SCHOOL OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO - Key Persons


Alex O'Keefe

Job Titles:
  • Research

Angel Otero

Job Titles:
  • Artist
From paintings to sculptures and beyond, Angel Otero's (BFA 2007, MFA 2009) work defies definition. The artist's innovative dried oil paint compositions smash together colors, textures, and focal points-almost daring viewers to discern a hierarchy. But Otero's work-with its bold, colorful, distinct point of view-speaks for itself.

April Sheridan

Job Titles:
  • Special Collections Manager

Brittan Nannenga

Job Titles:
  • Head of Library Special Collections Digital Services

Carolyn Faber

Job Titles:
  • Media Collections Librarian

Holly Stec Dankert

Job Titles:
  • Head of Research

John M. Flaxman

Job Titles:
  • Library

Jordan Wright

Job Titles:
  • Public Services Coordinator, Library Special Collections

Keith Kostecki

Job Titles:
  • Senior Library Acquisitions Assistant

Lindsay Hoy

Job Titles:
  • Digital Project Coordinator

Mackenzie Salisbury

Job Titles:
  • Information Literacy Librarian

Maria Gaspar

Job Titles:
  • Artist
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist and an associate professor in Contemporary Practices at SAIC. Her work negotiates the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. She's the recipient of an Imagining Justice Artist Grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship, and a Creative Capital Award. In Unblinking Eyes, Watching, Gaspar printed high-resolution images of the north end of the jail to scale and plastered them onto the wall of the Chicago Cultural Center. In this work, Gaspar forces the viewer to think about the presence and proximity of these detention sites and our own relationships to power.

Melanie Emerson


Michael Donovan

Job Titles:
  • Senior Cataloging Metadata Assistant

Nathaniel Feis

Job Titles:
  • Acquisitions Librarian

Ned Marto

Job Titles:
  • Access Services Manager

Shu Lea Cheang

Job Titles:
  • Artist
  • Media Artist
Born in Taiwan and now based in Paris, Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures. She began her career as a member of activist media collectives Paper Tiger TV and Deep Dish TV. Later, as a celebrated pioneer of Net Art, her work Brandon (1998-99) became the first-ever web-based artwork commissioned and collected by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Since 1994, she has produced four feature films, Fresh Kill (1994), I.K.U. (2000), Fluidø (2017), and UKI (2023), which encompass a new genre she calls "Scifi New Queer Cinema." In 2019, she represented Taiwan at the Venice Biennale with the mixed media installation, 3x3x6. Over the years, Cheang has participated in many renowned international biennials, including Performa 19, New York; the 11th Taipei Biennial; the 50th and 58th Venice Biennale; and the 1992 and 1994 Whitney Biennials among others. Her works are included in the world's key permanent collections for contemporary art, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and DSL collection, Paris.

Sylvia Choi

Job Titles:
  • Head of Collection Management