Category: Faculty Story

University of Arizona School of Art Associate Professor Nicole Antebi’s animated essay film, “100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas” (2023), has been acquired by El Museo del Barrio for the New York museum’s permanent collection.

Funded in part by a Jerome Foundation Film/Video Grant, the film is told through a cascade of vintage postcards of El Paso, Juárez, and part of eastern New Mexico.

“I interrogated colonial treaties, policies, and personal and found history to locate inflection points in the changing border,” Antebi said. “The film ends with my collaborators/friends and I immersing ourselves in the Rio Grande/Río Bravo.”

Associate Professor Nicole Antebi, with her animated essay film, “100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas (2023),” at the 2023 Arizona Biennial (photo by Julius Schlosburg). Top photo: The film is part of her “Rebel Waters / Aguas Rebeldes” show in Florida.

Antebi is currently showing the film as part of her solo exhibition, “Rebel Waters / Aguas Rebeldes,” at the Crisp Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida. In 2025, she screened the film at the AT&T Discovery District in Dallas as part of Video Art Night. The film also was selected for the Arizona Biennial in 2023.

“I am deeply honored that this work will be preserved alongside so many seminal works of Latin American and Caribbean art,” Antebi said.

El Museo was founded in 1969 by artist and educator Raphael Montañez Ortiz and a coalition of Puerto Rican parents, educators, artists and activists who noted that mainstream museums largely ignored Latino artists.

Antebi screened her animated essay film at the AT&T Discovery District in Dallas as part of Video Art Night.

Since its inception, El Museo has been committed to celebrating and promoting Latino culture, thus becoming a cornerstone of El Barrio, and a valuable resource for New York City.

El Museo’s varied permanent collection of over 8,500 objects, spans more than 800 years of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino art, includes Taíno to modern and contemporary drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations, as well as textiles, prints, photography, documentary films, and video.

“We are thrilled to have Nicole’s video in our permanent collection,” said Lee Sessions, permanent collections associate curator for E Museo.

“100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas (2023)” is part of Antebi’s current exhibition through Nov. 7 at the Crisp-Ellert Museum in St. Augustine, Florida.

Rivers can be borders, lifelines and repositories of memory. For University of Arizona School of Art Associate Professor Nicole Antebi, they are all three.

Her upcoming exhibition “Rebel Waters / Aguas Rebeldes” in St. Augustine, Florida, uses animation and sculpture to explore the histories and changing landscapes of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and the Santa Cruz River in Southern Arizona — a journey that will bring together Antebi and fellow faculty member Jennifer Saracino for a public conversation later this month.

The exhibition, presented by Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College, features Antebi’s moving-image, sculptural and animation work exploring the history and transformation of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and the Santa Cruz. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday evening, Sept. 4, with Antebi leading an exhibition walkthrough.

On Sept. 28, Antebi will join Saracino in Flagler’s Ringhaver Student Center for a public conversation about the exhibition and its themes.

For Antebi, whose work is deeply connected to the El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, region where she grew up, the Rio Grande become a way to examine environmental, social, political and economic forces that have shaped the borderlands for more than a century. The river is a vital water source for seven U.S. and Mexican states and becomes the border between Texas and the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz starts in the San Rafael Valley, flows south into Mexico, makes a U-turn, and then flows north past Green Valley, through the Tohono O’odham Nation, through Tucson and up past Marana.

Antebi moves between animation and sculpture, incorporating materials and imagery tied to the landscapes she explores. Her work has included found cottonwood from areas surrounding the Santa Cruz River and papel de amate, or Jonote bark paper, from Northern Puebla, Mexico. Text and mapping also recur throughout her time-based and sculptural works. The result is work that asks viewers to think about memory, place and the ways histories remain present.

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Antebi’s connection to the Crisp-Ellert exhibition goes back several years.

Julie Dickover, director of exhibitions and college collections at Crisp-Ellert, said Antebi first came onto the museum’s radar through connections within the experimental film and animation community. Patrick Moser, a professor at Flagler, had encountered Antebi’s work at a film festival, and the museum later included her work in its Finger Mullet Film Festival, an event created to highlight experimental video and animation.

“I’ve always liked Nicole’s work, and so last year we invited her to have an exhibition this fall,” Dickover said.

Saracino, an assistant professor of Art History, was a natural choice to help extend the exhibition’s conversation on Sept. 28. Her research focuses on Indigenous cartographic traditions of Central Mexico, cross-cultural interactions between mendicant friars and Indigenous communities, and the impact of these exchanges on the visual culture of early colonial Mexico.

“We make a small publication to go along with each exhibition, and I always commission an essay from an arts writer or art historian,” Dickover said. “I think both Nicole and I immediately identified Jen as a candidate to write the essay because there are so many overlapping themes in their work.”

Antebi has exhibited and screened her work throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Houston Center for Photography, Union Docs in Brooklyn, the Irish National College of Art and Design, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, El Paso Museum of Art, the MexiCali Biennial and Tucson Museum of Art.

Earlier this year, she received a MacDowell Fellowship to work on an animated essay that explores “the hug” — both visually and textually as a gesture that “is as complex as it is political,” she said. Her work focused on four consequential hugs that took place in El Paso, Texas, from 2019 to 2025, “which demonstrate the restorative love of a border city perpetually traumatized by federal policies,” Antebi said.

In 2025, she was a visiting professor at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, and was named an Early Career Scholar Award recipient by the University of Arizona for her cross-cultural work that centers on animation as a form of community-engaged storytelling. Antebi is co-director of the Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2, which serves as an animation, data visualization and film production laboratory dedicated to developing solutions for environmental change.

Saracino, who previously taught in Flagler College’s Department of Visual Arts, also contributed an essay to the publication accompanying Antebi’s exhibition.

“Nicole and I have admired each other’s work since we first met as colleagues in fall 2021,“ Saracino said. “There are many intersections and connections between our work, and I’m so happy that Flagler College gave us the opportunity to talk more about them in front of an audience. It’s been a dream of ours to collaborate for a while.“

Saracino added: “I hope (students and the audience) will see how the study of historical maps continues to be crucial for understanding the formation of borders and borderlands today, how research can inform creative production that tackles contemporary issues, and how art history and the visual arts continue to influence and shape one another.“

As the 2026-27 school year begins, the University of Arizona School of Art welcomes director Jeff Beekman and seven 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
• Bryan Cormac Peel, Academic Advisor

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

Dr. Geneva Foster Gluck, a School of Art adjunct instructor and alumna, has received a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award along with six other University of Arizona faculty members for the 2026-27 academic year.

Foster Gluck will be based in Spain’s Catalonia region from September to May to develop a creative research project that combines energy humanities with applied art, theater and scenography as tools for promoting behavioral change related to climate change.

As part of the Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Award, she’ll work with environmental scientist Maria Heras at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona on a series of immersive art and educational encounters that coalesce research questions and findings unique to Spain’s progressive energy, as well as the entangled legacies of colonialism, energy systems and cultural transformation.

“This was my first (Fulbright) application … and I really look forward to working with Maria and with all the great energy and sustainability projects that are taking place in Spain,” Foster Gluck said. “By taking an interdisciplinary approach to energy humanities, theater and design, my research contributes insights into our daily interactions with energy, diversifies perceptions of energy and devises actions for generative possibilities on a warming planet in the form of public-facing, immersive and interactive experiences.”

She has explored similar environmental themes specific to Tucson and the borderlands in projects such as her site-specific performance “Inheriting the Void” (2026), at the base of Tumamoc Hill, and “Interactive Batteries” (2024) in the “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” exhibition at the school’s Joseph Gross Gallery.

U of A has long Fulbright history

The Fulbright Program is the U.S. State Department’s flagship cultural exchange program that supports U.S. scholars conducting research or teaching abroad for up to a year. Since 1954, more than 300 Fulbright Scholars have represented the University of Arizona at institutions around the world, including seven in 2026-27 and seven in 2025-26, when U of A was named a top Fulbright producer and tied for fourth in the nation.

Since 2024, Foster Gluck has taught “Career Development for Artists” at the School of Art, where she received her BFA in 1999.

“I really enjoy teaching … and find it very satisfying to think about how to have sustainable arts practices, while expanding creative culture, such as art-as-research and community engagement,” she said. “Each semester is very different as each cohort of students brings new questions and perspectives on making a living as an artist.”

During her time in Spain, Foster Gluck will continue to teach her career development class online.

“I look forward to sharing some of what I learn about how Spain supports artists, its creative culture and economies,” she said. “The online format will also give me more time to work one-on-one with students and to support their unique visions and aims.”

Immersive theater, circus skills part of BFA years

During her undergraduate time at U of A, Gluck became a core member of Tucson-based Flam Chen Pyrotechnic Theatre, where she was responsible for introducing aerial circus skills and interactive sculpture into the company’s performance repertoire. Flam Chen performed at New York City and Philadelphia Fringe Festivals in 2001 and 2002.

After Gluck earned her M.A. in Scenography at the University of London in 2003, she went on to work with some of the UK’s most successful contemporary and immersive theater companies, including Fevered Sleep (2003), Marisa Carnesky (2004), and SHUNT (2005), before establishing her own company, Sugar Beast Circus, in 2007. The circus received professional acclaim, including the Jeunes Talents Cirque Award (2008), a residency at The Roadhouse (2010), a Circus Futures award (2011) and a premiere at the prestigious London International Mime Festival (2012).

“Inheriting the Void” (2026)

“Inheriting the Void” (2026)

“Magnetic Chamber” (2022)

“Magnetic Chamber” (2022)

“Interactive Batteries” (2024)

“Battery Maker Museum” (2020)

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“My work centers on immersive event-production, creative research, and material storytelling to explore a range of topics and experiences often grounded in decolonizing, feminist, and ecological approaches,” Gluck said. “I use a range of creative practices including performance, prop-making, video and sound installation to explore the connections between ways of knowing, environment and embodied experience.”

In 2020, Gluck completed a practice-led PhD program at Arizona State University titled, “Performing the Electrical or My Heart is an Electromagnetic Chamber: Scenographies of Power, Ecology and Speculative Practice.” Her research integrated performance studies, spatial theory and energy humanities to consider the ways that new knowledge is created and shared through artist led projects.

Now based in Tucson, Gluck is co-founder of Snakebite Creation Space, a platform for supporting performance, installation and process-based work in Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico. Her other shows included “Magnetic Chamber” (2022) at Pidgin Palace Arts, and “Battery Maker Museum” (2020), a month-long installation and nomadic storytelling project at the MSA Annex in west downtown.

Tumamoc project involves community

In early April, Gluck presented “Inheriting the Void,” a performance-installation and video essay, at the base of Tumamoc Hill. Loosely based on Gluck’s experience caring for her mother during her rapid onset of dementia, as well as larger themes of the climate crisis and mental health, the performance invited community members to scan a QR code on their phones for a 15-minute audiovisual story, using headphones.

She invited visitors to witness a speculative interaction between a bear and a ventriloquist that asks: “On whose behalf do we speak? What is the relationship between memory and knowledge? And who or what speaks through our actions?”

“I thought it was going to be much more of a traditional performance, but I was really pleased with the way the ‘narrative’ divided across the live installation, the site and the video essays,” she said. “I have used phone technologies before for site-specific and nomadic storytelling, but this was a little different, and the ways that the audience engaged with the work was really fun to see.”

The event was made possible by a MOCA Tucson Night Bloom Award and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

• Artist’s website: www.genevafostergluck.com
• Instagram: @genevagluck
• Story about Maria Heras: “Art can help us reconnect with ourselves, with the environment, with otherness”

Internal support is available for prospective Fulbright Scholar and Specialist applicants. For more information, contact Danielle Barefoot, dbarefoot@arizona.edu, associate for International Research Development and the university’s Fulbright Scholar liaison.

By Dr. Ilayda Altuntas

(Editor’s note: Reflecting on the Saturday Art School as a dynamic site of learning, mentorship and community, Altuntas first published this essay in the National Art Education Association’s Spring 2026 newsletter. An assistant professor in Art & Visual Culture Education for the School of Art, she is chair of the Seminar for Research in Art Education, or SRAE.)

On Saturdays, our campus at the University of Arizona feels unfinished. The lights are on, but the energy hasn’t arrived yet. The roads are empty, the air still. Opening the art studio at 7:30 a.m., there’s always a split second of doubt—and then the day begins. For years, Saturday Art School has been part of my professional life—I’ve moved through Saturday Art School in stages—first as a preservice teacher, then as a classroom instructor, later as a supervisor, and now as program coordinator.

Each role changed what I paid attention to, and in doing so, changed how I understand art education. As a teacher, my focus was the child in front of me. As a supervisor, I listened for how others were learning to teach. Now, as coordinator, I hold the broader structure: I oversee curriculum, supervise preservice teachers, teach when needed, manage enrollment, coordinate events, place students in classes, and handle the logistics that make the program function. What might be several positions elsewhere converges here, requiring both pedagogical vision and sustaining the program’s structure.

I still remember the early mornings as a beginning teacher: tables waiting, art materials untouched, fluorescent light pooling in the corners of the room. Then the shift—conversations, laughter, footsteps, the sound of paint lids popping open. I didn’t yet have the language for what I was experiencing, but I felt it: Teaching was not simply delivery of content. It was relational. Sensory. Affective.

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Over time, I began to understand what many of us in art education come to realize: The classroom is not static. It breathes. It absorbs. It echoes. Teaching requires attention not only to curriculum, but to atmosphere—to the subtle shifts in energy, the quiet pause before a student shares, the vulnerability embedded in making.

Years later, when I returned as a supervisor, the space felt familiar, yet my role had changed. I stood at the back of the room listening. The rhythm was different: preservice teachers navigating uncertainty, children responding in unpredictable ways. Supervision became its own form of practice—less about directing, more about attuning. Feedback required resonance rather than authority.

Now, as coordinator, I encounter Saturday Art School as both program and archive. Shelves hold years of student work. Lesson plans evolve. Cohorts shift. But what persists is harder to document. The archive lives in gesture—in the way teachers lean toward a child’s drawing, in the instinct to offer “You can start over,” in the quiet choreography of care that unfolds each week.

Saturday programs occupy a unique place in our field. They exist between university and community, between child and teacher education, between structure and improvisation. They are voluntary spaces. Chosen spaces—and I think that difference matters.

Without the urgency of weekday systems, experimentation feels possible. Preservice teachers try, adjust, and reflect. Children encounter art as process rather than performance. Families enter university spaces not as observers, but as participants in a shared learning ecology.

For those of us in SRAE, programs like Saturday Art School invite us to reconsider where research happens. Not all inquiry begins in a journal. Some of it unfolds in repetition—returning to the same studio each week, noticing how bodies remember, how community forms through rhythm.

As I revisit my own years within this program, I see Saturday not as a side project, but as a living continuum of practice. A place where teaching is rehearsed, revised, and remembered. A site where care accumulates quietly.

Sometimes the most enduring archives in art education are not stored in boxes or databases. They are carried in posture, in listening habits, in the shared tempo of a room that gathers again and again.

And on Saturdays, that gathering continues.

Wildcat Saturday Art School

• About: Wildcat Saturday Art School is a hands-on art education program designed for K–6 students. Courses are led by pre-service teachers in the School of Art’s Art & Visual Culture Education program, each bringing their own artistic perspective and teaching approach.
• Open Studios: On the final day, April 25, 2026, families are invited to a special event from noon to 2 p.m. at the University of Arizona School of Art.
• Website: wildcat.art.arizona.edu/

School of Art Assistant Professor Nicole Antebi has been awarded a prestigious MacDowell Fellowship to work on an animated essay that will explore “the hug” — both visually and textually as a gesture that “is as complex as it is political,” she said.

Antebi is among 135 artists across seven disciplines chosen from a pool of over 2,600 applicants for the spring/summer 2026 season at MacDowell — the nation’s first artist residency program, founded in 1907. She’ll be working on her project March 16-30 at its historic campus in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

“I’m really looking forward to this opportunity,” said Antebi, part of the school’s Illustration, Design & Animation program. “The project I will be working on … will focus on four consequential hugs that took place in El Paso, Texas, from 2019 to 2025, which demonstrate the restorative love of a border city perpetually traumatized by federal policies.”

Context for her animated essay, she said, will begin with the dismantling of “Hugs not Walls,” a Border Network for Human Rights initiative that began in 2016 that let families who could not visit each other because of their immigration status to meet in the middle of the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo) River once a month to embrace.

Makeshift platforms on the river allowed families wearing different T-shirts — one color for those on the U.S. side and another for those in Mexico — to hug without fear of deportation or any other repercussions. The events were hosted in partnership with the Border Patrol, the International Boundary and Water Commission and the El Paso and Juárez police departments. The initiative was cancelled May 10, 2025, on Mexican Mother’s Day, because the Trump administration had designated a second stretch of the border as a National Defense Area to enforce immigration laws, according to news reports.

Sama Alshaibi, a Regents professor from the University of Arizona School of Art, was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship last year.

Also offering a fall/winter season, MacDowell hosts 300 fellows annually from around the world, including architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theater artists, visual artists and writers.

Antebi and others “will be granted the gift of uninterrupted focus,” supported by a private studio, accommodations and three prepared meals each day, according to the residency’s website, macdowell.org.

“MacDowell is a safe haven for artists from around the world,” said Courtney Bethel, the program’s admissions director. “In the current political climate, it’s especially meaningful to create opportunities for artists to build connections and foster community at both the national and global levels.”

In 2025, Antebi was named an Early Career Scholar Award recipient by the University of Arizona for her cross-cultural work that centers on animation as a form of community-engaged storytelling. She is co-director of the Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2, which serves as an animation, data visualization and film production laboratory dedicated to developing solutions for environmental change. 

“Nicole is an amazing teacher who encourages her students to build better communities through storytelling, animation and collaboration,” said Professor Kelly Leslie, who chairs the School of Art’s Illustration, Design and Animation program.

For this year’s Spring Summer session, MacDowell received applications from artists in all 50 U.S. states along with Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, and 71 countries. Accepted artists represent 27 states, 16 countries and five continents.

Founded by composer Edward MacDowell and pianist Marian MacDowell, the MacDowell program was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997. Over the past 119 years, more than 16,500 residencies have been awarded to distinguished artists such as James Baldwin, Charlie Kaufman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Louise Erdrich, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ayad Akhtar, Laura Poitras, Faith Ringgold, Meredith Monk, Osvaldo Golijov, Sam Grabiner, Ersela Kripa, Alyson Shotz, Maya Ciarrocchi, and jaamil olawale kosoko.

“I am once again in awe of the remarkable talent arriving on our grounds this spring and summer,” said Chiwoniso Kaitano, MacDowell’s executive director. “Representing … an extraordinary breadth of ideas, these artists — at every stage of their careers—are true groundbreakers. It is a deep honor for MacDowell to play even a small role in the impact our Fellows have on art and culture.”

More about Nicole Antebi

• Early Career Scholar story: art.arizona.edu/antebi-receives-early-scholar-award
• Artist’s website: nicoleantebi.com
• School of Art bio: art.arizona.edu/profile/nantebi
  

Editor’s note: As the University of Arizona School of Art moves closer to its 100th anniversary in 2027, we’re profiling former faculty and students.

School of Art alumni are remembering Professor Emerita Bailey “Peggy” Doogan as the University of Arizona Museum of Art celebrates the late artist with an exhibition that highlights her life’s work.

In “Bailey Doogan: Ways of Seeing,” on view until April 4, 2026, 80 selections from each phase of Doogan’s career are being displayed together for the first time, highlighting her artistic processes and evolution.

After obtaining a BFA in Illustration from the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Doogan began her career as a graphic designer. Among her most well-known designs is the Morton Salt Girl, “Mortie,” an iconic symbol of the brand that remains mostly unchanged today — and one that the artist later reimagined in the large pastel drawing, Pour It On (1998). Her early work shows the influence of her design background, as well as the pressures she faced as a woman in a largely male-dominated industry.

In 1969, Doogan moved to Tucson to teach graphic design at the University of Arizona. She was promoted to Professor of Design, Painting and Drawing in 1982 after receiving her Master’s in Animated Film from UCLA. Much of Doogan’s 1980s work features bright colors and cartoon-like figures as seen in If You Can Scream Loud Enough You Get Hopp’in Mad (1982).

At the end of the decade she began creating her signature works focused on the human body. Detailed and visceral, these drawings and paintings interrogate traditional artistic conventions of female beauty by centering the aging female body, a subject which has been largely avoided in Western art and popular culture.

In works like RIB (1988-1989) and Self-Exam (2003-2005), Doogan explained she was not aiming to depict “The Nude” or “The Figure.” Rather, “I deal with the real body,” she said. “Our bodies are diaries of our experience. Whatever happens to us is recorded there: wrinkles, scars, the way we stand. That specificity fascinates me. I think it’s beautiful.” Doogan often painted her own body at a monumental size and in great detail, drawing attention to aspects of the female form that society often shies away from.

Doogan retired from the School of Art in 1999 and became a professor emerita of Painting and Drawing. She remained a vital part of Tucson’s arts community and a driving force in the downtown arts scene before her death in July 2022 at age 80.

“With powerful imagery, combining bite and humor, she called out sexism and misogyny in academia as well as in the Tucson art community and the art world,” School of Art Professor Ellen McMahon said in the school’s website obituary for Doogan. McMahon took three classes from Doogan while a graduate student at the University of Arizona.

Other former students remembered Doogan as the UAMA exhibition opened on Jan. 17:

Eve Calderaro
BFA ’98, Studio Art
Art teacher, K-8, New Jersey

Bailey was a painting professor during my time as an art student at UA and I took one of her classes. I remember her very distinctly. She was sharp, sassy and undeniably talented. Her work wasn’t easy to look at and I think that was very much the point. She wasn’t easy … or afraid of being honest in her work and in life. 

She told us about designing the Salty Girl logo in her early graphic design days. To this day, I keep a Salty Girl label pinned at my desk…in my art class where I am an Art teacher myself, K-8 public school in New Jersey.  She made us get custom sheets of glass as our palettes for oil painting and she always told us how she liked the empty jars from her martini olives to clean her brushes. 

As an artist, I take these little pieces with me on the journey and I’m grateful to have had exposure to someone like Peggy Bailey Doogan. I can think of other teachers who were more likeable or supportive in general, but there was a motivating factor and daring that came from Bailey.  She was staring you down and not taking anyone’s excuses.  Challenge accepted, thank you, for being you, exactly as you were.  RIP and I’m so happy to see your life’s work recognized.

Chris Carls
MFA ’98, Studio Art
Art Director, Cirrus Visual, Tucson

Margaret Bailey “Peggy” Doogan is most famously known as the designer of the Morton Salt Girl, but I remember her as an incredible painter and teacher. She was on my Masters of Fine Arts panel and I had a few classes with her. I was her assistant in the Advanced Painting class my final year, and was also her intern for a summer at the Anderson Ranch Arts School in Snowmass, Colorado. I even worked around her house, helping with various projects. After graduation, I’d visit and take her out to lunch since she lived close to work.

I loved her straight-forward talk. She was a true badass, and one helluva strong lady that would take no $hit. But she always had a precious smile to share.

My favorite line is when she’d suggest painting for your favorite part: “If you did it once, you can do it again.”

She fought for us young and dumb artists. She dedicated her life to helping us grow. She inspired me to want to teach so many years ago.

Thank you, Peggy! Miss you!

Deb Kahn
BFA ’73
Commercial art, Florida

Bailey Doogan was a major influence in my career as I pursued a major in Commercial Art and a minor in Scientific Illustration.

The memory that stands out the most was the time she stopped to talk with me in the hallway. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the inspiration. It carried me through my lengthy career in Commercial Art.

I understand the title “Ways of Seeing.” I have become legally blind, but still practice my evolving art.

Tricia Amato
BFA ’86, Studio Art
MA ’07, Art History
tamato design, Phoenix

Peggy, as she was known then, was teaching graphic design and we were so intimidated by her! But she was an amazing teacher, and something she told me has continued to inspire me.

“There are no bad ideas,” she said. “It’s only the execution that can suck.”

So true!

I also remember her telling us that when she interviewed for her academic position, they asked her if she would start crying in front of the class. This was in the late ’60s.

Mark Fina
BFA ’84, Studio Art
Creative Director, New York City

As a graduate, enthusiastic designer, and artist, I can look back fondly and proudly on the inspiration that Professor Doogan provided for me. She challenged me and instilled in me a drive that propels me every day in my career and creative pursuits. She also ignited the idea of inspiring others, which has led me to become a professor myself. 

Thank you, Professor Doogan. You have given us all so much and enriched our artistic minds, for that we are forever grateful.

Send us your memories of Professor Emerita Doogan at artinfo@cfa.arizona.edu.

University of Arizona School of Art Professors Amy Kraehe and Ryan Shin have been elected to the National Art Education Association Distinguished Fellows class of 2026 — among only four members nationally chosen for next year’s prestigious award.

“Membership in NAEA Distinguished Fellows is a mark of excellence in art education research and is widely considered one of the highest honors in the field,” Kraehe said. “It serves as a reminder of the opportunities and mentorship I have been given, for which I am immensely grateful.”

Dr. Kraehe and Dr. Shin, part of the school’s Art & Visual Culture Education program, will be honored March 5 at the NAEA national conference in Chicago.

“This recognition not only celebrates my journey thus far,” Shin said, “but it also inspires me to continue advocating for excellence in art education.”

Kraehe, a national leader and researcher in the arts, culture and education, also was selected to serve a four-year term as a Trustee of the National Art Education Foundation. “We are confident that your experience and perspective will be a valuable addition to the Foundation and will contribute meaningly to advancing (our) mission,” said Chris E. Guenter, the foundation’s past chair, said about Kraehe.

She has 25 years of experience in universities, public schools and museums. She has been a part of the College of Fine Arts since 2018 and was named Associate Vice President for Organizational Excellence and Impact at Arizona Arts in 2025. She received the Excellence in Fundraising Award for her contributions to development and advancement at Arizona Arts and garnered the Women of Impact Award from the University of Arizona for driving discovery, interdisciplinary collaboration, community outcomes and the empowerment of others. 

Her writings, podcasts, public lectures and workshops illuminate how sociocultural, economic, and political contexts influence the development of professional identities and organizational capacity within educational and cultural institutions. Kraehe has published four books, and her work appears in the top research journals in her field. She has received numerous grants and professional honors, including the prestigious Manuel Barkan Memorial Award from the National Art Education Association.

Shin’s research focuses on Asian popular media and culture, Asian critical theory and decolonization, global civic engagement, and new media and visual culture. In 2025, he was elected as associate editor for “Studies in Art Education,” a prime national research journal in the field of art education. He will serve two years as associate editor, and automatically move to editor position of the journal in 2027.

He has co-edited several notable books, including The Intersectionality of Critical Identities in Art Education (InSEA, 2024). In 2021, he was honored as the USSEA Kenneth Marantz Distinguished Fellow. His scholarly articles have been published in renowned journals, and he has authored numerous book chapters and presented his work at both national and international conferences.

“We are thrilled that Professors Kraehe and Shin are receiving this fellowship,” said Professor Karen Zimmermann, interim director for the School of Art. “No one is more deserving of this honor than these two. Their significant contributions to the AVCE program at the University of Arizona and to Art Education nationally and internationally are incredible as mentors, researchers and scholars, teachers and colleagues. We are so lucky to have them as part of our community.”

• Dr. Amy Kraehe bio
• Dr. Ryan Shin bio
• National Art Education Association (NAEA)