Art Faculty and Staff

Bio

Maria Farhadi is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and educator exploring the intersections of interactive media, UX/UI design, and emerging technologies. She holds an MFA in Digital Media Design from the University of Connecticut and a BFA in Visual Communication. Her work integrates design, research, and technology to address contemporary human-centered challenges, with a particular focus on healthcare, advocacy, and accessibility.

Maria began her creative journey in animation and transitioned into graphic design, eventually finding her passion in interactive and digital storytelling. Her recent projects, such as MindMaze, a cognitive support tool for individuals with memory impairment, demonstrate her commitment to inclusive design and digital innovation. Her work has been recognized with multiple honors, including a Silver and Excellence Award at the 48th Annual CADC Awards and selection for Get Seeded Pitch Night by CCEI.

In addition to her design practice, Maria is interested in using graphic communication as a tool for advocacy, particularly in the areas of human rights and women's rights. She collaborated with UConn Human Rights Institute as a designer and contributed to exhibitions and events promoting social justice through the arts for several years.

Website: https://www.mayfarhadi.com/

Bio

Julian Francolino is energized by teaching students how their lives and individual studio practices intersect with larger histories of art, spanning time periods, regions, and cultures. As a visual studies scholar and art historian, his research hinges on concepts and discussions of size, scale, and monumentality within visual cultures, especially in the 20th century. A practicing artist, Dr. Francolino enjoys the messy tasks of dovetailing his scholarly research with artistic production, investigating visions of dimension, scale, and monumentality within landscapes and built environments. Acknowledging the act of picturing a site and ecological environment as an entry point into preexisting and fraught histories of human fabrication, his more recent small scale landscape paintings usually address large scale human interventions in and manipulations of land, particularly those involving human-made water systems (canals, aqueducts, reservoirs, etc.). When he is not teaching or researching, you might find him plein air painting in some field, making a mess in his kitchen, or sitting on his porch.

Research Interests

Modern art, modernisms, monuments and monumentality, the Interwar period, New Deal art, Socialist Realism, art of Central and Eastern Europe, figuration and abstraction, theories of landscape

Bio

Annapurna Kumar is an American animator and filmmaker. Her work is largely inspired by the complex histories of image capture and simulation technologies, and their ties to consumerism, enforced normativity, and the built environment. The work manifests as diaristic, playful fantasies that oscillate between scenes of intense planning and improvisational digressions. Themes of fertility, ecological utopia, the structures of memory, repressed sensuality, and a preoccupation with plastic recur throughout Annapurna's short films, which are fast-paced, non-linear, and at times, totally abstract. Her work blends CGI and drawn animation, 16mm filmmaking techniques, and camera-stand stop-motion. She occasionally makes artist books, tapestries, ceramics, and interactive work. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at UCLA DMA and an adjunct faculty member in the CalArts EA Department.

Annapurna is an alumni of the Yaddo and Film Farm residencies. Her work has been featured by AQNB, Pitchfork, Dublab, Create Digital Motion, and Edge of Frame, and has shown in festivals including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Zagreb, The Walker Art Center, London International Animation Festival, Eyeworks, Light Field, GLAS, Experimenta India, and others.

Bio

Dean O Hare graduated in 2012 with a BBA in Business Administration from ENMU. He currently teaches Music Appreciation for the Music Department, from 2012 to present, and Photography Projects for the Art Department. He has been a licensed photographer since 2010: DBA Dean OHare Photography and has over 15 years of experience as a professional photographer. Mr. OHare owned Deans Music from 1989 to 1995 and managed Philips House of Music from 1996-2000.

Bio

Greg grew up in a rural area in northern Wisconsin where he developed a lifelong interest in the outdoors, and specifically fishing with the flyrod and "poppers" - surface baits which he makes himself. He has built custom rods as well as developed custom patterns in his pursuit of both bluegills and bass, and has been a confirmed catch and release fisherman since 1974. He is also an addicted scuba diver and skin diver - even though this seems a little silly considering he lives on the high plains desert.

Greg teaches three-dimensional design, sculpture, and jewelry.

Research Interests

-Portrait/Figure Sculpture in Concrete, Glass, and Iron

-Commission Jewelry/Metal Casting

-Fiberglass/Resin Casting

Bio

Ann's recent work is about contemporary society's expectations of people in their gender roles,but her particular focus is on women and the struggles they endure in a world that still lacks equity and equality. Her work responds to the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, expectations of gender roles; dealing with domesticity, body image, workplace power struggles, and violence against women. Ann explores these social constructs and constrictions through the concept of 'boxes and labels'. To counteract this limiting aspect, she focuses on surface treatment and distorts a standardized box label with words that echo words of conditioning received starting at a young age. Showing how the standardization and commercialization of the common box must be overridden to find one's voice. By reacting to those oppressive verbal labels and the confinements of being put into a box in a figurative sense, she engages the audience to experience the words meant to have power or control. Satirizing the original standard text in ways that challenge and rewrite the labels she creates in her work forces the audience into an intimate space to deal with or fit into these 'social norms'. She primarily uses screen and relief printing to express herself but also draws, collages, and plays with photography and ceramics.

Ann has 25 years of experience as a graphic designer and eleven years as a director of a creative shop. She is a recent empty-nester with three adult children. She loves her plants, pets, visiting art galleries and museums, and attending live music. She received her B.F.A .in Graphic Design (1999) and M.F.A. in Studio Art (2022) both from West Texas A&M University.

Bio

Britta Urness investigates drawing, painting and printmaking language, often combined to layer ideas, atmospheres, and figures within two-dimensional works (and sometimes ventures to the third-dimension). She has shown her work in the Midwest in places such as St. Ambrose University, the Ann Arbor Art Center, Delta College in Saginaw, MI, the Grand Rapids Art Center in Grand Rapids, MN, The Scarab Club in Detroit, Buckham Gallery in Flint, and the University of Nebraska-Omaha. Britta often participates in national print exchange portfolios, an accomplished community workshop instructor and a lifelong student of all art processes. She is a self-professed Word Nerd consumed by crossword puzzles and trivia, strength sports enthusiast, and an avid traveler thrilled to be living in the Southwest.

Prof. Urness teaches all levels of painting and drawing courses.

Bio

Will grew up in Eula, Texas, a rural town outside Abilene. He went to Hardin Simmons University where he started out as a graphic design major but got the mud bug after taking a ceramics class with professor, Brandon Phillips. He earned his BFA in Ceramics in 2012 then went straight into graduate school. He earned his MFA in ceramics in 2015 from the University of North Texas. Since his formal schooling he has taught a range of art subjects at UNT, NCTC, and Weatherford College. He has also taught high school ceramics, sculpture, and drawing.