Woven In:
Creating a Shared Vision with Jiseon Lee Isbara

This is the spirit Lee Isbara is bringing to her next project, and it’s a big one: in July, she became the president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Like her work, she’s not coming with answers or a set-in-stone plan. Really, her first intention is to spend a great deal of time listening. 

“I do not think that what lies ahead for SAIC should be solely realizing my vision,” Lee Isbara said. “I think it’s got to be the School's vision.” 

In tandem with her creative talent, Lee Isbara’s experience as an accomplished administrator is another reason she was chosen to lead the School into its next era. She has two master of fine arts degrees in fiber, one from Colorado State University and the other from Ewha Womans University in Seoul. She went on to serve in several roles at Oregon College of Art and Craft, including head of the fibers department, dean of academic affairs, and interim president. Eventually, she came to serve as provost at Otis College of Art and Design in California. There, she implemented a five-year strategic plan that resulted in substantial positive changes at the school around enrollment, mental health, career preparedness, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lee Isbara wants her time at SAIC to be shaped by the needs and desires of current students, staff, faculty, alums, and stakeholders. She acknowledges that SAIC, like many other higher educational institutions, has endured recent challenges, including those brought on by the pandemic. In order to best lead the School, she wants to connect with community members in meaningful ways, and let those discussions guide her.

Maybe this openness to ambiguity comes in part from Lee Isbara’s own personal and family history. Both her father’s and mother’s families were originally from Northern Korea (now North Korea), and came to the South as refugees during the Korean War. They came with nothing, and always planned to move back to the North, but were never able to. 

“The story of my family and the difficulty they had to pull through to become who they are now [is the story of] why education is so important,” Lee Isbara said. 

She grew up living with her parents and all of her aunts, next door to both sets of her grandparents. She knows now that living with her extended family influenced her more than she realized at the time. Her grandmother was an accomplished textile artist, knitting, sewing, and making things with fabric and thread. Lee Isbara grew up watching her and credits her grandmother with much of her own aesthetic, work ethic, and value of labor. When she went to college, she chose fibers as her major because it came so naturally to her. 

In many of her lectures, Lee Isbara shows a spoon case her grandmother made—a family heirloom and the only object that her family brought with them to South Korea. The spoon case is hand-embroidered with east Asian symbols to bestow luck, health, prosperity, and the like. Lee Isbara cherished the spoon case, and nobody objected when she brought it to the US with her.

Lee Isbara acknowledged that the spoon case represents, in some ways, patriarchal society. None of her aunts were given a spoon case: Lee Isbara’s father, as the first-born male, was bestowed with a great deal of significance. But it’s appropriate that the spoon case is complicated, imbued with meanings at once powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. That’s the complexity that Lee Isbara embraces, not only in her work, but in her capacity as an educator and leader. 

Accolades aside, Lee Isbara brings with her a life story that’s filled with the kind of richness and multitudes present in the stories of so many students at SAIC. She’s the School’s first first-generation immigrant president, and only its second woman president.