Ellen McMahon
Professor, Art
Professor, Applied Intercultural Arts Research - GIDP
Professor, Social / Cultural / Critical Theory - GIDP
MFA - Vermont College, MS - University of Arizona
McMahon’s work addresses a diversity of topics, including the cultural construction of motherhood, the effects of climate change on regional water and forest ecosystems, and the intersection of memory, time, and place. Her collaborations with environmental scientists have been recognized with a Fulbright Research Grant and invitation to serve as a delegate to the World Design Congress (ICOGRADA) in Cuba.
McMahon initiated and directed a collaborative faculty research project focused on regional water, which included 29 participants from students and faculty in art, design, architecture, humanities, and the natural and social sciences, as well as city and regional water managers. The resulting book Ground|Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River, art directed and co-edited by McMahon and published by Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, received national and international design awards and has been collected by over 40 public institutions worldwide.
McMahon’s visual art has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions and her artist books, No New Work, Alice’s Idea, and A is for Autonomy: Psycho-visceral Alphabet Cards are housed in over 50 public collections. McMahon’s motherhood work was recently included in BOOBS: Fe:male Bodies in Pictorial History, edited by Kothe, Juliet, von Stosch, Natanja, DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin, 2023. Her writing ranges from essays and op-eds about design (MIT Press, Bloomsbury, Huffington Post, Pacific Standard), to technical papers about scientific illustration (ECHOSPERE), and the role of art in promoting environmental justice (NATURE), to memoir (Seven Stories Press, University of Arizona Press, and Demeter Press.)
McMahon came to the University of Arizona to pursue a master’s degree in Scientific Illustration in 1980. She has served as Professor in the School of Art since 1990 and as the inaugural Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts since 2019. In this role McMahon has led an initiative to integrate arts practices into the university research ecosystem, as a critical means of knowledge creation. The Integrative Arts Research Initiative has received major support from the Arizona Institute of Resilience and the central research office to fund meta-, multi- and inter-disciplinary College of Fine Arts faculty-led projects.
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