100 Notable alumni of
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Updated:
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is 352nd in the world, 147th in North America, and 139th in the United States by aggregated alumni prominence. Below is the list of 100 notable alumni from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago sorted by their wiki pages popularity. The directory includes famous graduates and former students along with research and academic staff.
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Hugh Hefner
- Occupations
- writerfilm produceractorjournalistnightclub owner
- Biography
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Hugh Marston Hefner was an American magazine publisher. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, a publication with revealing photographs and articles.
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Orson Welles
- Occupations
- actortheatrical producerstage actorvoice actortheatrical director
- Biography
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George Orson Welles was an American director, actor, writer, producer, and magician who is remembered for his innovative work in film, radio, and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
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Ed Harris
- Occupations
- theatrical directorvoice actortelevision actordirectorfilm director
- Biography
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Edward Allen Harris is an American actor and filmmaker. His performances in Apollo 13 (1995), The Truman Show (1998), Pollock (2000), and The Hours (2002) earned him critical acclaim and Academy Award nominations.
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Kim Novak
- Occupations
- television actormodelpainterfilm actorfilm producer
- Biography
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Marilyn Pauline "Kim" Novak is an American retired film and television actress and painter. Her contributions to cinema have been honored with two Golden Globe Awards, an Honorary Golden Bear, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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Halston
- Occupations
- fashion designercostume designer
- Biography
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Roy Halston Frowick, known mononymously as Halston, was an American fashion designer, who rose to international fame in the 1970s.
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Shel Silverstein
- Occupations
- composerscreenwriterwritersingeractor
- Biography
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Sheldon Allan Silverstein was an American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Silverstein briefly attended university before being drafted into the United States Army. During his rise to prominence in the 1950s, his illustrations were published in various newspapers and magazines, including the adult-oriented Playboy. He also wrote a satirical, adult-oriented alphabet book, Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book.
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David Sedaris
- Occupations
- comedianwriteressayist
- Biography
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David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. His next book, Naked (1997), became his first of a series of New York Times Bestsellers, and his 2000 collection Me Talk Pretty One Day won the Thurber Prize for American Humor.
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Sarah Vowell
- Occupations
- journalistvoice actorwriteractor
- Biography
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Sarah Jane Vowell is an American historian, author, journalist, essayist, social commentator and actress. She has written seven nonfiction books on American history and culture. She was a contributing editor for the radio program This American Life on Public Radio International from 1996 to 2008, where she produced numerous commentaries and documentaries and toured the country in many of the program's live shows. She was also the voice of Violet Parr in the 2004 animated film The Incredibles and its 2018 sequel.
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Edward Gorey
- Enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Studied in 1943-1943
- Occupations
- writercostume designerillustratorpuppeteer
- Biography
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Edward St. John Gorey was an American writer, Tony Award-winning costume designer, and artist, noted for his own illustrated books as well as cover art and illustration for books by other writers. His characteristic pen-and-ink drawings often depict vaguely unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
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Hong Sang-soo
- Occupations
- cinematographerfilm directorscreenwriterexecutive producercomposer
- Biography
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Hong Sang-soo is a South Korean film director and screenwriter. An acclaimed and prolific filmmaker, Hong is known for his slow-paced films about love affairs and everyday dilemmas in contemporary South Korea.
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Grant Wood
- Occupations
- painteruniversity teacherprintmaker
- Biography
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Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul
- Occupations
- film directordirectorscreenwriterinstallation artistfilm producer
- Biography
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Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Thai independent film director, screenwriter, and film producer. Working outside the strict confines of the Thai film studio system, Apichatpong has directed several features and dozens of short films. Friends and fans sometimes refer to him as "Joe" (a nickname that he, like many with similarly long Thai names, has adopted out of convenience).
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Elisha Cook Jr
- Occupations
- television actorstage actorfilm actoractorcharacter actor
- Biography
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Elisha Vanslyck Cook Jr. was an American character actor famed for his work in films noir. According to Bill Georgaris of They Shoot Pictures, Don't They, Cook appeared in a total of 21 films noir, more than any other actor or actress. He played cheerful, brainy collegiates until he was cast against type as the bug-eyed baby-faced psychopathic killer Wilmer Cook in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon. He went on to play deceptively mild-mannered villains. Cook's acting career spanned more than 60 years, with roles in productions including The Big Sleep, Shane, The Killing, House on Haunted Hill, and Rosemary's Baby.
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BenDeLaCreme
- Years
- 1981-.. (age 43)
- Occupations
- drag queenactor
- Biography
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BenDeLaCreme is the stage persona of Benjamin Brock Hamlet Putnam, an American drag queen, burlesque performer, and actor based in Seattle, Washington. He is known for being a contestant on the sixth season of RuPaul's Drag Race and the third season of RuPaul's Drag Race: All Stars. He is also known for his solo shows Ready To Be Committed, Terminally Delightful, Inferno A-Go-Go and Cosmos, and as co-creator and host of burlesque revues Freedom Fantasia and Homo for the Holidays.
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J. C. Leyendecker
- Occupations
- painterdesignerillustrator
- Biography
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Joseph Christian Leyendecker was one of the most prominent and financially successful freelance commercial artists in the U.S. He was active between 1895 and 1951 producing drawings and paintings for hundreds of posters, books, advertisements, and magazine covers and stories. He is best known for his 80 covers for Collier's Weekly, 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, and advertising illustrations for B. Kuppenheimer men's clothing and Arrow brand shirts and detachable collars. He was one of the few known gay artists working in the early-twentieth century U.S.
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Thomas Hart Benton
- Occupations
- printmakerarchitectural draftspersoncartoonistdesignermuralist
- Biography
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Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter, muralist, and printmaker. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States.
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Mykki Blanco
- Occupations
- rapper
- Biography
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Mykki Blanco is an American rapper, performance artist, poet and activist. She has collaborated musically with artists including Kanye West, Teyana Taylor, and Blood Orange.
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Joan Mitchell
- Enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- In 1944 graduated with undergraduate degree in fine art
- Occupations
- artistpainterillustratorprintmaker
- Biography
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Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.
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Cynthia Rowley
- Occupations
- fashion designer
- Biography
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Cynthia Rowley is an American fashion designer, known for her books, television appearances and "flirty" and "carefree" women's clothing designs.
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Audrey Niffenegger
- Occupations
- visual artistuniversity teacherscience fiction writernovelistartist
- Biography
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Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer, artist and academic. Her debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, published in 2003, was a bestseller.
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Matteo Lane
- Occupations
- comedianartistpodcaster
- Biography
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Matthew "Matteo" Lane is an American comedian, actor, singer, and illustrator.
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LeRoy Neiman
- Occupations
- actorpainter
- Biography
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LeRoy Neiman was an American artist known for his brilliantly colored, expressionist paintings and screenprints of athletes, musicians, and sporting events.
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Wen Yiduo
- Occupations
- writerpoet
- Biography
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Wen Yiduo was a Chinese poet and scholar known for his nationalistic poetry. Wen was assassinated by the Kuomintang in 1946.
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MC Chris
- Occupations
- voice actorscreenwritermusicianrapper
- Biography
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Christopher Brendan Ward IV, better known by the stage name MC Chris (stylized in all lower case), is an American rapper, voice actor, comedian, and writer. He is known for his high-pitched voice and for combining his "geek" background with the "gangsta rap" image which resulted in the genre of nerdcore. He has released ten albums, five EPs, one re-release and a tenth anniversary edition of his recordings with the Lee Majors.
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Richard Estes
- Occupations
- paintervisual artistphotographerprintmaker
- Biography
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Richard Estes is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
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Bill Mauldin
- Occupations
- caricaturistcomics artistscreenwriteractorjournalist
- Biography
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William Henry Mauldin was an American editorial cartoonist who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work. He was most famous for his World War II cartoons depicting American soldiers, as represented by the archetypal characters Willie and Joe, two weary and bedraggled infantry troopers who stoically endure the difficulties and dangers of duty in the field. His cartoons were popular with soldiers throughout Europe, and with civilians in the United States as well. However, his second Pulitzer Prize was for a cartoon published in 1958, and possibly his best-known cartoon was after the Kennedy assassination.
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Vachel Lindsay
- Occupations
- painterwriterpoet
- Biography
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Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was an American poet. He is considered a founder of modern singing poetry, as he referred to it, in which verses are meant to be sung or chanted.
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Mark Tobey
- Occupations
- painterillustrator
- Biography
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Mark George Tobey was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions. Similar to others of the Northwest School, Tobey was mostly self-taught after early studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1921, Tobey founded the art department at The Cornish School in Seattle, Washington.
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A. Y. Jackson
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Alexander Young Jackson LL. D. was a Canadian painter and a founding member of the Group of Seven. Jackson made a significant contribution to the development of art in Canada, and was instrumental in bringing together the artists of Montreal and Toronto. In addition to his work with the Group of Seven, his long career included serving as a war artist during World War I (1917–19) and teaching at the Banff School of Fine Arts, from 1943 to 1949. In his later years he was artist-in-residence at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario.
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Hope Larson
- Occupations
- cartoonistillustratorcomics artist
- Biography
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Hope Raue Larson is an American illustrator and cartoonist. Her main field is comic books.
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Ivan Albright
- Occupations
- sculptorpainterfilmmakerprintmaker
- Biography
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Ivan Le Lorraine Albright was an American painter, sculptor and print-maker most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes. Due to his technique and dark subject matter, he is often categorized among the Magic Realists and is sometimes referred to as the "master of the macabre".
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Tania Bruguera
- Occupations
- theatrical directorpainterperformance artistinstallation artistartist
- Biography
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Tania Bruguera is a Cuban artist and activist who focuses on installation and performance art. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University. Bruguera has participated in numerous international exhibitions. her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
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James Earle Fraser
- Occupations
- sculptormedalist
- Biography
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James Earle Fraser was an American sculptor during the first half of the 20th century. His work is integral to many of Washington, D.C.'s most iconic structures.
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Amanda Crowe
- Occupations
- sculptorwood carver
- Biography
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Amanda Crowe was an Eastern Band Cherokee woodcarver and educator from Cherokee, North Carolina. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her work has been widely exhibited and is held by a number of museums. Crowe dedicated much of her career to teaching and training the next generation of Eastern Cherokee artists.
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Gahan Wilson
- Occupations
- cartoonistcomics artist
- Biography
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Gahan Allen Wilson was an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations.
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Elizabeth Murray
- Occupations
- artistprofessorpainterphotographerillustrator
- Biography
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Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
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Emil Ferris
- Occupations
- writercomics artistdesignercartoonistillustrator
- Biography
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Emil Ferris is an American writer, cartoonist, and designer. Ferris debuted in publishing with her 2017 graphic novel My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. The novel tells a coming-of-age story of Karen Reyes, a girl growing up in 1960s Chicago, and is written and drawn in the form of the character's notebook. The graphic novel was praised as a "masterpiece" and one of the best comics by a new author.
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John Steuart Curry
- Occupations
- painterprintmaker
- Biography
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John Steuart Curry was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural life in his home state, Kansas. Along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth century. Curry's artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.
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Kristin Hayter
- Occupations
- singer
- Biography
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Kristin Hayter is an American singer and pianist. From 2017 to 2023, she released music and performed under the name Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language").
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Sterling Ruby
- Occupations
- collagistpaintersculptorartistceramicist
- Biography
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Sterling Ruby is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, video, and textiles. Often, his work is presented in large and densely packed installations. The artist has cited a diverse range of sources and influences including aberrant psychologies (particularly schizophrenia and paranoia), urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption. In opposition to the minimalist artistic tradition and influenced by the ubiquity of urban graffiti, the artist's works often appear scratched, defaced, camouflaged, dirty, or splattered. Proclaimed as one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby's work examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint. Sterling Ruby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His studio is located in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles.
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Rashid Johnson
- Occupations
- film directorphotographerinstallation artistjewelry designersculptor
- Biography
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Rashid Johnson is an American artist who produces conceptual post-black art. Johnson first received critical attention in 2001 at the age of 24, when his work was included in Freestyle (2001) curated by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He studied at Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his work has been exhibited around the world.
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Archibald Motley
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an American visual artist. Motley is most famous for his colorful chronicling of the African-American experience in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, and is considered one of the major contributors to the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, a time in which African-American art reached new heights not just in New York but across America—its local expression is referred to as the Chicago Black Renaissance. He studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the 1910s, graduating in 1918.
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Gregory La Cava
- Occupations
- comics artistdirectorfilm directorscreenwriteranimator
- Biography
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Gregory La Cava was an American film director of Italian descent best known for his films of the 1930s, including My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, which earned him nominations for Academy Award for Best Director.
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Jon Rafman
- Occupations
- filmmakerartistessayist
- Biography
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Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).
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Will McBride
- Occupations
- painterjournalistphotographerillustratorvisual artist
- Biography
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Will McBride was an American photographer in reportage, art photography and book illustration as well as a painter and sculptor.
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Trevor Paglen
- Enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Graduated with Master of Fine Arts
- Occupations
- geographerwriterphotographerinstallation artistinternational forum participant
- Biography
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Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.
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Casey Spooner
- Occupations
- musician
- Biography
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Casey David Spooner is an American musician and artist. He resides in Paris, Los Angeles, and New York City.
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Anchee Min
- Occupations
- writerpainternovelistmusicianphotographer
- Biography
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Anchee Min is a Chinese-American author who lives in San Francisco and Shanghai. Min has published two memoirs, Red Azalea and The Cooked Seed: A Memoir, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China.
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Gertrude Abercrombie
- Occupations
- artistpainter
- Biography
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Gertrude Abercrombie was an American painter based in Chicago. Called "the queen of the bohemian artists", Abercrombie was involved in the Chicago jazz scene and was friends with musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, whose music inspired her own creative work.
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Mike Grell
- Occupations
- comics artist
- Biography
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Mike Grell is an American comic book writer and artist, known for his work on books such as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Warlord, and Jon Sable Freelance.
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Byeong Sam Jeon
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Byeong Sam Jeon is an internationally recognized South Korean artist who lives in Seoul and New York. One of his large-scale art installations is CD PROJECT that turned an abandoned old tobacco factory into a shiny dream factory through decorating the 180 meter-long and 32 meter-high outer wall of the factory building with the total 489,440 flattering compact discs collected by 27,912 people from 288 organizations in 31 cities of 9 countries. The total number of the CDs installed was counted by the official Guinness World Records, and announced as the 'Largest Display of Compact Discs'. His works and sketch/prototypes of the giant installations have sold for substantial sums of money by the galleries and private collectors.
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Richmond Barthé
- Occupations
- paintersculptorartist
- Biography
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James Richmond Barthé, also known as Richmond Barthé was an African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Barthé is best known for his portrayal of black subjects. The focus of his artistic work was portraying the diversity and spirituality of man. Barthé once said: "All my life I have been interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man."
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Red Grooms
- Occupations
- architectural draftspersoninstallation artistprintmakerperformance artistillustrator
- Biography
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Red Grooms is an American multimedia artist best known for his colorful pop-art constructions depicting frenetic scenes of modern urban life. Grooms was given the nickname "Red" by Dominic Falcone (of Provincetown's Sun Gallery) when he was starting out as a dishwasher at a restaurant in Provincetown and was studying with Hans Hofmann.
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Phil Foglio
- Occupations
- cartoonisteditorcomics artist
- Biography
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Philip Foglio is an American cartoonist and comic book artist known for his humorous science fiction and fantasy art.
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Frederick Carl Frieseke
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Frederick Carl Frieseke was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his life as an expatriate in France. An influential member of the Giverny art colony, his paintings often concentrated on various effects of dappled sunlight.
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Thomas C. Lea III
- Occupations
- journalistnovelistpainterhistorian
- Biography
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Thomas Calloway Lea III was an American muralist, illustrator, artist, war correspondent, novelist, and historian. The bulk of his art and literary works were about Texas, north-central Mexico, and his World War II experience in the South Pacific and Asia. Two of his most popular novels, The Brave Bulls and The Wonderful Country, are widely considered to be classics of southwestern American literature.
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Martin Nodell
- Occupations
- comics artistscreenwritercartoonistvisual artistdrawer
- Biography
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Martin Nodell was an American cartoonist and commercial artist, best known as the creator of the Golden Age superhero Green Lantern. Some of his work appeared under the pen name Mart Dellon.
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Ben Stahl
- Occupations
- writer
- Biography
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Benjamin Albert Stahl was an American artist, illustrator and author. He showed precocious talent, winning a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago at age twelve. His artwork appeared in the International Watercolor Show at the Art Institute when he was sixteen. He later taught at the Art Institute, as well as at the American Academy of Art, the Art Students League of New York, Brooklyn's Pratt Institute and at various universities.
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Ida Applebroog
- Occupations
- conceptual artistpainterdrawerartistsculptor
- Biography
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Ida Applebroog was an American multi-media artist who was best-known for her paintings and sculptures that explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence, and politics. Applebroog was the recipient of multiple honors including the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant", the College Art Association Distinguished Art Award for Lifetime Achievement, and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the New School for Social Research/Parsons School of Design. Applebroog lived in New York City and is represented by Hauser & Wirth.
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Betty Bumpers
- Occupations
- peace activistteacher
- Biography
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Betty Lou Bumpers was an American politician, advocate for childhood immunizations, and world peace activist, who served as the First Lady of Arkansas from 1971 to 1975. Together, she and Rosalynn Carter ran a successful campaign to ensure that all American school children were immunized. Bumpers was the wife of Dale Bumpers, who served as governor of Arkansas from 1971 to 1975 and as a U.S. Senator from 1975 to 1999.
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Mat Devine
- Occupations
- guitaristsinger-songwriter
- Biography
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Mat Devine is an American singer, songwriter and musician. He created and fronted the alternative rock band Kill Hannah. His debut solo album, Gold Blooded, was released in August 2014. He is currently the Head of Music Partnerships at Cameo.
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Margaret Brundage
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Margaret Brundage, born Margaret Hedda Johnson, was an American illustrator and painter who is remembered chiefly for having illustrated the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Working in pastels on illustration board, she created most of the covers for Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938.
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Edgar Alwin Payne
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Edgar Alwin Payne was an American painter. He was known as a Western landscape painter and muralist.
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Santiago Martínez Delgado
- Occupations
- sculptorpainter
- Biography
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Santiago Martínez Delgado was a Colombian painter, sculptor, art historian and writer. He established a reputation as a prominent muralist during the 1940s and is also known for his watercolors, oil paintings, illustrations and woodcarvings.
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E. Irving Couse
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Eanger Irving Couse was an American artist and a founding member and first president of the Taos Society of Artists. Born and reared in Saginaw, Michigan, he went to New York City and Paris to study art. While spending summers in Taos, New Mexico, he began to make the paintings of Native Americans, New Mexico, and the American Southwest for which he is best known. He later settled full time in Taos.
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Rolf Armstrong
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Rolf Armstrong was an American commercial artist specializing in glamorous depictions of female subjects. He is best known for his magazine covers and calendar art. In 1960 the New York Times dubbed him the “creator of the calendar girl.” His commercial career extended from 1912 to 1960, the great majority of his original work being done in pastel.
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Minerva Teichert
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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Minerva Bernetta Kohlhepp Teichert was a 20th-century American artist who painted Western and Mormon subjects, including murals of scenes from the Book of Mormon. She received her art education from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York, and was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Religious-themed artwork by Teichert includes Christ in a Red Robe, Queen Esther, and Rescue of the Lost Lamb. She painted 42 murals related to stories in the Book of Mormon which reside in Brigham Young University's (BYU) Museum of Art. Teichert was the first woman invited to paint a mural for an LDS Church temple.
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Warren MacKenzie
- Occupations
- artistceramicist
- Biography
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Warren MacKenzie was an American craft potter. He grew up in Wilmette, Illinois the second oldest of five children including his brothers, Fred and Gordon and sisters, Marge (Peppy) and Marilyn. His high school days were spent at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.
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Brad Troemel
- Years
- 1987-.. (age 37)
- Occupations
- artist
- Biography
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Brad Troemel is an American artist and writer based in New York City. Troemel is most well known for co-creating the Tumblr blog The Jogging in 2009 which received attention for its work in post internet art.
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Wafaa Bilal
- Occupations
- artistvideo installation artistconceptual artist
- Biography
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Dr. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently an art professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is a Creative Capital Award winner in 2021 for his project In a Grain of Wheat: Cultivating Hybrid Futures in Ancient Seed DNA and named one of Foreign Policy magazine's Leading 100 Global Thinkers in 2016 for his work as an advocate. Bilal's work, Canto III, was included as part of the Iranian pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Bilal's current work 168:01 brings awareness to cultural destruction and promotes the collective healing process through education and audience participation. He is best known for his work, Domestic Tension, a performance piece in which he lived in a gallery for a month and was shot by paintballs remotely by internet users watching from a webcam and for his book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and Resistance under the Gun, based on that performance, which details the horrors of living in a conflict zone and growing up under Saddam Hussein's regime. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was conferred an honorary Ph.D. from DePauw University.
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George Grey Barnard
- Occupations
- sculptor
- Biography
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George Grey Barnard, often written George Gray Barnard, was an American sculptor who trained in Paris. He is especially noted for his heroic sized Struggle of the Two Natures in Man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his twin sculpture groups at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, and his Lincoln statue in Cincinnati, Ohio. His major works are largely symbolical in character. His personal collection of medieval architectural fragments became a core part of The Cloisters in New York City.
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Anne Rosellini
- Occupations
- screenwriterfilm producer
- Biography
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Anne Rosellini is an American film producer and screenwriter. She is best known for writing and producing the 2010 film Winter's Bone with her frequent collaborator Debra Granik. Her work has been nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture and for Best Adapted Screenplay. Before becoming a film producer, she was a programmer for various film festivals in Seattle, Washington.
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Jeffrey Gibson
- Occupations
- painterinstallation artistsculptor
- Biography
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Jeffrey A. Gibson is an American Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter and sculptor. He has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York; Hudson, New York; and Germantown, New York.
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Edward McKnight Kauffer
- Occupations
- designergraphic designervisual artistpainter
- Biography
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Edward McKnight Kauffer was an American artist and graphic designer who lived for much of his life in the United Kingdom. He worked mainly in poster art, but was also active as a painter, book illustrator and theatre designer.
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Richard Hunt
- Occupations
- lithographersculptor
- Biography
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Richard Howard Hunt was an American sculptor. In the second half of the 20th century, he became "the foremost African-American abstract sculptor and artist of public sculpture." Hunt, the descendant of enslaved people brought from West Africa through the Port of Savannah, studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s. While there he received multiple prizes for his work. In 1971, he was the first African-American sculptor to have a retrospective at Museum of Modern Art. Hunt has created over 160 public sculpture commissions, more than any other sculptor in prominent locations in 24 states across the United States.
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Teresa Burga
- Occupations
- visual artistmultimedia artistconceptual artist
- Biography
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María Teresa Burga Ruiz was a multimedia artist whose conceptual art works during the late 1960s and 1970s position her as a precursor of media art, technology-based art, and installation art in Peru.
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Jennifer Reeder
- Occupations
- screenwriterfilm director
- Biography
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Jennifer Reeder is an American artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away (2014) was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category. In 2003, she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, Knives and Skin. She won a 2018–19 SFFILM Rainin Grant for scriptwriting, and was the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony. In 2021, she was awarded a United States Artists (USA) Fellowship.
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Gray Morrow
- Occupations
- penciller
- Biography
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Dwight Graydon "Gray" Morrow was an American illustrator of comics, magazine covers and paperback books. He is co-creator of the Marvel Comics muck-monster the Man-Thing and of DC Comics Old West vigilante El Diablo.
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David Stone Martin
- Occupations
- painterillustrator
- Biography
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David Stone Martin, born David Livingstone Martin was an American artist best known for his illustrations on jazz record albums.
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Jane Heap
- Occupations
- editorjournalist
- Biography
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Jane Heap was an American publisher and a significant figure in the development and promotion of literary modernism. Together with Margaret Anderson, her friend and business partner (who for some years was also her lover), she edited the celebrated literary magazine The Little Review, which published an extraordinary collection of modern American, English and Irish writers between 1914 and 1929. Heap herself has been called "one of the most neglected contributors to the transmission of modernism between America and Europe during the early twentieth century."
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Neysa McMein
- Occupations
- painterillustrator
- Biography
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Neysa Moran McMein was an American illustrator and portrait painter who studied at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League of New York. She began her career as an illustrator and during World War I, she traveled across France entertaining military troops with Anita P. Wilcox and Jane Bulley and made posters to support the war effort. She was made an honorary non-commissioned officer in the United States Marine Corps for her contributions to the war effort.
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Victor Skrebneski
- Occupations
- fashion photographerphotographer
- Biography
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Victor Paul Skrebneski was an American photographer born in Chicago to parents of Polish and Russian heritage. He was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1943 and attended the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1947 to 1949. He set up his own studio in Chicago in 1952. The Art Institute of Chicago had an exhibit of his work in 1969.
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Wayne Boring
- Occupations
- artistpencillerillustrator
- Biography
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Wayne Boring was an American comic book artist best known for his work on Superman from the late 1940s to 1950s. He occasionally used the pseudonym Jack Harmon.
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Martine Syms
- Enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Studied in 2007
- Occupations
- filmmakerartist
- Biography
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Martine Syms is an American artist residing in Los Angeles, specializing in various mediums including publishing, video, installation, and performance. Her artistic endeavors revolve around themes of identity, particularly the representation of the self, with a focus on subjects like feminism and black culture. Syms frequently employs humor and social commentary as vehicles for exploration within her work. In 2007, she introduced the term "Conceptual Entrepreneur" to describe her artistic approach.
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Robert Storr
- Occupations
- art criticcuratorart theoristpainterjournalist
- Biography
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Robert Storr is an American curator, critic, painter, and writer.
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Lucy Knisley
- Occupations
- comics writercartoonistcomics artist
- Biography
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Lucy Knisley is an American comic artist and musician. Her work is often autobiographical, and food is a common theme.
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Michael Shaowanasai
- Occupations
- actorfilm actorfilm director
- Biography
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Michael Shaowanasai is a Thai-American artist and actor who lives in Bangkok, Thailand. His works includes performance art, photography, video, film and installations. Openly gay, his works are often provocative, such as photographic portrait of himself as a Buddhist monk made up to look like a woman. Active as an artist since 1997, his works have featured in international exhibitions since 1999, and his work is held in major collections.
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McClelland Barclay
- Occupations
- military officer
- Biography
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McClelland Barclay was an American illustrator. By the age of 21, Barclay's work had been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve in 1938 and following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he went on active duty. At the time of his death, in 1943, he was a Lt. Commander.
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Felipe Smith
- Occupations
- comics artistvisual artistwriterillustrator
- Biography
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Felipe Smith is an American comic book writer and artist of Jamaican and Argentine descent. He is the creator, co-designer, and writer of Robbie Reyes Ghost Rider, and the author of Peepo Choo, a manga series debuting in 2009 in Kodansha's Morning 2 monthly magazine. It is the first manga created and serialized in Japan by a Western creator before being licensed for an English-language release.
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Spike Trotman
- Occupations
- publishercomics artist
- Biography
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Charlie Spike Trotman also known as C. Spike Trotman, is an American cartoonist and publisher known for creating the long-running web comic Templar, Arizona, and for publishing the Smut Peddler anthologies of what she describes as "lady centric porn". She is the founder and owner of Iron Circus Comics, an indie comics publisher which Forbes described as "a powerhouse of the indy landscape."
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Bessie Potter Vonnoh
- Occupations
- sculptorartist
- Biography
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Bessie Potter Vonnoh was an American sculptor best known for her small bronzes, mostly of domestic scenes, and for her garden fountains. Her stated artistic objective, as she told an interviewer in 1925, was to “look for beauty in the every-day world, to catch the joy and swing of modern American life.”
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Eldzier Cortor
- Occupations
- graphic designerpainterprintmaker
- Biography
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Eldzier Cortor was an African-American artist and printmaker. His work typically features elongated nude figures in intimate settings, influenced by both traditional African art and European surrealism. Cortor is known for his style of realism that makes accurate depictions of poor, Black living conditions look fantastic as he distorts perspective.
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Herb Kawainui Kane
- Occupations
- writer
- Biography
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Herbert Kawainui Kāne, considered one of the principal figures in the renaissance of Hawaiian culture in the 1970s, was a celebrated artist-historian and author with a special interest in the seafaring traditions of the ancestral peoples of Hawaiʻi. Kāne played a key role in demonstrating that Hawaiian culture arose not from some accidental seeding of Polynesia, but that Hawaiʻi was reachable by voyaging canoes from Tahiti able to make the journey and return. This offered a far more complex notion of the cultures of the Pacific Islands than had previously been accepted. Furthermore, he created vivid imagery of Hawaiian culture prior to contact with Europeans, and especially the period of early European influence, that sparked appreciation of a nearly forgotten traditional life. He painted dramatic views of war, exemplified by The Battle at Nuʻuanu Pali, the potential of conflicts between cultures such as in Cook Entering Kealakekua Bay, where British ships are dwarfed and surrounded by Hawaiian canoes, as well as bucolic quotidian scenes and lush images of a robust ceremonial and spiritual life, that helped arouse a latent pride among Hawaiians during a time of general cultural awakening.
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John Vanderpoel
- Years
- 1857-1911 (aged 54)
- Occupations
- painter
- Biography
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John Henry Vanderpoel, born Johannes (Jan) van der Poel, was a Dutch-American artist and teacher, best known as an instructor of figure drawing. His book The Human Figure, a standard art school resource featuring numerous drawings based on his teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was published in 1907.
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Ben Babbitt
- Occupations
- musiciancomposer
- Biography
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Ben Babbitt is a Los Angeles–based artist and musician for independent films and video games. He is a founding member of the video game development studio Cardboard Computer, where he wrote the soundtrack for Kentucky Route Zero.
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Dox Thrash
- Occupations
- sculptorpainterprintmakerartist
- Biography
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Dox Thrash was an African-American artist who was famed as a skilled draftsman, master printmaker, and painter and as the co-inventor of the Carborundum printmaking process. The subject of his artwork was African American life. He served as a printmaker with the W.P.A. at the Fine Print Workshop of Philadelphia. The artist spent much of his career living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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Charles Umlauf
- Occupations
- sculptor
- Biography
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Charles Umlauf was an American sculptor and teacher who was born in South Haven, Michigan. His sculptures can be found in churches, numerous public institutions, outdoor locations, and museums, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as in many private collections. Umlauf received a number of accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Grant.
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James F. Walker
- Occupations
- artistphotographer
- Biography
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James F. Walker was an American graphic artist, twice named to the 100 Best New Talent List by Art in America. Walker was particularly noted for his mixed media surrealist images, which he called "magic realism". Walker was also an influential teacher. His work has been exhibited in America, as well as in Germany and in France.
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Nicholas Volpe
- Occupations
- journalistmake-up artistcostume designer
- Biography
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Nicholas A. Volpe was an American artist, noted for his portraits of Hollywood celebrities, presidents, sports figures, and other famous personalities. He is said to have painted more movie stars than any other artist in America.
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Walter Ufer
- Occupations
- lithographerpainter
- Biography
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Walter Ufer was an American artist based in Taos, New Mexico. His most notable work focuses on scenes of Native American life, particularly of the Pueblo Indians.
