New Faculty Positions for Four SAAH Faculty

Emmanuel Ortega is now Assistant Professor of Art History! He will also retain the title of the Marilynn Thoma Scholar in the Art of the Spanish Americas, which was established after a generous donation by the Thoma Foundation last year. Ortega holds a PhD in Art History from the University of New Mexico and has lectured nationally and internationally on the topics of images of autos-de-fe, nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novohispanic Franciscans martyr paintings. Springing from his research interests, Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States.

 

Now Assistant Professor of Museum and Exhibition Studies (MUSE), Lucy Mensah first came to MUSE from the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she worked as an assistant curator of post-1950 contemporary art. Mensah holds a Ph.D. in English and a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from Vanderbilt University, where she studied the intersection of spatial theory, gender, and African American literary/visual culture. Her current research explores critical black museology, the history of the exhibition gallery as a racialized and gendered space, and speculative curating practices. Mensah has held curatorial and research appointments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

 

Tiffany Funk is now Visiting Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts (IDEAS)! Funk is an artist, critical theorist, and researcher specializing in emerging media, computer art, video games, and performance art practices. She received her MFA and PhD from UIC and researches and develops work exploring both current and historical digital technological art practices, alternately taking the form of critical and conceptual writing, drawing, software, video, and installation. Funk is also the Director of Publications for the Video Game Art Gallery, and founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Video Game Art Reader.

 

Now a Clinical Assistant Professor of Art Education, William Estrada joined the Art Education program in 2019 and describes his art and teaching as a collaborative discourse of existing images, text, and politics that appoints the audience to critically re-examine public and private spaces. As a teacher, artist, and cultural worker Estrada reports, records, reveals, and amplifies experiences you find in academic books, school halls, teacher lounges, kitchen tables, barrios, college campuses, and in the conversations of close friends to engage in radical imagination. He received his MA in Art Education from SAIC and is currently engaging in collaborative work with the Mobilize Creative Collaborative, Chicago ACT Collective, and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative.