Alumni

Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal is known internationally for his online performative and interactive works provoking dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. Bilal’s work explores tensions between the cultural spaces he occupies—his home in the comfort zone of the U.S. and his consciousness in the conflict zone in Iraq. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, amongst others. He holds a bachelor of fine arts from the University of New Mexico, a master of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was conferred an honorary PhD from DePauw University. Bilal is currently an arts professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Austen Brown (b. 1985) is an artist living in Chicago holding his master of fine arts from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago. Using a site-based practice, he works with sound, video, and installation to draw conceptual lines between sites, using buildings as evidence to investigate histories of urban planning, as well as relationships of nature to industry and labor. Brown's work has been shown internationally at Triumph Gallery, Chicago; The Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago; The SUB-Mission, Chicago; Super-Sensor, Madrid, Spain; EXPO Chicago; ACRE, Chicago; Switched on Garden with funding from the Pew Charitable Trust, Philadelphia; Flat Gallery, Chicago; LODGE, Chicago; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington; and Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Residencies and awards include ACRE, HATCH Projects, the Municipal Arts League Fellowship, and Siragusa Foundation Fellowship.

Jonny Farrow is a multi-disciplinary artist working with sound as both a poetics and a material to create works that interrogate the liminal spaces of belief, memory, and history. Using concepts such as resonance, feedback, and transmission, he sounds these liminal spaces through various material and conceptual means in order to set them vibrating. Farrow has shown and presented work in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, United Kingdom, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. From 2011-2016 he produced The Distract and Disable Program heard monthly on WGXC 90.7 FM in Hudson, NY. He holds a BA in English, an MA in Music, a Master of Fine Art in Studio from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Farrow currently lives and teaches sculpture, printmaking, and sound art courses in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Lindsey French (she/they) is an artist, educator, and writer whose work engages in multi-sensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. She has shared her work nationally in museums, galleries, screenings, and diy art spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), the Miller Gallery for Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and Lease Agreement (Lubbock). Recent publications include chapters for Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge), Why Look at Plants (Brill), and poetry for the journal Forty-Five.They earned a bachelor of arts through an interdisciplinary course of study—Environment, Interaction, and Design—at Hampshire College, and a master of fine arts in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Newly based in the prairie landscape of Treaty 4 Territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, French teaches as an assistant professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina.

Dr. Michael Graeve is a sound and visual artist living in Melbourne Australia. A 2007 alumnus of SAIC’s Master of Fine Arts Sound program, he currently exhibits and performs internationally across mediums such as painting, sound performance and composition, and site-specific installation. Dr. Graeve is committed to artist-run culture: he has been a board member of Liquid Architecture Sound Inc since 2011, was a founding member of Grey Area Art Space, and previously served as both a board member and program manager at West Space Inc. Dr. Graeve lectures at RMIT University in Sound, Sculpture, Expanded Studio Practice, Honours, and in the Master of Fine Arts program. 

Milad Mozari is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work in video, performance, and installation moves through concepts of music, belief systems, absence, and structures. His research-based practice often starts with sound or spatial experiments, which then attempt to resonate physically, historically, and experientially. While studying for his BS in International Studies at the University of Utah, he began to make and exhibit work about language and place. He continued his studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a master of fine arts in the Department of Sound. His work has shown internationally at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, International Symposium of Electronic Arts, Chicago International Film Festival, Litmus Community Space, Chicago Cultural Center, the Studebaker Theater, Roots & Culture and Experimental Sound Studio. Fellowships and residencies include Asian Cultural Council Grant to individuals, ACRE, Tsung-Yeh Artist Village and soundpocket.

Sophie Kahn is a digital artist and sculptor, whose work addresses technology’s failure to capture the unstable human body. Sophie has exhibited her artwork in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka and Seoul. Her video work has been screened in festivals including Transmediale, Zero1 San Jose Biennial, Dance Camera West, Trampoline, Frequency, Currents New Media Festival and the Japan Media Arts Festival.  Sophie has taught in the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute as a Visiting Associate Professor, and at Columbia College, Chicago, as a visiting instructor. 

Alyssa Moxley is a composer and artist working with narratives of identity, place, and embodied experience through sound. Much of her practice involves the use of field recordings to transform environments, via live performances, compositions and installations. She also curates sound events and produced the Kinisi Festival of Sound in 2015 and 2016. Moxley studied ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, sound design at the London College of Communication, studio production techniques at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and an MFA in Studio Art in the Sound Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her solo and collaborative works have been heard and installed in venues and radio stations in the UK, USA, France, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Croatia, Hungary and Greece.

Trevor Paglen (born 1974) is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection. In 2016, Paglen won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and he has also won The Cultural Award from the German Society for Photography. In 2017, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Ethan Rose is a composer, artist, and designer who loves all things sound. Drawing from years of composing music for the moving image and creating sound installations, his work has grown to introduce sonic design to events, objects, and buildings. Ethan currently runs Parallel, an audio focused design studio that specializes in sound design for the built environment. Past projects include permanent installations at Microsoft, Nike, and the University of Oregon.

Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon generates and reconfigures masses of communal material to present new perspectives on the familiar. Though formally varied, his projects frequently manipulate the roles of individual elements arranged in diverse visual populations. This often unearths unexpected patterns as the relationship between the part and the whole, the individual and the group is explored. Reflecting a natural attraction to popular culture and the day-to-day, his work regularly incorporates the use of common references and source material. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context. Born in Indiana (1970), raised in Texas, and based in Chicago, Salavon earned his master of fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his bachelor of arts from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown in museums and galleries around the world. Reviews of his exhibitions have been included in such publications as Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times, and WIRED. Examples of his artwork are included in prominent public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago among many others.

Peter Speer is an artist and musician based out of Asheville, North Carolina. His sonic work incorporates performance, recording and sound installation, and takes inspiration from the quiet stillness at the center of loud fast things. Working primarily with the modular synthesizer, Speer’s experimental electronic compositions present field recordings from a world based in voltage.

Kim Walker is a Scottish artist working with sound, video, installation and new media. She gained her Master of Fine Arts in Studio from SAICand her Bachelor of Arts in (Hons) Time Based Art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Walker also holds a PgDip in Library and Information Studies from the University of Strathclyde. Walker has exhibited widely through artist-led spaces, larger galleries, video screening festivals and radio broadcasts. Venues include Patriothall Gallery (Edinburgh), Centrespace, DCA (Dundee), Exhibitions DJCAD (Dundee), Heaven Gallery (Chicago), Area 405 (Baltimore), Studio 41 (Glasgow) and South Hill Park (Bracknell). She has held artist in residence positions with Common Ground Projects, Exhibitions DJCAD, SSW, Outlandia and recently with the Woodlands Trust Scotland at Glen Finglas. Kim Walker is a current Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Sound Arts within the Music Department at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and is part of the SERG sound arts research group.

Adrian Wood (MFA 2019) creates soundscapes, videos, transmissions and live works featuring sounds of water and wind, howls, whispers, seismic vibrations, and radio interference. Their work deals with knowledge production around land and landscape. Adrian has shown work in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Gene Siskel Film Center, Links Hall, Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Experimental Sound Studio, LITHIUM gallery, and the College of William & Mary. Adrian’s work has been featured in online broadcasts and publications like Radio Borealis, Collective Terrain and Bivouac Recordings. Adrian has received a number of scholarships and grants including the ESS/SAIC Alba Sonic Arts Residency, and the Arts, Science & Culture Collaboration Grant from the University of Chicago.

Santiago X, M.Arch, MFA is an Indigenous futurist and multidisciplinary artist specializing in land, architectural, and new media installation. He is an enrolled citizen of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana (Koasati) and Indigenous Chamoru from the Island of Guam U.S.A (Hacha'Maori). X has exhibited and designed internationally, including The World Expo in Shanghai, China; Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. He was a contributor in the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and a 2020 Lead Artist with the American Arts Incubator, a new media and digital arts exchange program developed by ZERO1 in partnership with the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Currently, X is reinvigorating the ancestral mound building practice of his Koasati people, via two large-scale augmented public earthwork installations being constructed along the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers in Chicago. This is notably the first time that effigy earthworks will be constructed by Indigenous peoples in North America since the founding of the United States. They opened to the public on the 2019 celebration of Indigenous Peoples Day as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.