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.

Eric Telfort is an illustrator and fine artist who earned his BFA in Illustration from RISD and, after working as a production artist in the video game industry, an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Telfort has lectured throughout the US and internationally in Zimbabwe, where he was a Visual Arts Initiative artist in residence. In 2019 he received a Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson fellowship to explore the concept of creativity in poverty, and to pursue a personal independent visual novel. 

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.

Patricia Felisa Barbeito is professor of American literatures in the Literary Arts and Studies department. Her research and teaching interests include race and ethnicity in American literature; the African American literary tradition; captivity and prison narratives; magical realism; the Latin American novel; and noir fiction and film. She is also a translator of contemporary Greek fiction and poetry, and in 2013 she was awarded the MGSA Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize for her translation of Elias Maglini's The Interrogation.

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.