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,
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
Cooper-Siegel 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 currently has a solo exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum.
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.
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
Elizabeth Chodos
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).
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.
