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. The core faculty meets with each student a minimum of three times per term, and at least one member of the core sits on each thesis committee. 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,
Associate 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
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 his work is included in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s survey Fictions.
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. In 2015, she premiered Unloaded, a multimedia group show that explores historical and social issues surrounding the availability, use, and impact of guns in our culture, which traveled to 10 venues.
Angela Washko
Assistant Professor of Art
Angela Washko is an artist, writer, and facilitator devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Her most recent project, The Game: The Game, is a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator.
MFA Faculty
Jessica Beck
Visiting Scholar
Jessica Beck is the Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum, where she organized the major monographic exhibition, Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body, for the Fall of 2016. At Carnegie Mellon, she is teaching MFA Critical Studies Seminar I in the Fall of 2017 and MFA Thesis Writing Seminar I in the Spring of 2018.
John Carson
Professor of Art
John Carson is an artist who has wittily and provocatively explored the interface between high and low culture and who has sought to widen the audience for contemporary art practice. From 2006 to 2016, he served as the Head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. He is teaching Contextual Practice for the Program.
