Alumni

Martine Syms is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Syms has shown extensively including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter, film producer, and professor at Tama Art University in Tokyo. Working outside the strict confines of the Thai film studio system, Apichatpong has directed several features and dozens of short films. His art projects and feature films have won him widespread recognition and numerous festival prizes, including two prizes from the Cannes Film Festival. Blissfully Yours won the A Certain Regard Prize in 2002 and Tropical Malady won the Official Competition Jury Prize in 2004. His acclaimed 2006 feature, Syndromes and a Century, was the first Thai film to be selected for competition at the Venice Film Festival and was acclaimed in a number of international polls as one of the best films of the last decade.

Writer-director Jennifer Reeder constructs personal fiction films about relationships, trauma, and coping. Reeder’s innovative, award-winning narratives borrow from a range of forms, including after-school specials, amateur music videos, and magical realism. Her films have screened around the world—including at the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial—and received awards qualifying her for an Academy Award nomination.

Frequently named one of the great master filmmakers of the 21st century, South Korean director Hong Sangsoo has gained new prominence in recent years through a remarkable full dozen of assured and critically acclaimed features completed since 2010. 

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. In dialogue with interlocutors (living and ancestral), her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document. Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at JOAN Los Angeles, Greene Naftali, Mass MoCA, Jeu de Paume, CAPC Bordeaux, the Museum of Modern Art, LAXART, and other venues. Her work has been included in significant generational exhibitions, including Greater New York (2021) and the Whitney Biennial (2019), and is part of many public collections, including the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail. 

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is a Puerto Rican film and video maker who received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The uncontrived, observational style of her art aligns it with the sensibility of documentary film while also blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Despite its ostensible simplicity, Santiago Muñoz’s work stems from intensive research, observation, and documentation, and she is deeply concerned with the tension between the documentarian’s desire for truth and the artist’s aesthetic concerns. For her, the camera as a tool that can both reveal and fabricate reality.

Jules Rosskam is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, artist, and educator. Through the use of autoethnography and hybrid forms, Rosskam's interdisciplinary practice investigates the means by which we construct individual and collective histories and identities. His films and documentaries include transparent, against a trans narrative, Thick Relations, Paternal Rites, Something to Cry About, Dance, Dance, Evolution, and Desire Lines.

Jodie Mack is an experimental animator and an associate professor of animation at Dartmouth College. Combining the formal techniques and structures of abstract/absolute animation with those of cinematic genres, her handmade films use collage to explore the relationship between graphic cinema and storytelling, the tension between form and meaning. 

Mack’s 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Images Festival, Projections at the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at 25 FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts, among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, the New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. Mack received her MFA in film, video, and new media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007.

Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2002) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010) and a recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" grant.