Faculty

Melina Ausikaitis is a multidisciplinary artist and musician from Chicago. She has exhibited and performed all over the country and traveled the world playing in her band Joan of Arc. She is as much an inventor/historian as an artist. Check out her drawings, videos, sculptures, garments and Halloween costumes at melinaausikaitis.com

Kayce is an artist educator, designer and mom. She studied Studio Art (and music, too!) at Florida State University, and earned her MFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee. Her practice is varied, working across media and collaborating with artists, writers, musicians, and community members to explore personal stories, histories, places, and art experience outside of institutional spaces. Kayce has over 15 years experience as an arts and design educator and is honored to spend her days with the amazing young people at The Chicago High School for the Arts! In all creative pursuits – as teacher, collaborator, maker – Kayce sees art as a place to inspire curiosity and critical literacy.

Whitney Bradshaw is an artist, educator, curator, social worker and mother. Bradshaw has been the chair of the visual art conservatory at ChiArts (the Chicago High School for the Arts) since fall of 2012. She was formerly the assistant curator of the renowned LaSalle Bank Photography Collection and the curator of photography for the Bank of America Collection. As a curator, she developed more than 40 exhibitions, which have been loaned to museums throughout the United States, Central and South America, Europe and Asia. While curating for 13 years, Bradshaw was an adjunct professor in the photography department at Columbia College Chicago where she taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in theory and criticism, color photography, senior seminar, etc. She received an MFA in photography in 2001. In 2003, she had a solo exhibition of herScar series at the International Museum of Surgical Science. After focusing many years on parenting, curating, and teaching Bradshaw is back in the studio and deeply invested in her work. In the Fall of 2018 Bradshaw had a solo exhibition of her Outcry project at the DePaul Art Museum September-December. This exhibition was written about in the Chicago Tribune and her process for this social practice project was illustrated on a segment for public TV, WTTW’s, Chicago Tonight. She also had a solo show of Outcry at the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University and at The Show Gallery in the Twin Cities, both in 2019. The latter was reviewed on MPR’s Art Hounds and in the Star Tribune. Her photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the DePaul Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, several private collectors, and have been published and/or reviewed in the New York Times, Columbia College’s 6×6 series, Time Out New York, New City, the MCA Chicago catalog for The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965-Now, and the Chicago Tribune. In 1991 Bradshaw attained a BA in Sociology with a minor in Women’s Studies from Eastern Illinois, a program she spearheaded and was one of the first to graduate with a degree in. She also worked in various capacities as a social worker across the city of Chicago. In 2001 she was named one of the top 10 MFA candidates and awarded the College Art Association Regional MFA Exhibition at UIC’s Gallery 400. Some of her artwork can be viewed at whitneybradshaw.com

Jeanne Donegan is an image based artist and educator living in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Connecticut, her home state, and her MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. In 2016/2017 she held an artist residency at Lillstreet Art Center, where she is now the Director of the Photography Department and runs a photographic artist lecture series titled, Discourse. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Hyde Park Art Center and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL; The Pitch Project in Milwaukee, WI; The Madison Public Library in Madison, WI; and Honolulu Art Museum School in Honolulu, HI. She has been interviewed by various online and print publications such as Sixty Inches From Center, Wave-pool, Fotographia, Facets Features, and Art Ascent: Art & Literature Journal. Her experimental film works have screened in the Chicago Underground Film Festival at Logan Theater and Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 3, which premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2017.

Megan Kalmes is an artist and educator living and working in Chicago. Megan works traditionally with oil on canvas. Her paintings are figurative and often depict a feminine protagonist entranced within her own psyche – a sort of psychological landscape. Megan loves art history and embraces the fundamentals of painting and drawing. She believes that figuration can be more than a reflection of the self or of society; transcending beyond mere representation to a place of greater sensitivity and call upon the nature of being. The act of self-reviewing is present in Megan’s personal work and in her teaching. Her painting practice informs her communication with students providing enrichment and development from a place of emotional investment. Megan has taught with the Early College Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Clarke University in Dubuque, Iowa. Megan also has experience with after-school programming working with vulnerable and at-risk youth groups. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and Minor in Art History from Clarke University. Megan also holds Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio and an MFA in Painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Chris Lin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, working in media including films, books, puppetry, music, and installation. Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, he moved to British Columbia, Canada and received his BFA with honor from University of Victoria in 2005. After relocating to Chicago, Mr. Lin pursued an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated in 2008. His exhibition history includes Contemporary Art Workshop, Eel Space, and OP Shop in Chicago, Verge Art Fair in New York, Deluge Contemporary Art and 50/50 Arts Collective in Victoria, BC, and Atlantic Centre for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, FL. His visual art and short stories has been published in Fiction At Work and Balliwik. Mr. Lin is the co-founder and collaborative director at Good Stuff House, a performance and publishing art collaborative, and the founding member and ukulele player of the folk-thrash-hop duo Hannis Pannis. www.cardboardish.com

Kera MacKenzie is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in film, video, live broadcast and installation. Her works have explored radical subjectivities, the mechanisms of empathy, suspense, liveness, and control. She has screened and exhibited at spaces including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives and UnionDocs (New York City), the MassArt Film Society (Boston), Microlights (Milwaukee), Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, La lumière collective (Montreal), Cellular Cinema (Minneapolis), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Nightingale, and Chicago Underground Film Festival (all Chicago). Kera has been an artist in residence at The Luminary (St. Louis), ACRE (Wisconsin), Culturia (Berlin), and most recently at Signal Culture (Owego, NY). She received her MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013. Additionally, Kera is a Founding Co-Director of ACRE TV, an artist-made live-streaming television network (ACRETV.org), and an educator.

A son of several places, Devin Mawdsley is proud to call Chicago home. He is a painter and a drawer who received his B.A. at the College of William and Mary in Chinese and an M.F.A in Studio Painting from Indiana University. He has experience in the visual arts, including drawing and digital photography, as well as language instruction, both Chinese and English. His recent exhibition history includes the Momenta Art Gallery in New York, Buy Art Not People in Chicago, as well as the Department of State, Art in Embassies program (Suva). You can find his work at www.devinmawdsley.com/.

Devin Mays holds a B.B.A in International Business and Marketing from Howard University. After receiving his degree, he worked in advertising developing brand strategies and commercials for the better part of a decade. He returned to school to pursue an M.F.A in studio practice from the University of Chicago where he graduated in 2016. There he began an auto-ethnographic exploration of material and memory, which he often refers to as gestures. Since then he has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Lowe Art Museum, University of Florida; Nahmad Projects, London; NADA Miami, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Regards Chicago and collaborated with the Rebuild Foundation as a designer and contributor for exhibitions and publications. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. http://regardsgallery.com/artists/devin-mays/

Rebecca Memoli is a Chicago based photographer and curator.  She received her BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute in 2006 and soon after co-founded The Blood Dumpster Artist Collective in Brooklyn, NY. As a curator, Memoli has organized several group exhibitions and art happenings in New York, Kansas City and Chicago.  Her work has been shown in group art exhibitions throughout the US and in Chile.  She has had three solo exhibitions including one at the New York Public Library, Mulberry Branch. In 2017 Memoli received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College and received the Albert P. Weisman Award for her ongoing curatorial project, The Feeling is Mutual.  She currently works as a Teaching Artist at Lillstreet Art Center and Chicago Public School’s Advanced Art Program at Gallery 37.  Her gallery reviews can be read on the New Art Examiner website.

BFA, 2011, School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL; MFA, 2016, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Exhibitions: NURTUREart Gallery, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Parson Paris Gallery, Paris; VideoFag, Toronto; Defibrillator, Chicago; Enemy, Chicago

Travis Rothe is a visual designer, creative director, and human-centered design strategist. Travis studied Graphic Design and French Language + Culture at Northern Kentucky University, earned a BFA in Visual Communications from The Illinois Institute of Art–Chicago, and received an MDM (Master of Design Methods) from the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. Travis has worked as a creative director and visual designer in various industries and with a variety of clients including: performing arts organizations, museums and foundations, publishing, media, political/social justice campaigns, and higher education. He has received numerous awards for design excellence in magazine design, branding, and marketing communications, including an AZBEE award for best magazine redesign. Travis encourages visual communication students to consider design not only as a means for communicating the now, but also as a tool for introducing the new. www.travisrothe.com

Nick Wylie is an artist, administrator, and educator based in Chicago. He currently serves as Managing Director for Public Media Institute, where he helps takes care of a nonprofit art center (Co-Prosperity Sphere), a radio station (Lumpen Radio), and magazine publisher (Lumpen). Wylie received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, did post-baccalaureate work in Art History at Northwestern University, and went to the University of Illinois at Chicago for his MFA. In 2006 he co-founded Harold Arts, a Chicago-based non-profit arts organization with a residency in Ohio, and was its co-director until early 2010. He then co-founded ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), a 501(c)3 with residency in rural Wisconsin and an extensive exhibition program in Chicago. Wylie served as co-director of ACRE until moving to San Francisco and joining its Board of Directors in 2015. From 2015-18 he served as Associate Director Southern Exposure, a nonprofit, artist-run gallery, and art education space in San Francisco, and before that was from 2012-2015 the Founding Artistic Director at Mana Contemporary Chicago, a large art center in the Pilsen neighborhood. He has taught studio art and arts administration courses at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of St Francis. Wylie’s art practice, which incorporates video technology, performance, drawing, and queer futurity, has haunted galleries in Chicago and beyond for the past fifteen years. His work currently focuses on Elmer Ellsworth, a dandy abolitionist and lover of Lincoln, who was first to die in the Civil War after taking down a giant confederate flag flying in Alexandria VA. Mr. Wylie’s writings and projects can be found on publicmediainstitute.com