The MFA program is guided by a core faculty of four highly active artists who provide critical oversight and intellectual support for students through one-on-one advising, mentorship, and studio visits. In addition to the core faculty, graduate students work closely each semester with additional academic advisors of their choice from throughout the full faculty.
MFA Program Director
Jon Rubin
MFA Program Director,
Professor of Art
Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that reimagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. His recent project with Lenka Clayton, …circle through New York, was commissioned as part of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative.
MFA Core Faculty
Katherine Hubbard
Assistant Professor of Art
Katherine Hubbard uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Her photography and performances have appeared at the Brooklyn Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX; among many others.
Susanne Slavick
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art
Susanne Slavick is an artist and curator whose work pursues empathic unsettlement through images that remind us of what we stand to lose after what we have lost already. Her traveling curatorial projects include Marx@200 (2018); Unloaded (2015) that examines gun violence in our culture; and Out of Rubble (Charta, 2011) featuring international artists who respond to the aftermath of war.
Alisha B. Wormsley
Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow
Alisha Wormsley investigates collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color. Working with communities around the world, she fosters artistic engagement and celebrates identities. Her project "There Art Black People in the Future" has been shown around the country on billboards, in museums, and at other public venues.
MFA Faculty
Elizabeth Chodos
Assistant Professor of Curatorial Practice Director, Miller Institute for Contemporary Art
Elizabeth Chodos is the Director of the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-founder of Common Field and previously served as Executive and Creative Director of Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists' Residency.
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim
Associate Professor of Art History & Theory
Dr. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim is a specialist of modern and contemporary art addressing issues concerning gender, race, and sexuality. Kim is the author of Painted Men in Britain, 1868-1918: Royal Academicians and Masculinities (2012; 2016) and is co-editor of the interdisciplinary anthology Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture (2017).
Cash (Melissa) Ragona
Associate Professor of Art History & Theory
Melissa Ragona’s critical and creative work focuses on sound design, film theory, and new media practice and reception. By forging approaches from the disciplines of film studies, art history, and new media technologies, her work seeks to present a more complex aesthetic, theoretical, and historical foundation for the analysis of contemporary time-based arts.
Sharmistha Ray
Visiting Scholar
Sharmistha Ray is an artist, writer, and educator whose work includes paintings, drawings, printmaking, sculptures, installations, photographs, cultural programming, lectures, and hybrid texts. Their writings have been published in various online and print magazines including Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, Ocula, Art India, and the India editions of Vogue and Elle.
Devan Shimoyama
Assistant Professor of Art
Devan Shimoyama is a painter and photographer whose work reimagines black queer masculinity as both desirous and desirable through the use of narrative and self-portraiture. He is the recipient of the 2016 PULSE prize and recently staged a solo exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum. On leave academic year 2021-22.
Angela Washko
Associate Professor of Art
As a feminist media artist working in a variety of forms, Angela Washko is committed to telling complex and unconventional stories about the media we consume from unusual perspectives. She is a recent recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the Impact Award at Indiecade, and the Franklin Furnace Performance Fund. On leave Fall 2021.
