Academic Leadership

As RISD’s chief academic officer, Touba Ghadessi sets a vision for student learning, academic affairs and the academic program, championing and advancing the core values of the institution across all efforts. Ghadessi previously served as provost and a professor of the history of art for Wheaton College and, before that, as co-chair of Wheaton’s Art and Art History department and the college’s associate provost for academic administration and faculty affairs.

As RISD’s first vice provost for strategic partnerships, Sarah Cunningham supports research development and special projects, collaborating with community organizations, arts nonprofits, higher education entities and corporate design leaders worldwide. Prior to RISD, she served as the executive director for research and founding director of the Arts Research Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.

A Providence-based designer and educator, John Caserta holds an MFA from Yale University and a BA in Journalism from the University of North Carolina. As an information designer, he has produced infographics and data-driven applications for The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Reuters, the Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center in France, NBC, the NCAA and more.

Brooks Hagan has taught at RISD since 2006, focusing on the integration of hand-based practice with industrial manufacturing and new technologies. In addition to maintaining a studio practice informed by industrial fabrication processes, he is the founder of the interdisciplinary Virtual Textiles Research Group and a co-creator of Weft, a digital platform for designing on-demand custom woven textiles.

Jennifer Prewitt-Freilino is a social psychologist whose primary research explores the power of social identity and role norms generally (and gender and parental status in particular) to shape how we think about ourselves, behave, and speak. At RISD she teaches courses in psychology and other areas, and her work appears in publications like Self and Identity, Sex Roles and several others.

In her work Joanne Stryker explores the nature of artifacts and human perception through paintings depicting other works of art. Her two-dimensional interpretations of three-dimensional form—sculpture, pottery, friezes—exploit the interplay between various modes of perception, creating intricate still lifes outside the confines of time, place or historical context.

Nicole M. Merola focuses her teaching on a range of environmental humanities topics, including biodiversity and extinction studies, climate change cultures, discourses of the anthropocene, ecological literary studies and theories of natureculture. Her current environmental humanities scholarship addresses the intersection of affect, form and socioecologies in contemporary culture.

Margot Nishimura is an art historian with more than two decades of experience in teaching, curatorial practice and administration in museums and libraries. Providing leadership for The Fleet Library, the Nature Lab, the Center for Arts & Language, and Campus Exhibitions, in past years at RISD she was a lecturer in art history and, from 2010–11, Academic Affairs' director of academic planning and assessment.