We are pleased to announce the appointment of Danny Giles as course director of our Master of Fine Art programme, effective immediately. After considering over sixty international potential applicants, the committee and the advisory board agreed unanimously that Danny was the most suitable candidate to fill this position.
Danny brings a wealth of experience to the role, that is well-suited to the programmes focus on research and will greatly contribute to a seamless administration and the further development of the course’s offering. He will be working closely with other course directors at the Piet Zwart Institute and the Willem de Kooning Academy.
In his own practice as a visual artist, he focuses on the dilemmas of representing and performing identity to reveal hidden languages of power within mundane objects and spaces. His work has been exhibited, performed and screened at venues including The Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle WA, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum, Evanston, IL, El Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. He has recently worked as a part-time faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as Academic Director of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, MI. We look forward to continuing our inspiring collaboration with Danny.
Danny Giles: "In my work, I'm concerned with making experiences that connect our collective experiences of identity and social being to larger histories and structures of power and belonging. My research often begins with a cultural artefact or a historical narrative from which I can expand my thinking to consider how human experience is shaped by visual and material culture. To do this, I find it important to begin with thinking on an individual human level, finding ways to centre the effects of culture in real bodies and communities. Because my work often requires other people to participate or collaborate in the process, my challenge is to make the form of my projects correspond ethically to the communities and individuals with which I collaborate. I bring the same kind of human considerations to my graduate advising and teaching, bringing a perspective that reckons with the confluence of humanity, criticality and rigour. I want to engage and collaborate with my advisees to come to a greater understanding of how their work participates in the world and ways of building a sustainable practice that considers the whole person."
