MAAD Lecturers

Nick Briz
//Teaching "Internet Art I" in Autumn 2021, "Internet Art II" and "Collaborative Artware" in Winter 2022, and "Digitizing Human Rights" in Spring 2022.
Nick Briz is an internationally recognized new-media artist, educator and organizer. His work focuses on digital culture by investigating the promises and perils of living in an increasingly digital and networked world. He is an active participant in various online communities and conversations including glitch art, net art, remix culture, digital rights, Internet ecology and digital literacy. He's an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Creative Director of the digital agency Branger_Briz, a collective of artists, strategists, educators and programmers specializing in conceiving and developing custom innovative digital projects for a wide range of clients. Check out his website here.

Ilana Emmett
//Teaching "Television in an Age of Change" in Winter 2022. 
Ilana Emmett is currently working on her dissertation on the aesthetics of American daytime soap operas on radio and television from 1930 to today, with a focus on sound aesthetics. Additional research addresses the history of television programming for deaf audiences. Research interests include: sound studies, disability studies, women’s popular media, teen media, and religion and media. She has presented her work at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Console-ing Passions. She has a B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in the U.K. She has also worked in film and television production.

Ian Bryce Jones
//Teaching "Digital Storytelling" in Winter 2022 and "Comparative Media Poetics: Horror" in Spring 2022.
Ian writes and teaches in the areas of new media, cinema, and the arts, across a breadth of levels and specialities. He has taught film and videogame analysis to college students and video production to high school students, worked as a video editor, curated screenings, organized conferences, secured grant funding for educational games, and published criticism. In addition to his current teaching at DePaul University and the University of Chicago, he also serves as the grants administer for Chicago's Storycatchers Theatre.

Takashi Shallow
//Teaching "Video Game Music Production and Sound Design" in Spring 2022.
Takashi Shallow’s (he/they) experiments intersect visual art with new media and performance. He completed a BA in Fashion Design at Dominican University then an MFA at the University of Chicago where his experience as a teaching assistant for Theaster Gates inspired new trajectories for Shallow’s material gathering process. He teaches art and music at the University of Chicago and is a board member of the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society. Dazed Digital includes him in the article 10 of the best Chicago artists right now and The Arts Club of Chicago has named him a Visual Arts Fellow. Find his work here.

Crystal Beiersdorfer
//Teaching "Body and the Digital" in Spring 2022.
Crystal is a digital artist whose work exams digital culture and how the digitized world promotes alterations to identity, body, and the psyche. Through a femme perspective, her art showcases how digital culture influences and controls concepts of the ideal femme figure and how pervasive technology has become in our daily lives. Her work also scrutinizes media itself through the use of glitching, pixelization, and other digital manipulation methods, making viewers question the influence that technology has over their personal beliefs and daily routines. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Crystal is a recent graduate from The University of Chicago with my MFA from the Department of Visuals Arts. She currently reside in Chicago, IL and is a 2021 Visual Arts Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago. Check out her website here.

Cameron Mankin
//Teaching "Machine Learning at the Archive" in Winter 2022 and "Digital Art and Fabrication" in Spring 2022. 
Cameron Mankin makes prints, artist's books, and sculptural installations that investigate the role of reason and rhetoric in the arrangement of public space and personal identity. Working primarily from found archives (news site banner images, apartment floor plans, and grainy security camera footage), he employs traditional print and bookmaking techniques to approache delicate systemic problems with a tongue-in-cheek rigor. The material properties of paper and ink set measurements and catalogs to collapse under their own unwieldy weight. The resulting projects vibrate between love letter and biting rebuttal - both addressed to vernacular image-making that goes unquestioned in our day to day lives. Mankin received his BA in Studio Art (Printmaking) from the University of Virginia in 2016 and his MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020. He lives and works out of Chicago, IL. His website is here.