marie Herwald Hermann is an assistant professor in the Ceramics department. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from the Royal College of Art in London in 2009 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Westminster. Hermann’s work is informed by the objects of the everyday. She draws meaning from the way individuals unconsciously create relationships with the domestic objects present in daily life. Solo exhibitions include Shields and the Parergon at Reyes Projects; And dusk turned dawn, Blackthorn at NADA, Miami; Northern Light, Pontiac Rise at Galerie Nec, Paris. Her work is represented in the collections of the Danish Arts Foundation; the Denver Art Museum; Sèvres Ceramics Museum, France; Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway; and Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Julietta Cheung
Assistant Professor
Contemporary Practices
Julietta Cheung (MFA 2012) is an assistant professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices. Her work examines the contemporary American narrative of the future as it is interpreted by a diverse public. She mines and unmakes her source material—popular writing, buzz terms, and utility objects—and remakes them in her typographic prints, sculptures, installations, and reading performances. Cheung joins SAIC from Florida State University where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Art. She received her Bachelor of Science from Syracuse University and Master of Fine Arts from SAIC.
Hương Ngô
Assistant Professor
Contemporary Practices
Hương Ngô (MFA 2004) is an assistant professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices. Ngô’s research-based practice connects personal and political histories using a conceptual, interdisciplinary, and often collaborative approach. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Master of Fine Arts from SAIC in Art and Technology Studies, and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.
Jade Yumang
Assistant Professor
Fiber and Material Studies
Jade Yumang is an assistant professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. His primary focus is on the concept of queer form through sculptural abstraction, installation, and performance. He joins SAIC from the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts with honors from the University of British Columbia and a Master of Fine Arts with departmental honors from Parsons School of Design.
Danielle Andress
Assistant Professor
Fiber and Material Studies
Danielle Andress is an assistant professor in the Fiber and Material Studies department. Her work focuses on contemporary identity politics as mediated through popular culture and gendered craft and primarily takes the form of woven cloth. She previously taught at the California College of the Arts. Andress earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her Master of Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in 2017.
Jeremy Biles
Assistant Professor
Liberal Arts
Jeremy Biles is an assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts. Since 2008, Biles has taught courses at SAIC on religion, philosophy, writing, and photography. His research ranges across religious studies, psychoanalysis, and art theory, with special attention to eroticism, surrealism, and the category of the sacred. He is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form. Biles holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.
Ryan Edwards
Assistant Professor
Liberal Arts
Ryan C. Edwards is an assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts after having worked for two years at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Edwards received a Bachelor of Arts in geography from the University of California Berkeley in 2009 and a PhD in history from Cornell University in 2016. His research and teaching focus on Latin America, environmental history and geography, and prison studies. During 2018–19, Edwards will be on leave as a visiting associate research scholar at Princeton University.
Suma Ikeuchi
Assistant Professor
Liberal Arts
Suma Ikeuchi is an assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Arts. Her research interests include diaspora, citizenship, and religion in global Asia, specifically among the diverse migrant groups in Japan. She has published articles in Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, and Contemporary Japan; her first book is also forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2019. Ikeuchi joins SAIC from the University of Alabama. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Hokkaido University, a Master of Arts from Brandeis University, and PhD from Emory University.
Kirin Wachter-Grene
Assistant Professor
Liberal Arts
Kirin Wachter-Grene is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Liberal Arts and coordinator of the First-Year Seminar program. Wachter-Grene’s work focuses on African American literature and culture from the late 19th century to the present, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. She joins SAIC from New York University and received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona, Master of Arts from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and PhD from the University of Washington.
Mike Cloud
Assistant Professor
Painting and Drawing
Mike Cloud is an assistant professor in the Painting and Drawing department. He is a painter whose work examines the conditions of painting in its contemporary life among countless reproductions, symbols, and descriptions. Cloud earned his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Cloud has lectured extensively on his work and issues of contemporary art theory at Cooper Union, Yale University, and Bard College among others.
Piotr Michura
Associate Professor
Visual Communication Design
Piotr Michura is an associate professor in the Visual Communication Design department. His research interests are in areas of information design, interaction design, and typography/text visualization. His PhD research was on experimental visualizations for interaction with electronic documents for humanities researchers. In 2015 he received the Fulbright Senior Advanced Research Award. Michura is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland, where he received his MFA in 2001 and PhD in 2012, and the University of Alberta, Canada, where he received his MDes in 2008.
Maura M Frana
Assistant Professor
Visual Communication
Maura Frana is a designer and educator who examines the parallels between verbal and visual. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Communications Design from Pratt Institute and has taught graphic design full time at the undergraduate and graduate levels since 2013. She was previously a visiting artist at SAIC. Frana is coauthor of the book Five Conversations on Graphic Design and Creative Writing, which examines the value of cross-disciplinary methods in graphic design.