Welcome to our fantastic Fall 2023 MFA Faculty! Learn more about each of them, below.
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Community & Context

Anniessa Antar (she/her and they/them)

MA, Education – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Philosophy & Arabic – McGill University

Anniessa is an educator, cultural organizer and software engineer living in Bde Ota Otunwe, so-called Minneapolis. Her pedagogical approach centers on the power of creative, playful, and collective work to confront and heal systemic inequities. She has taught at l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France, and for learners of all ages across the Twin Cities. Currently, she also instructs in the Art and Art History department at Saint Catherine University, St Paul. Beyond working with artists and arts organizations in her prior role at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Anniessa has been co-coordinating MASS Action (Museum as Site for Social Action) since 2016. This collaborative project strives to align museums with more racially just and liberatory practices. Anniessa received a Master’s of Education from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Arabic from McGill University.

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Criticism & Theory I

Jen Caruso (she/her)

PhD, Comparative Literature – University at Buffalo
MA, Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism – University of Western Ontario
BA, English and Philosophy – University of Toronto

Dr. Jen Caruso earned a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on European modernism and critical theory and holds an MA from the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario.

Her recent research and teaching interests include socially-engaged art practice, aesthetics in the context of late capitalism, and cultural responses to climate change.

She has an essay on alienated labor in the novels of William Gibson in the anthology, Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism (Bloomsbury).

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Criticism & Theory I

William Franklin (he/him)

William “Billy” Gustavo Franklin (he/him/his) is an educator and an independent art curator. Franklin was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, and has been living in Minnesota for over twenty-five years. Franklin has curated more than a dozen exhibits locally and served as panelist reviewing applications for grants and artist-in-residence programs. He teaches art history and criticism at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and at Dunwoody College of Technology. Franklin is also an Educator at the Walker Art Center. He is co-curating the exhibit “Latina and Latinx MN: Re/claiming Space in Times of Change,” an exhibition celebrating art created by self-identifying Latina women and non-binary Latinx Minnesota-based artists with ancestral roots in Latin America, to take place at The Catherine Murphy Gallery of Saint Catherine University in Saint Paul September 7–December 8, 2024.

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Graduate Critique Seminar III

Andy Graydon (he/him)

MFA, Radio, Television & Film – Northwestern University

Andy Graydon is an artist and filmmaker originally from Maui, Hawai’i. His work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices. Recent projects have focused on island ecologies and the imaginal and narrative forms employed by the natural sciences. His projects frequently engage structures of music such as the ensemble, the score, improvisation and variation, and techniques of the voice. Often ephemeral in nature, Graydon’s work combines minimal physical materials with elements that are absent, fictional, or imaginary.

His work has been presented internationally including shows at the New Museum; Mass MoCA; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Honolulu Biennial. Screenings include the Fulcrum Festival, Los Angeles; the Flaherty Series at Anthology Film Archives; WRO Media Arts Biennial, Poland; Arsenal Institut für Film und Videokunst, Berlin; Millennium Film Archive; Black Maria Film & Video Festival; Worldfest Houston and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.

Grants and fellowships include the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Media Arts; the MacDowell Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Projects; Film Study Center at Harvard Fellowship; NKD Nordic Artists‘ Center Residency; and the Headlands Center for the Arts Residency. He received his MFA in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University.

Graydon has collaborated widely as a sound artist and composer, including work with Jennifer Walshe, Jan St Werner, Michael Pisaro, Richard Garet, Delia Gonzalez, Stephen Vitiello, David Grubbs, France Jobin, Luke Martin, Kenneth Kirschner, Cecilia Lopez, Zimoun, Emily Manzo, Amnon Wolman, Kato Hideki, John Hudak, Klaus Janek, Yukitomo Hamasaki, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder.

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Graduate Critique Seminar III

Rini Yun Matea (she/her)

Rini Yun Matea (aka Keagy) works in moving image and multimedia installation. Her research-based practice investigates race and labor, disease, and sites of historical and psychosocial trauma. She was raised in California and Guatemala. Rini is the recipient of the McKnight Media Artist Fellowship; Jerome Foundation Film, Video and Digital Production Grant; and University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections Olson Innovation Artist in Residence Award. She has taught at University of the Arts, Drexel University, University of California at Santa Cruz, Minneapolis College of Art & Design and Carleton College.

Screenings and exhibitions of her work include: Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles; Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Galerija Nova, Zagreb; Souvenirs from Earth International TV Project, Cologne; Raum für Projektion, Bergen, Oslo & Buenos Aires; Katherine E. Nash Gallery, Minneapolis; PAPA Projects, St. Paul; Flaten Art Museum, Minnesota; Light Industry, Brooklyn; Mind TV/Media Independence, Philadelphia; Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery, Philadelphia; Philadelphia Film Festival, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Wits School of the Arts, Johannesburg; Festival Images Contre Nature, Marseille; Berlinale Talent Campus Editing Studio, Berlin.

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Teaching Art & Design Online

Dan McAvey (he/him)

MFA, Visual Studies – Minneapolis College of Art & Design
MA, Educational Psychology – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Psychology – Carleton College

Dan McAvey’s work explores human connection through the genre of landscape painting. His art has been featured in solo and group shows in the greater Minneapolis area and is collected by a national audience. Dan teaches studio art, art education, and humanitiies in collegiate and community settings, empowering students to adopt a spirit of experimentation in their work and to embrace failure as a joyful part of developing their art. Dan earned an MFA in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Prior to pursuing art full-time, he spent 20 years working in psychology and human development on college campuses. Dan also holds a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Carleton College.

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Graduate Preparation I

Patricia McMeans (she/they)

PhD, practice-led, Contemporary Art Practice – Edinburgh College of Art
MFA, Sculpture and Combined Media – University of Minnesota

Patricia is an artist, researcher and co-producer of projects taking the form of artists’ residencies, social sculptures, sound and participatory printed matter. Her work investigates how radical hospitality and slow immersion within the artist-led social studio leads to residential learning and new practice. Since 2012, she’s run iterative experimental artists’ residency events in her two homebases, Minneapolis and Edinburgh (UK), for international sets of emerging artists called Ten Chances Art Res.

She has conducted these itinerant experiments trans-nationally, most recently in Edinburgh and other regions of Scotland, Galway, Helsinki, New York City, Boston, as well as Minneapolis and North Branch, MN. Her co-producing endeavours include five culminating events from 10XArtRes iterations (2012-2016), and is affiliated with the Number Shop, the Fruitmarket Gallery, Bargain Spot, Embassy Annuale, Cove Park Residency, Hospitalfield Arts, formerly Soap Factory (Mpls), Art Shanty Projects and Night Owl Farm. Recently, she’s joined a cohort of artist-builders in a self-designed dwelling project called Moveable Feast Bothy, occuying sites in and around Edinburgh.

She has taught college art courses on a ship for Semester at Sea, leading field practicuums in Cadiz and Istanbul, and also on land at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 2007 to present. She holds an MFA in Sculpture and Combined Media from the University of Minnesota, and has recently earned her practice-led PhD in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art, studying Lived Residencies, Experiential Learning and Thick Geographies: How Artists Produce Knowledge(s) in the Social Studio. Primarily identifying as an artist, her strategies continue to place the artist first and give them room to move.

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Graduate Critique Seminar I, Graduate Preparation I, and MFA Visiting Artist

Ziba Rajabi (she/her)

MFA – University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
BFA – Sooreh University, Tehran

Ziba Rajabi (b.1988, Tehran, Iran) received her MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and her BFA from the Sooreh University, Tehran. Her primary practice is focused on painting, drawing, and fabric-based installation. She is the recipient of the Artist 360 Grant, a program sponsored by the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Her work has been included in a number of exhibitions, nationally and internationally, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; AR, CICA Museum; South Korea; Masur Museum; LA; 21C Museum, AR; Araan Gallery, Iran; The II Platform, UK, among many others. She has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, Terrain Residency, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.

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Graduate Critique Seminar I

Marcus Young 楊墨 (he/him or any pronouns)

MFA, Theater – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Music – Carleton College

Marcus Young 楊墨 is a behavioral and social practice artist making work for the stage, museums, and the public realm, as well as within mindfulness and learning communities. His work invites participation in artistic forms to expand the repertoire of human behavior and the expressivity of how we gather. Born in Hong Kong, Young has a BA in Music from Carleton College and an MFA in Theater from the University of Minnesota. He is a recipient of awards from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations, and he received the Forecast Public Art Mid-Career Grant, given to one artist a year.

From 2006 to 2015, he was City Artist in St. Paul, where he helped redefine the role of the artist in government as daily collaborator and systems changemaker. His project Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk transformed the city’s sidewalk maintenance program into a publishing entity for poetry. This idea has been adopted by many towns and cities throughout the U.S. and beyond. From 2020 to 2022 he was Artist in Residence for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, one of two of its kind in the nation placing artists in statewide agencies. There, he created the Land Acknowledgment Confluence Room, re-making a top-floor conference room in the State Transportation Building into a space of broadening awareness around land, body, and place.

In a museum work titled With Nothing to Give, I Give Myself, he lived ten days around-the-clock at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to foster the understanding that people are the great overlooked works of art. He is the founding artist for Don’t You Feel It Too?—a participatory street dance practice of social healing and inner-life liberation, and Stage Director for Ananya Dance Theatre. He teaches “Art+Life” at the University of Minnesota as well as in the Creative Leadership MA program at Minneapolis College of Art & Design. (Photo by Laichee Yang, courtesy of Ananya Dance Theatre)