Visual Arts & Design

We study and live in the homeland of the Wabanaki, the People of the Dawn. We extend our respect and gratitude to the many Indigenous people and their ancestors whose rich histories and vibrant communities include the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe, and Penobscot Nation.  We aim to help ensure that they are not forgotten and acknowledge relationships and claims to this area that are maintained to the present day by these people and communities, whether recognized by federal or state governments or living unseen in plain sight and throughout the world.

Before COA
Catherine taught at McGill University, University of New Mexico, University College London, Kent Institute of Art and Design, and New Mexico Highlands University. She is a Master Printmaker of Intaglio and Relief and Founder of Hexenspuk Press, New Mexico.

Personal Websites

http://www.historiesdrawingsprints.com/

Course Areas

art history, printmaking, drawing, philosophy, visual and critical theory

• Ph.D. Art History, University of London
• M.Phil. History of Art, University College London
• M.A. History of Art, University of New Mexico
• B.F.A. University of Kansas

Catherine is an artist, art historian, writer and devoted teacher. She embodies our ideals for the Allan Stone Chair as “an art historian with a studio practice, an established body of work, and a track record of teaching excellence.”

Catherine comes to us with a rich knowledge of Art from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Romanticism and critical theory; print culture in the transnational fields of science and technology; and, Contemporary Art.  She is a painter and is a Master Printer of Intaglio. 

Throughout her career as an artist and scholar, Catherine has demonstrated a commitment to developing, piloting, and participating in efforts to bring a wider range of human ecological awareness and action in the communities where she has taught. 

During time as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Catherine joined in the Sanctuary Movement, working to stem the restrictive immigration policies that targeted Central American asylum seekers.  She participated in various actions of civil disobedience including ones to protest the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) to store transuranic radioactive waste at Carlsbad, New Mexico. 

Before leaving New Mexico to teach and study abroad, Catherine served for 12 years in the El Pueblo Fire Department.  Trained as an arson investigator and wildland firefighter, she worked in small villages, on public lands, and led an annual Head Start workshop for children to give them the tools needed to educate their own families about fire prevention and safety.

Catherine co-founded Los Amigos del Rio, a public advocacy group formed to protect the Upper Pecos River Valley from a proposed uranium and thorium processing facility on its banks.  She served as Board President of the Theater Residency Project founded by Cookie Jordan in Santa Fe and co-produced Left-Handed, a play performed in secondary schools to educate faculty and students about the variability of sexual orientation and gender identity in youth populations.  

Since arriving on Mount Desert Island in 2010, she has chosen to document its biotic diversity through her art.  The range of experiences in political, social, cultural, and natural worlds honed her eye and her heart as an artist, scholar, and activist. 

A recipient of various grants and fellowships, Catherine is currently working on a book related to German Romanticism and Mining Practices.

Selected Publications:

‘Speleological Interiority – The Mindfulness of a Spelunking Anatomist,’ in Discovering the Human Life Science and the Arts in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Ralf Haekel, Sabine Blackmore (Hg.), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, 2013).

‘Painted Nature -19th century landscape,’ Encyclopedia of World History, The Age of Revolutions, 1750-1914, Ed. James Overfield, (Oxford and Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO), 2012.

I know the Voices Dying with a Dying Fall, Exhibition Catalogue Essay for artist Robin Ward, Published by Omphalos Press, San Francisco, 2011.

‘Theory of the Ridiculous: Max Beckmann, Jean Paul, and Dostoevsky’s Donkey,’ Art History, Vol. 33, Issue 3, 2010.

‘Emanation and Return: Archive as Liberator,’ Afterimage: a journal of media arts and cultural criticism, vol. 35, no. 3, (November, 2008).

‘Notes on an Indulgence,’ Vertigo Magazine, volume 3, no. 6 (Summer 2007).

‘Retrieval and Transmittal in a Fictive Photographic Experience,’ in Johnson and the 33 Confessors, Los Angeles and London, 2007.

Before COA

Before arriving at COA, Melissa spent close to a decade in Los Angeles. She taught at CalArts, Whittier College, Queens College, Cal State LA, and LACHSA. Throughout her career, Melissa has made commissioned animation for documentaries, specializing in handmade animation for films addressing social issues or scientific topics. Melissa also creates independent experimental nonfiction animations, primarily working with hand-drawn palimpsest and stop motion techniques. From 2015-2016, Melissa worked as an animation artist at Dusty Studio in New York City.

For the past several years, Melissa’s animation practice has included working with antique magic lantern projectors. As a lanternist, she creates contemporary expanded animation performances rooted in the history of traditional magic lantern phantasmagoria and scientific lantern lectures. Melissa specializes in creating handmade animated slides based on historic designs. Her performances include experimental documentaries, collaborations with musicians, and phantasmagoria revivals. She spent the majority of 2023-2024 touring/creating magic lantern shows, as well as teaching magic lantern workshops.

Course Areas

animation, film/video

Personal Website

www.melissaferrari.com

• MFA, Experimental Animation, California Institute of the Arts (2019)
• BA, Philosophy, Tufts University (2015)
• BFA, Studio Art, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2015)

Melissa is an experimental animator, nonfiction filmmaker, and magic lanternist who seeks to acquaint folklores of the past with contemporary culture. In exposing peripheral histories, she aims to unveil the wonder that lies in the shadow of nonfiction, rather than fiction. Her research-based practice engages with the mythification of science and pseudoscience, the preternatural, and histories of phantasmagoria and documentary. Her most recent body of films/performances examined social issues reflected in the culture of cryptozoology.

Melissa’s research focuses on questions of ethics, veracity, and research methodologies in the production of animated documentaries. Her practice as a magic lanternist involves research into various histories of proto-cinematic animation, slide-making, and production techniques.

Melissa is a Vice President of the Magic Lantern Society of the US & Canada and a member of the Society for Animation Studies.

Melissa’s films and magic lantern performances have been shown internationally in venues such as The Exploratorium, UnionDocs, Hauser & Wirth LA, Hot Docs, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Baltic Analog Lab, Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Philosophical Research Society, and the Harvard History of Science Dept.

Melissa’s commissioned documentary animations have screened on PBS, the BBC, CNN, The New York Times Op-Docs, The MoMA, Nautilus, & TED on Broadway.

Melissa was a 2024 Contributing Artist at the Philosophical Research Society in LA and 2024 Project Space Resident at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. In 2022-2023, she was an Artist in Residence at the Camera Obscura Arts Lab in Santa Monica, CA, the Larry Spring Museum of Common Sense Physics in Fort Bragg, CA, and the REDCAT NOW Festival Residency in LA.

Before COA

I’ve been a working artist since c. 2007, staging exhibitions and performances as both an individual artist and collective member (The Soil Factory, Miss Rockaway Armada, KCHUNG Radio, Monday Nite Weirdos).

• Teaching Associate, UC Irvine, Irvine CA (2017-2019)
• 
  Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Wells College, Ithaca, NY (2021–24)
• 
  Visiting Critic, Art Department, Cornell University, Ithaca NY (2025)

Website

www.aialeggio.net

Course Areas

ceramics, sculpture, mixed media, performance art

• MFA, Studio Art with Graduate Emphasis in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine (2019)
  
• Natural Building Certificate, Yestermorrow Design/Build School (2012)
• 
  BA, Studio Art (Ceramics, Printmaking), East Asian Studies, Oberlin College (2005)
  
• Studio Art Certificate, Kansai Gaidai University (Ceramics), Hirakata-shi, Japan (2004)
  

My artwork and teaching practice are intimately linked. Working in sculpture, ceramics, performance, drawing, text, and media to explore overlaps between ecology, social protocol, and narrative structure, I’m exploring the perception of change that occurs as each generation redefines for itself what is considered “natural” or “normal.” Marine fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined the term shifting baselines syndrome for this phenomenon in order to describe the difficulty of using individual human perception of change as the basis for conservation policy. I extend this idea as a poetic and ethical framework for art-making; it leads me to social and class analysis as well as absurdist humor. Recurring material themes include liminality, fragility, improvisation, and play; rupture and lightly bounded space; polish addressed to a provisional gesture; joyful queering of a matter or a tactic; discarded objects and refuse; collectivism as professional practice.

I love interdisciplinary collaboration, site-specific research, material play, and spending as much time as possible outside.

• “Fun That Is Or Isn’t Funny.” Unserious Ecocriticism: Humor, Wit, Play, and Environmental Destruction in North American Contemporary Art & Visual Culture. Ed. Maria Lux, Jessica Landau. Amherst College Press. (2026)
• Landing (Exhibition Catalog). Wells College Press. (2024)
• Disappearing Birds of North America. Ed. Jen Delos Reyes. (2023)
• “The Second Field.” The New Farmers Almanac, Vol VI: Adjustments and Accommodations. Greenhorns Press. (2022)
• “CRANE & MAN.” Hold Our Breath 2040: Writers and Artists Reimagine Forestation. Ed. Heidi Staples. University of Alabama. (2021)
• “Themselves on their own terms.” Antiquated Future, Leaf Litter #8. (2020)
• “Featured Artist.” Los Angeles Review of Books, Summer #7. (2015)
• “The Van Dies.” Nowhere Magazine, June Issue. (2015)
• “Here ́s The Link For Editable Sharing.” PHONEBOOK 4, Threewalls Gallery w/ Common Field. (2015)
• “The Game of the Future.” INCITE! Journal of Experimental Media, BLOCKBUSTER Issue #5. (2014)

Born in Canada, Brook grew up in Burlington, VT (and considers Northern New England home). He cherishes walking, reading, reading while walking, writing, drawing landscapes, and imagining and designing ecologically responsive places.

Before COA

Brook worked at Behnisch & Partner Architects of Stuttgart, Germany from 1993 to 1996, where he served as co-project leader for the design of the National Institute for Forestry and Nature Research (IBN) in Wageningen, the Netherlands, a European Union pilot project for environmentally friendly building. With colleagues from Germany, he helped establish Blackbird Architects, an award winning, Santa-Barbara based firm (still going strong). Having always dreamed of a future in teaching, Brook entered the academy as professor of architecture at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo (2000-2004) before moving on to the University of Oregon (2004-2019). At Oregon, he also served as core faculty member of the Environmental Studies program and director of the graduate certificate in Ecological Design. Prior to coming to CoA, Brook served as Dean of the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2019-2023).

Course Areas

Architecture, Ecological Design, Water, Urban Studies, Environmental Studies

• Master of Architecture, University of Oregon
• Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies, Brown University

Brook’s research and practice focus on urban ecological design strategies that foreground water as connective medium between landscapes and buildings. He has worked on systems-based, sustainability-focused projects in the US, Tanzania, Egypt and the Madeira Islands. His current book project, Regrowth Architecture: Living Systems for Urban Placemaking, speaks to the tremendous potencies of ecological design as it transitions from household or community-scale interventions in places of affluence and relatively high environmental quality to significantly altered, densely populated settings of poverty, pollution, and possibility.

Brook is part of the core team of Tahayyuz, a Cairo-based, cross-disciplinary para-academic platform focused on community development and conservation of heritage assets in medieval Islamic Cairo’s al-Khalifa neighborhood (part of a UNESCO world heritage site). Al-Khalifa and neighboring communities confront food insecurity, failing infrastructure, climate change impacts, and other challenges. The platform engages these communities through the power of the arts, urban and ecological design, conservation, and the social sciences.

Brook serves on the board of Salmon-Safe, a Portland, Oregon based nonprofit that works to keep urban and agricultural watersheds in the Pacific Northwest clean enough for native salmon to spawn and thrive. He helped develop Salmon-Safe’s Urban Development certification standards.

Brook is author of two books: Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures (University of Texas Press, 2022), American Association of Publishers PROSE award finalist for architecture and urban planning, and Ecology and the Architectural Imagination (Routledge, 2014)

Additional and select writings include:

“al-Khalifa Environment and Heritage Park: Redesigning Flows, Refurnishing Community Infrastructures,”Society of Architectural Historians 76^th Annual International Conference Proceedings, Montreal, Quebec, 2023

“New Horizons for Sustainable Architecture: Hydro-Logical Design for the Ecologically Responsive City,” Nature + Culture (Hemholz Centre for Environmental Research), Volume 13, No. 2, 2018

“Blue Architecture (The City and the Wild in Concentrate),” Environmental Philosophy Special Issue in Memory of W.S.K. “Scott” Cameron, Volume 15, No. 1, 2018, 59-75

“Thinking in Building/Environment Systems,” Opening plenary presentation for the Architectural Research Centers Consortium Conference “Architecture of Complexity: Design, Systems, Society and Environment,” Salt Lake City, June 2017

“A Machine is a Watershed for Living In (Reconstituting Architectural Horizons),” The Pluralist: Official Journal of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Volume 2, No. 1, 2016

“Metaphor, Environmental Receptivity and Architectural Design,” in Gary Backhaus and John Murungi, eds., Symbolic Landscapes. New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2009

Book review of Paul Memmott’s “Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia,” for Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Volume 15/2008

“Continuity of Singularities: Architecture, Ecology and the Aesthetics of Restorative Orders,” Environmental Philosophy: Special Double Issue: Environmental Aesthetics and Ecological Restoration, Volume IV, Issues I, II, Fall, Spring 2007

Presentations

Blue Architecture: Living Imaginaries for Urban Placemaking, University of Arizona School of Architecture 2023-24 Lecture Series, November 6, 2023

Invited Keynote Lecturer, Blue Architecture, PG&E Water Conservation Showcase, San Ramon, CA, June 15, 2023

Invited Keynote Lecturer, Hydro-Logical Architecture: Unprecedented Crisis = Unparalleled Design Opportunity, American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) National Forum, Seattle, WA, December 29, 2018

Architecture as Ecological Infrastructure: Hydro-Logical Design for the 21^st Century City, Lineage Lecture Series hosted by the American Institute of Architects Southern Arizona Chapter and the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, Tucson, AZ, March 19, 2018

Watershed Architectures and Opportunistic Ecologies, University of Texas School of Architecture Fall Lecture Series, Austin, TX, November 16, 2016

Reconstituting Architectural Horizons, Invited Coss Dialogues Keynote Speaker, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) Annual Meeting, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI, March 6, 2015

A Machine is a Watershed for Living In, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design) “Jour-Fixe” Lecture Series, Stuttgart, Germany, January 20, 2015

Before COA

I lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I moved to join the MFA in Studio Art program at UNC Greensboro. During the two years of my studies, the way I painted changed from working observationally to working from my imagination. My journey as a painter began when I took an introductory oil painting class at Fleisher Art Memorial, a community art center in Philadelphia. This was a major shift from molecular and cell biology, which is what I focused on during and after my undergraduate studies, but science is also a speculative process like painting and my past experience continues to inform my work today. I spent my childhood in Hamburg, Germany and Bangalore, India, before moving to Philadelphia. Before Greensboro, I was in Bangalore, and my time in the city—the architecture, the people, the stories—continues to be a strong presence in my work.

Course Areas

Drawing, Painting, Studio Art

Personal Website

neerajsebastian.com

• MFA, Studio Art, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2022
• BS, Biological Sciences, Drexel University, 2011

The images in my work are informed by personal experiences, questions about the role of the individual in the context of community and society, myths and dreams. I consider questions of inclusion and exclusion: young men who find themselves without a place in the world and, feeling a need to assert themselves, embark on self-destructive paths; I draw from myths, in particular creation stories, in which a violent act often precipitates the reemergence of life. The couple-form, a man and a woman, recurs in my work; in these paintings I portray both the closeness and the distance that exists between people who are otherwise completely intimate. The settings for my work range from mythological dream-spaces to domestic spaces. My paintings are often dense with paint and also hold the history of their own making, with exploratory marks and traces of earlier directions, embedded in the surface of the finished paintings.

2023: A Room with a View, Vardan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Constellations (with Jill Beth Hannes), Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC

2022: Presence: North Carolina Figurative Artists, Greenhill Center for NC Art, Greensboro, NC; Annual Juried Exhibition, First Street Gallery, New York City, NY, Juror: Clintel Steed; UNCG MFA Thesis Exhibition, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Belonging and Distance (MFA Thesis Exhibition), Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC (solo exhibition)

2021: 13th Annual Juried Exhibition, Prince Street Gallery, New York City, NY, Juror: Sangram Majumdar; Nothing to Lose: Drawing as a Speculative Process, Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC

2020: Fumes: Cruising, Coasting, Refueling, Greensboro Project Space, Greensboro, NC

2018: Powercut, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

2016: 118th Annual Student Exhibition, Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA

Website

http://www.joshwiner.com/

Course Areas

photography

• BA, Human Ecology, College of the Atlantic
  
• MFA, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Josh Winer is a photographer and teacher who lives and works on Mount Desert Island, Maine. He teaches at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine and lives nearby. He holds an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has shown nationally. Josh also works as a commercial photographer with extensive experience and a portfolio that includes event, product and promotional work.