Three faculty appointments and two faculty searches

The University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design is pleased to announce the hiring of three new faculty members: Sangram Manjumdar (Painting + Drawing), Miriam Chusid (Japanese Art), and Meichun Liu (Industrial Design). Manjumdar and Chusid begin teaching in September 2021. Due to other commitments, Liu will start in September 2022. All are appointed as assistant professors.

Sangram Majumdar
Born in Kolkata, India, Sangram Majumdar has an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibition venues include Geary, New York; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York; Barbara Davis Gallery, Texas; and Asia Society Texas Center. Selected group exhibition venues include Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles; The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles; James Cohan Gallery, New York; and Come Together: Surviving Sandy, curated by Phong Bui, Brooklyn, New York. Selected awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in Painting; Purchase Award from the 2010 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts, American Academy of Arts and Letters; a MacDowell Fellowship; a residency at Yaddo; a Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Space Program Grant; and a Maryland Institute College of Art Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2019, Majumdar was inducted into the National Academy of Design. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, among others. Recent visiting critic and lecture venues include Boston University, Columbia University, Cranbrook School of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and The New York Studio School. Majumdar was a Professor of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 2003 to 2021.

Miriam Chusid
Miriam Chusid received her PhD from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2016. She specializes in premodern Japanese religious art and visual culture. Chusid’s interests include relationships between art, ritual, and text; the role of women in the production and reception of religious images; and the place of conservation in art historical inquiry. She is currently a J. Clawson Mills Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously, Chusid was a postdoctoral fellow and visiting lecturer at the Burke Center for Japanese Art at Columbia University and has also taught at Haverford College.

Meichun Liu
Meichun Liu is a PhD candidate in Design at North Carolina State University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and her master’s degree in Design from the University of Alberta in Canada. Liu has worked as a product designer for sixteen years and served as a design professor for six years. At Asia University in Taiwan, she held the positions of Associate Professor and Chair of the Creative Product Department. In 2010, she founded her design company Wolkeland Design. Liu has been the lead designer of several award-winning products, mostly IT products but also a number of biomedical devices and handicraft-inspired designs. Her current research focuses on the systemic design framework of adaptive design in a complex system. It adopts an agent-based approach, which is a bottom-up, computational method to study and tackle complex problems in order to achieve a user-adaptive system.

New faculty searches
The School is also excited to announce an opportunity for two faculty appointments in Photo/Media (Art) and Latin American Art (Art History). As per the University of Washington’s Diversity Blueprint, the institution prioritizes attracting and retaining a diverse faculty that reflects our diverse student population. We are the center for creative innovation and study at the University of Washington, one of the world’s leading public research institutions. The School invites applications from those who value original research, cutting edge technology, unique modes of artistic inquiry, and fresh approaches to pedagogy. Our focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and the development of new practices enhances both studio and classroom learning as well as fostering dynamic engagement and critical discourse.

Learn more about these faculty openings.