Courses taught at Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design
ART DES 602 Decolonizing the Archive: Visual and Artistic Research Practices
This seminar course explores archival theories alongside artistic research practices with archival materials amid the regimes of silencing and erasure characteristic of colonial/national archives. Through collaborative theoretical and creative explorations, we will ask: What constitutes an archive? Is it possible to decolonize the archive? What alternative modes of representation, counter-visualities, and fictionalizations can transcend the violence inherent to colonial archives? How have artists, community members, and other practitioners reimagined oral histories, cartographies, and testimonies to recover historical memory?
Students will respond to readings and viewings and undertake experimental visual exercises that merge original research with course discussions. By interrogating their own historical materials as sites of inquiry, students will develop new theoretical elaborations around their archival artifacts. The culminating project will involve a creative engagement with archival materials, accompanied by a project rationale that documents the conceptual development and employs the course texts and ideas to justify the selection of materials and the chosen format.
ART DES 340 Digital (Image) Making
With the stunning proliferation of visual imagery we encounter every day — most of it digital –- it is imperative that artists and designers understand how these images are made, disseminated, and consumed. Using a range of digital image making tools – software and hardware – students will learn to capture, draw, paint, appropriate, collage, and produce sophisticated images that convey particular messages and evoke intended responses. Students will build on skills learned in introductory courses to gain experience with a broader range of tools and techniques in order to convey their chosen subject matter with more depth, sophistication, and impact. Projects will prompt students to remix existing images, construct impossible spaces, invent visual systems, create digital artifacts, and respond to contemporary image culture. Students will develop technical digital making 2D and 3D skills while exploring authorship, memory, identity, misinformation, and the strange life of images online.
This course explores conceptual techniques in live-action filmmaking and animation as separate projects as well as the possibilities of combining them. At times, a filmmaker employs simple animation, motion graphics or moving images to emphasize or enhance a story. These techniques might appear subtle and seamless in live-action or highly expressionistic through animation. In a series of individual and group projects, students will learn a variety of styles and approaches to these experimental, arthouse techniques. The second half of the class will be the completion of a carefully planned and produced final project in either a live-action film, an animated film or a project that combines the two. One of the goals of this class is to allow students to broaden their storytelling skills in filmmaking, videography and animation.
Across different cultures humanity has found ways of making meaning and leaving traces about significant events through time and across generations. States, communities and individuals make memory marks through many forms and artistic mediums: statues, plaques, altars, graffiti, grave markers, gardens, flags, quilts, stamps, tattoos, photo albums, and other non material forms such as oral histories. Whether through public or private rituals, memory practices express our individual and collective desire to remember the past and shape the future.
Students will experiment with objects, imagery, archives, digital authoring tools and the urban environment to create projects that critically engage cultural memory and the contested politics of memory. We will explore together multimodal representations, texts, ideas and practices from art, design, digital media, performance, activism, and urban studies that investigate the role memory plays in fashioning and questioning meaning in everyday life.
The course is part of the #ArtsandResistance themed semester at U-M
Class Trailer with works by students from previous class:
Mimi Hourihane
Greyson-Felicia Snyder
Christian Dean
Meredith Kratochwill
Paulina Braverman
Phoebe Rose Matthews
Students will acquire proficiency in both the concepts of time-based art & design and the tools and methods necessary to create this work. Assignments in video, animation, sound, and real time/ live art serve to provide students with a range of approaches to creating works that utilize time and movement and are experiential in nature. This course is organized around the completion of four different creative projects in time-based media including: animation, video, audio, and performance/ live action. Through in-class critiques, discussions, exercises, technical demonstrations, guest lectures, presentations, and readings, students will gain the essential skills to analyze and produce creative work in which time-based media plays a crucial role.
ART DES 130 Methods of Inquiry
Methods of Inquiry is a process-based studio course in which students learn and practice a series of creative inquiry methods. Students learn different ways of approaching creative inquiry, drawing on and integrating creative methods from disciplines across the art and design spectrum. Course work includes learning how to effectively present project proposals, thoughtfully assess a project’s strengths and weaknesses, consider viable alternatives, and make informed decisions regarding solutions/outcomes/proposals. By the end of the semester, students will be able to employ multiple methods for finding and addressing meaningful creative problems and opportunities.
ART DES 356 Independent Studies: Social Justice Media (documentary)
Graduate course: ART DES 500 Independent Study “Diasporic Women of Color: Body, Memory, and Violence”
“Narrate to not forget. Historical memory and feminism”. Feminisms, Memory and Resistance in Latin America Graduate Seminar, Center for Higher Studies of Mexico and Central America. Chiapas University of Sciences and Arts, Mexico, 2021.
Courses taught at USC
Annenberg Youth Academy for Media and Civic Engagement, Annenberg School of Journalism, USA, 2017.
Teaching Assistant
IML 354 Introduction to 3D Modeling. Instructor Silvia Ragon. Fall 2020.
IML 202 Media Arts and Practice Studio I. Instructor Michael Bodie and Evan Huges. Fall 2020.
IML 320 Designing and Writing for Transmedia. Instructor Vicki Callahan. Spring 2018.
IML 364 Methods in Digital Research. Instructor Kiki Benzon. Spring 2018.
CNTV 101 Reality Starts Here. Instructor: Jeff Watson. Fall 2017.
IML 364 Methods in Digital Research. Instructor Kiki Benzon. Spring 2017.
IML 335 Digital Narrative Design. Instructor Ashley York. Spring 2017.
IML 295 Race, Class and Gender in Digital Culture. Instructor Virginia Kuhn. Fall 2016.
CNTV 101 Reality Starts Here. Instructor: Jeff Watson. Fall 2016.
Community Practice & Research 