As the 2026-27 school year begins, the University of Arizona School of Art welcomes director Jeff Beekman and six other new faculty and staff members:
- Andrea Allen, Assistant Professor
- Kerri Conlon, Assistant Professor
- Isabella Shey Robbins, Assistant Professor
- Pete Froslie, Professor
- Nicole Dvorak, Academic Advisor
- Andrew Schroeder, Technician
Here’s a look at the school’s new faces.
Jeff Beekman
Position: Director, School of Art; Professor, Photography, Video & Imaging
Bio: Beekman took over as director of the School of Art on July 1, bringing nationally recognized leadership as the school nears its centennial in 2027. He came to the U of A from Florida State University, where he chaired the Department of Art since 2023 and held other roles since 2013, including associate chair and director of Foundations and BA programs. As a community steward, he received an Emerging Arts Administrators Fellowship by the National Council of Arts Administrators. Previously, Beekman taught at the University of Oklahoma, Georgia Southern University and the University of New Mexico-Gallup. He received his BFA from the University of Florida and his MFA from the University of New Mexico. As an artist, he has focused his work “on our relationship with the landscapes we occupy,” including lens-based projects in recent years. He has exhibited broadly across the U.S. and internationally at venues in New Zealand, Australia, China, South Korea, Hungary, England, Ecuador, Italy and Vietnam. In his work, Beekman has explored human and environmental trauma, including the “Florida Coastline Project” and the “Battlefield Project,” which photographically explores conflict sites in the U.S. Civil War with archival photos of soldiers projected upon the battlefields where they fought and fell.
Quote: “I have a deep love for the American West. Joining a school the caliber of the University of Arizona and working with a faculty as dynamic and well-respected as those in the School of Art is truly exciting.”— Jeff Beekman
Website and Instagram: https://jeffbeekman.wixsite.com/home and @jeffbeekman
Andrea Allen
Position: Assistant Professor, Art & Visual Culture Education
Bio: Allen comes from Michigan State University, where she was an assistant professor of Art Education and the undergraduate program coordinator. She is an interdisciplinary artist-educator and scholar specializing in social justice art teaching, identity development, and decolonial methodologies in visual arts education and research. Her scholarship has been published in leading art education journals, including Studies in Art Education and the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. She has presented her work at numerous state and national conferences and serves as program chair for the Inquiry in Visual and Performing Arts Education Special Interest Group within the American Educational Research Association. Allen has over a decade of teaching experience spanning community arts centers, museums, and K-16 classrooms across Texas, New York, Japan and New Zealand. She earned her PhD in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Art Education from the University of Houston in 2023, where she also completed her MEd and BA in Broadcast Journalism.
Quote: “In my teaching, research and artmaking, I draw from the concept of nepantla, a Nahuatl term meaning ‘the place in the middle,’ as articulated by poet-activist Gloria Anzaldúa. From nepantla, my identities as Mexican, Filipino, American, Woman, Artist, Scholar and Teacher interact to challenge my internalized beliefs about what it means to embody these roles.” — Andrea Allen
Website and Instagram: andreaeallen.com and @teetasdoodles
Kerri Conlon
Position: Assistant Professor, 3D & Extended Media
Bio: Conlon’s large-scale sculptural installations fuse the ornamental with the structural to explore the intersections of construction, both architectural and cultural, investigating how identity and space are shaped by structures that are at once physical and ideological.
She received her MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. She has exhibited nationally, with recent solo exhibitions including Permission Structures at Cal Poly University Art Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA and Upholding at Bass and Reiner in San Francisco, CA. Her work has also been shown in New York, NY; Providence, RI; and Ferguson, MO. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Lighthouse Works Fellowship (2023) and the Fannie B. Pardee Prize for Excellence in Sculpture (2019).
Conlon was previously a Lecturer in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University. She is the co-founder of Hunt Projects, a shared studio space in San Francisco that provides artists with private studios and a communal wood and metal shop for material exploration and dialogue. She has worked in academic shop spaces since 2007, teaching students the conceptual and technical skills necessary to translate ideas into physical form.
Quote: I believe that making is a way of knowing and fosters agency in students through hands-on engagement with materials and processes.” — Kerri Conlon
Website and Instagram: kerriconlon.com and @kerriconlonstudio
Isabella Shey Robbins
Position: Assistant Professor, Art History
Bio: Robbins is a Diné scholar, curator and educator from Cameron, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation. She received her PhD in the History of Art and American Studies departments at Yale University in May 2026. Her dissertation, “Relationality and Being: Indigeneity, Space and Transit in Global Contemporary Art,” considers how artists engage with their own communities and others within and across the settler states of the U.S. and Australia.Guiding her research are questions related to definitions of Indigeneity, and the intersections of mobility, diaspora, and global Indigeneity.
She recently completed the second and final year of her prestigious Chester Dale Fellowship in Washington, D.C., with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts — the National Gallery of Art’s world-renowned research institute. Robbins has held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, and the Cantor Arts Center, and has taught contemporary art history and theory courses at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Robbins earned a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an MA in Public Humanities from Brown University. She serves as treasurer of the Diné Studies Association.
Quote: “(My) dissertation more broadly considers the meaningful engagements of specific places and their peoples, symbols of Indianness, and the repetition of cultural and aesthetic practices by artists.”
Instagram: @isabella.shey
Pete Froslie
Position: Professor, Photography, Video & Imaging; associate dean for research and graduate studies, College of Fine Arts
Bio: Froslie, whose research focuses on the intersection of human-made technological systems, art and culture, is also the new associate director of AI and the Arts within the University of Arizona’s Office of Responsible AI. He has long been fascinated with the relationship between global political and economic structures and emerging issues of climate and environmental change. He joins the U of A from the University of Oklahoma, where he was associate dean for technology and grants of the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, the Director of the School of Visual Arts, and Professor of Art, Technology and Culture.
He received his Master of Fine Arts from the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art (MassArt) and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nevada-Reno. As part of his art practice, Froslie’s recent work includes three expeditions to the Arctic Circle in the Svalbard archipelago in 2017, 2019, and 2024.
Quote: “You can feel the energy around the arts at the University of Arizona. The Arizona Arts community engages urgent environmental and social questions, and there’s a genuine commitment to interdisciplinary work.” — Pete Froslie
Website and Instagram: froslie.net and @petefroslie
Nicole Dvorak
Position: Undergraduate academic advisor
Bio: Dvorak previously was an academic advisor at Pima Community College in Tucson and Columbia College in Denver. Before that, she taught World History and Reading in the Orange County Public Schools District in Apopka, Florida. She received her bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and Teaching from the University of Central Florida. Nicole was born outside of Chicago, but moved to Orlando, Florida, when she was in the third grade.
Quote: “I consider teaching and academic advising to be closely related. There are many transferable skills of teaching that carry into the academic advising world, such as student mentoring and counseling in both academic and personal capacities, using data to drive practices, and helping students navigate their educational journeys. Both careers are rewarding as my main goal is helping students be successful and achieve their goals.”
Instagram: @nicole_dvorak
Andrew Schroeder
Position: Technician for Print, Publishing and Book Arts
Background: Schroeder grew up in Nebraska and received his BFA in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska, before getting his MFA in Printmaking and Photography from the University of Minnesota. Initially torn between art, geography and sociology, he studied printmaking at Nebraska under Karen Kunc, “who showed me that visual art could be the umbrella under which I could explore all three,” he said. For the last three years, he was the College of Fine Arts photography lab manager at the University of New Mexico. Among his previous roles, he was a program coordinator at the University of Arizona Faculty Center and at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Quote: “I’m thrilled to join the School of Art because this role lets me combine my passion for technical practice with my love of typography and printmaking. I want to dive into the extensive and incredibly diverse collection of wooden and metal type in the letterpress area, ensuring students and faculty can fully leverage it while also researching the typographic history of these objects. I’m also eager to expand our workflows using the Risograph, especially developing methods for reproducing photographs via halftones on the machine … something I’m excited to learn and share with the community. … My approach to this role is about facilitating art-making and helping students produce their best work.”
Website and Instagram: andrewschroeder.net and @eigengrau_photo
