Faculty

Sabrina Raaf – Associate Professor and Program Director for New Media Arts

Sabrina Raaf, a Chicago-based artist, experiments in mechanized sculptural media and designs responsive environments and social spaces. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at the ZERO1 Biennial (2011, San Jose), Brandts Art Center (Denmark), Transitio_MX (Mexico City), Sala Parpalló (Spain), MejanLabs (Stockholm), Lawimore Projects (Seattle), the Edith-Russ-Site for Media Art (Germany), Stefan Stux Gallery (NYC), Ars Electronica (Linz), Museum Tinguely(Basel), Espace Landowski (Paris), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), and ISEA 2004 (Helsinki). She was the recipient of a Creative Capital Grant in Emerging Fields (2002) and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship (2005 &2001). Reviews of her work have appeared in Art in America, Contemporary, Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, Leonardo, The Washington Post, and New Art Examiner. She received an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Tiffany Funk – Visiting Lecturer and Academic Advisor

Tiffany Funk is an artist, educator, and art historian specializing in the history of computer art, creative coding, interactive performance, data visualization, and video games. She is co-founder and lecturer of the Interdisciplinary Education in the Arts program at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches courses on digital media history, theory, and production. She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Video Game Art Reader, a peer-reviewed journal for video game audiences and practitioners interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, and Associate Editor of Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus. She received an MFA in New Media Arts (2012) and PhD (2016) in Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Caleb Foss – Adjunct Faculty

Caleb Foss (they/them) combines a spectrum of old and new media devices with a focus on how their mechanics reflect and impact social and political structures. They earned an MFA in New Media Arts at UIC. They have shown work at film festivals, screenings, and galleries in Berlin, Germany; New York, NY; Pittsburgh, PA; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Los Angeles, CA; and Santiago, Chile.

Jon Chambers – Adjunct Faculty

Jon Chambers is an artist and educator based in Chicago where he teaches media literacy, media art histories, net art, new media art (software + hardware) and video. Chambers’ work responds to experiences of saturation, obsessions and often humorous contradictions that emerge from our relationships with technology, virtuality and remoteness. He’s particularly interested in how we negotiate the duality of our digital and physical lives within networked systems of consumerism, surveillance, identity and future histories. Endearing and uncanny feelings in the work urge us to consider the streamlined technological interfaces (both hardware and software) we encounter everyday and where those interactions start to break down. He has shown work nationally and internationally, in screening venues, galleries and online.

Jenna Boyles – Adjunct Faculty

Discarding physical material and leaving trails of digital information are an inevitable part of being human in the 21st century. Jenna Boyles works with textiles, circuitry, and found objects using craft based techniques and DIY approaches to address the subject of waste as it pertains to current political and environmental issues. She traces her relationship to accumulation back to growing up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania and investigates her own personal history with waste. Inspired by public trash and obsolete machines she is driven by a desire to collect and sort through both digital and physical refuse. Responding intuitively to shape, form, and color, Boyles employs spontaneous play and meticulous organization to articulate the ubiquity and resonance of unwanted things. Her practice includes research in electronic textiles, particularly DIY soft circuitry and thermochromic (heat sensitive) fabrics.

Jenna currently lives and works in Chicago where she is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Art and Technology Studies Department and adjunct assistant faculty at University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Art & Art History. She is a member of the experimental Chicago based collective Bad Fabric with Clare Brennan, Astro Escudero, Fran E. Gallagher, and Nicole Rinde.

Alan Perry – Adjunct Faculty

Alan Perry is a new media artist living in Chicago, Illinois, and working with creative coding, interactive electronics, 3D animation, and video. His work engages with ideas about philosophy, the history of technology, and artificial intelligence, often recontextualizing historical moments in a contemporary or speculative mode. A core concept in his work is the Anthropocene and its related concepts of Posthumanism and Transhumanism. Perry’s art practice explores the relationship between technology and humans, such as creativity, strategy, environmental impact, and orthodoxy. His earlier work examined the photographic medium throughout history, from Wet-Plate Collodion to glitch art. Perry’s work has been exhibited in SITE Gallery, LITHIUM Gallery, (both in Chicago, IL), Black Box Gallery (Portland, OR), Ice Cube Gallery (Denver, CO), Rendition Gallery, Hatton Gallery, Curfman Gallery, and Electronic Arts Gallery (all in Fort Collins, CO). He is currently an MFA (2019) student at the Art & Technology Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2013 he received his BFA in Photo Image Making from Colorado State University. In 2019 he received the Art, Science, & Culture Initiative Collaboration Grant offered by the University of Chicago.