20 new staff & faculty members

The Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is pleased to welcome new faculty and staff members who have joined our community this fall. The new faculty and staff represent the multi-disciplinary education MICA prides itself on offering its students as part of its mission to empower students to forge creative, purposeful lives and careers in a diverse and changing world. New faculty additions have expanded MICA’s expertise in graphic design, game design, painting, ceramics and product design.

Among the new faculty is Amy Sherald, who is joining the College’s Painting faculty as a McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair. In 2016, Sherald was the first woman to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition grand prize. Her work is in the public collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, among many others.

Also holding the McMillan/Stewart Endowed Chair is Kira Nam Greene, a native of Seoul, Korea, who is now based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University. Greene explores female sexuality, desire and control through lush still-life paintings of food, surrounded by complex patterns and abstract design. Her work has shown at venues including Brown University and Bronx Museum of Art.

Interim director of the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, New York-based Stephen Ellis is part of a group of American artists who rebelled against self-referential formalism and returned abstraction to a more active engagement with the world. His work is in collections including The Brooklyn Museum and The Ashmolean Museum, and he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.

Joining MICA as inaugural chair of the new Product Design program, Leslie Speer is a noted designer and educator with a passion for helping people use design to improve their world and others’ lives. For the last 20 years she has educated students, most recently as a professor in industrial design at San José State University and, before that, as professor and assistant chair at the California College of the Arts. She emphasizes innovative interdisciplinary courses and projects, often with students or user populations in emerging markets like as Africa, Central America and China. She received the prestigious Educator of the Year award from the Industrial Designers Society of America in 2009.

Jerome Harris holds an MFA in graphic design from Yale University. After his graduation, he was an active designer in the greater New Haven area, working for Yale and with local arts nonprofit Artspace. He designed the identity for the Black Pulp! exhibition, which examines evolving perspectives of Black identity in American culture and history from 1912 to 2016, curated by William Villalongo and Mark Gibson.

Victoria Jang is a ceramic mixed media artist from San Francisco and the recipient of the 2017–18 AICAD teaching fellowship. Jang earned her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and received the Headlands Center for the Arts Fellowship, the Retired Professor’s Award by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, and Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Arts Award.

See the full list, with links for more information about each faculty member. 

About MICA
Founded in 1826, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is the oldest continuously degree-granting college of art and design in the nation. The College enrolls nearly 3,500 undergraduate, graduate and continuing studies students from 49 states and 65 countries in fine arts, design, electronic media, art education, liberal arts, and professional studies degree and non-credit programs. With art and design programs ranked in the top 10 by U.S. News and World Report, MICA is pioneering interdisciplinary approaches to innovation, research, and community and social engagement. Alumni and programming reach around the globe, even as MICA remains a cultural cornerstone in the Baltimore/Washington region, hosting hundreds of exhibitions and events annually by students, faculty and other established artists.

For more information about MICA, click here.