SAIC Welcomes 15 New Full-Time Faculty this Fall

September 23, 2014

Fifteen full-time faculty joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) working across a range of departments. They are:

Jonathan Solomon
Director of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects
Jonathan Solomon is a committed educator and active researcher with a long interest in the role of architecture in the contemporary city and an accomplished career as an editor and a curator. He is committed to collaboration and sees SAIC’s interdisciplinary curriculum as a strength in contemporary design education. Solomon has taught design at the City College of New York and as a Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. At the University of Hong Kong, he led the Department of Architecture as Acting Head from 2009 to 2012. He is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois and Member of the American Institute of Architects.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier
Assistant Professor, Photography
LaToya Ruby Frazier comes to SAIC after holding academic and curatorial positions at Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University. Her work focuses on contemporary economic strife, urban growth, issues of race and migration, industry decline and displacement, as well as family history through the traditional black-and-white photography of social documentary.
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Aimee Beaubien 
Assistant Professor, Photography
Aimee Beaubien is best known for her woven photo collages of pigment prints, which have recently taken on an intricate, sculptural form. In addition to many Chicago exhibitions, her work has been highlighted in numerous national art publications including Art in America, Art On Paper, New Art Examiner, and ArtPapers.
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Sara Black
Assistant Professor, Sculpture
Sara Black’s work uses carpentry, wood-working, and repair as a time-based method and inherited wood or other haunted objects as a material. She imagines building as a physical means of articulating lived relationships in a constant state of renegotiation. Black has given talks and presented workshops at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Harvard University, DePaul University, Columbia College, and more. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art; Betty Rymer Gallery; Hyde Park Art Center; ThreewallsSOLO; and Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft; among other spaces.
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Shiben Banerji
Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Shiben Banerji’s research critically examines American urbanism and urban design in light of political and economic liberalism. He is currently researching and writing Inhabiting the World, about a non-nationalist alternative to empire through architectural and urban design, and In the Shadow of Sovereignty, investigating communitarian experiments and their influence on the US legal system. He is also an activist for humanitarian justice in India and winner of the Hugh Hampton Young and Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowships.
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Benjamin DeMott
Assistant Professor, Ceramics
Benjamin DeMott is a mixed-media ceramicist who straddles the line between object and installation, earthenware and sculpture. An advocate for the use of unconventional, but commonly found materials, he draws with and assembles the material in a web of three-dimensional forms. He was a recently selected HATCH artist of the Chicago Artist Coalition and has been featured in both Ceramics Now and Artforum.
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Heather Dewey-Hagborg
Assistant Professor, Art and Technology Studies
Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s multimedia work incorporates and critically examines the notions of the natural and artificial within the context of contemporary culture and science. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including the Poland Mediations Biennale, PS1 MOMA, the New Museum, Ars Electronica, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and Science Gallery Dublin. She has been featured in more than a dozen major news publications and networks from the New York Times to the BBC, to TED, CNN, and the Smithsonian magazine.
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Kate Anne Dumbleton
Assistant Professor, Arts Administration and Policy
Kate Anne Dumbleton is best known for her work as the Executive and Artistic Director of the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in South Chicago and was previously, beginning in 1965, the Executive Director of the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. She serves as a member of the Chicago Composers Forum, MSJO Jazz Organization, and Noir Records. Her productions and recordings include Rovate '04, Mirror Ball '05, Glass Head '06; Fixtures and Fissures '09, The Sophisticate, Port Chicago, and Harriet Tubman. 
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Mari Eastman
Assistant Professor, Painting and Drawing
Mari Eastman’s is both painterly and illustrative with an emphasis on the engaged and intuitive process. Her work has appeared in national and international exhibitions at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; Emily Tsingou Gallery, London; Sies + Hoke, Duesseldorf, and Spruth and Magers Projecte, Germany; among others.
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Seth Kim-Cohen
Assistant Professor, Art History, Theory, and Criticism
Seth Kim-Cohen is an artist, musician, sonic theorist, and sound art historian. Interested in the experimentation and trends of contemporary art in sound media, his books Against Ambience (Bloomsbury 2013) and In The Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art(Continuum 2009) examine topics from contemporary trends of the “ambient, immersive experience” to the tradition and history of the sonic medium. His art has been shown internationally at Tate Modern; Denver Museum of Contemporary Art; Singapore Biennial; Peer Gallery in London; and Audio Visual Arts in New York.
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Ayanah Moor
Assistant Professor, Printmedia
Ayanah Moor dissects and reconfigures thematic trends in pop culture to spark conversation about how these expose the unspoken mindsets, aspirations, and inhibitions that drive social thought. Previously, she was an assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA,  focusing on Printmaking and studio theory practice. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions across the United States, and she has won the the Pittsburgh Foundation’s Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh award numerous times.
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Judd Morrissey
Assistant Professor, Art and Technology Studies, Writing, and Performance
Judd Morrissey s a writer and performance artist with both a gallery and online presence, using interdisciplinary modes of electronic literature, data poetry, choreographed performance pieces, and installations. He is the co-founder of the Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r), an arts collective that fuses the mediums of digital literacy and performance. He has performed nationally and internationally and is the recipient awards from Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation, Fulbright Scholar, and Illinois Arts Council.
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Jacob Ristau
Assistant Professor, Visual Communication Design
Jacob Ristau infuses his designs with notions of vitality, curiosity, and the basis of reality. In his teaching and professional practices, he encourages the “nonlinear and intuitive” methodologies that yield unique displays of the visual-verbal language of design. He has given visiting artists lectures at colleges across the United States, and his work is part of the Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection.
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Oliver Sann
Assistant Professor, Photography
Oliver Sann frequently collaborates with Beate Geissler, a Chicago-based, German born photographer like himself. Together, they have covered issues of war, sociopolitical criticism, German heritage, and interior portraits of foreclosed homes in Chicago. Sann has been exhibited work  across Europe and Russia as well and in Chicago, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Jan Tichy
Assistant Professor, Photography
Jan Tichy is known not only in the world of photography but also in video, sculpture, architecture, and sound. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Spertus Museum, Chicago. His work has been shown around the world in museums, galleries, art publications, and architectural biennales. He is the recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award and the Mayor of Jerusalem Award.
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