Nine Accomplished Artists, Designers and Scholars Join RISD Faculty

RISD’s fall 2024 semester is in full swing, and nine new full-time faculty members are contributing their unique points of view to the Architecture & Design, Experimental and Foundation Studies, Fine Arts and Liberal Arts divisions. “Every year, I am humbled by the creative and intellectual practices I witness in our colleagues, and this year is no exception,” says Provost Touba Ghadessi. “These new faculty members bring to RISD bold approaches to biomaterials, internationally acclaimed practices and research, as well as justice-minded pedagogical structures. From students to faculty, staff and community practitioners, we all learn from the epistemological plurality RISD is elevating.”
 
The Architecture & Design division welcomes Associate Professor of Interior Architecture Can Altay, who has been teaching interior design at Istanbul Bilgi University in his native Turkey since 2011. There he led the development of a status quo-defying curriculum informed by experiences in art, architecture and urbanism. In his own practice, Altay uses sculpture, photography, design and installation to reflect on unforeseen and unsanctioned uses of urban space and the relationship between the observer and the observed.

Newly hired Assistant Professor Topher Gent 12 FD is also inspired by architecture, as well as design, engineering and natural forms. A native Rhode Islander and RISD alum, Gent is one of three new full-time faculty members in the Experimental and Foundations Studies (EFS) division. Through objects and form, he explores the conflicts and dualities of excess and minimalism, perceived value and the role of 3D design in visual communication. Before joining the faculty at RISD, Gent taught 3D design at Swarthmore College and worked with the Center for Functional Fabrics at Drexel University. 

Fellow alum and EFS faculty member Jerome Arul 12 ID, an industrial designer and interdisciplinary artist who has been teaching part-time at RISD since 2015, has worked on such environmentally friendly projects as the portable EcoZoom cook stove, which reduces indoor air pollution and has been deployed by the World Food Programme, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Relief International. He co-teaches a collaborative studio on product design and development with RISD’s Industrial Design department, the MIT School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management and has also taught design courses at the MIT D-Lab.   

Assistant Professor Rachel Rosenkrantz has also been teaching at RISD since 2015, introducing lutherie (stringed instrument making) to students in the core Foundation Studies courses she teaches. She runs a successful business handcrafting guitars, ukuleles and unique stringed instruments that combine the traditional and the new. Rosenkrantz focuses in her practice on sustainability and, in particular, biomaterials. “I get bored quickly,” she says, “and finding that equilibrium between form and function always keeps things challenging.”
 
The Fine Arts division welcomes Associate Professor of Ceramics Shoji Satake, who formerly headed the ceramics department at West Virginia University School of Art & Design. In addition to maintaining an active studio practice, he has served in various roles within the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) and completed artist residencies in China, Japan, Canada and the US. “I love teaching just as much as making my work,” he says. “As a faculty member, I have the opportunity to collaborate with many different departments and advance research, techniques and technology.”

New Assistant Professor of Illustration Leela Corman, who joined RISD’s faculty as an adjunct in 2022, creates comics and graphic novels in watercolor, gouache and acrylics. Her work focuses on Polish-Jewish history, 20th-century New York, trauma and loss. The second book in her New York trilogy—Victory Parade, a graphic novel about women working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the Second World War, a Jewish refugee turned amateur women’s wrestling champ, and the astral plane over Buchenwald—was published in the spring of 2024 by Schocken-Pantheon. Past books include the graphic novel Unterzakhn (Schocken-Pantheon, 2012), You Are Not a Guest (Fieldmouse Press, 2023), Victory Parade (Penguin Random House, 2024) and the short comics collection We All Wish for Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Plant, 2016). Her teaching philosophy centers the direct physical experience of making art by hand with unpredictable physical materials and the use of storytelling practices to arrive at powerful images.

The Illustration department also welcomes new Assistant Professor Steven Johnson, who earned their BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and their MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Utilizing the language of drawing, animation and photo-documentary, their work attempts to make peace between religious, intellectual and humanistic ideals in relation to Blackness and otherness through multidisciplinary storytelling. 

In the Liberal Arts division, Theory and History of Art and Design welcomes Associate Professor Sara Rich and History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences adds Assistant Professor Molly Kelly to its roster. Rich is an art historian, archaeologist and artist “who dabbles in wood science and weird fiction.” She is author of Cedar Forests, Cedar Ships (Archaeopress, 2017), Shipwreck Hauntography (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and, most recently, Mushroom: Object Lessons (Bloomsbury, 2023), part of a series of books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Kelly is an interdisciplinary philosopher whose research explores questions of place, politics and power within phenomenal experience. She approaches philosophy as a way of thinking that extends beyond the classroom into students’ lives, and her teaching style encourages students to think about philosophical concepts as they appear in everyday contexts and to question the social, cultural and historical conditions that frame them. 

Simone Solondz / top photo by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH
September 9, 2024