Faculty

k. funmilayo aileru — pronouns: xi, xem, xyr(z) — is a Black Native artist, educator, and organizer who works in the realms of AfroIndigenous futurism(s). xi employs a variety of mediums including digital media, sculpture, and installation to engage concepts and themes such as [ancestral] memory, trauma, and Otherness within celestial time and space. Much of xyr work explores historical, present, and future relationships between technology and Black and Indigenous experiences and embodiment in the West. aileru experiments with reconstructing these paradigms through collective imagination and dreaming.

k. funmilayo aileru was born and is based on the South Side of Providence, RI. xi is an enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island and a co-founding member of blackearth collective and lab. Currently, xi is a Mellon Visiting Practitioner Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Brown University (Providence, RI). xi is also an inaugural ‘Parkist-in Residence’ for the City of Providence, Artist-Facilitator for the Black Lives Matter Mural Project.

Stephen St. Amant, adjunct assistant teaching professor, teaches Introduction to Sculpture. Stephen is an artist, marketer, and musician living in central Pennsylvania. His work is not tied to a specific medium, but woodworking and cabinetmaking have been longtime loves. In his drawings, sculptures, and design work, craftsmanship and attention to detail are a continuous thread. Stephen’s work often uses everyday objects and routines as entry-points to considering larger ideas. Stephen writes a daily blog about productivity, creativity, and personal disposition at www.savenwood.com.

Benjamin Andrew is an assistant teaching professor at Penn State, specializing in online education and interdisciplinary design. He has worked as a graphic and web designer for clients ranging from political campaigns to research teams at NASA. His fine art practice explores the frontiers of storytelling by leveraging participatory art and digital media to imagine strange new futures. He previously taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Johns Hopkins University; though he misses Baltimore, he enjoys his new home on the internet.

Ian Brill is an instructor of digital art for Penn State World Campus. His work focuses on the accumulation of form through process. Through the design of interactive, performative, and multisensorial environments, he considers boundaries of becoming (versus being) and our immersive relationship with technology. His installations, performances, and writing have been presented internationally at conferences, festivals, and galleries.

Michael Collins is an associate professor in the School of Visual Arts and teaches new media studio art and digital design. Collins has been creating online learning technology for over a decade and is an advocate for open-source technology. His current research interests center around free access to teaching knowledge and home-grown learning technology. His most recent collaboration is called OER Schema, a project helping to make open education resources (OER) more interoperable. In his words, “this project is an exhilarating ontological romp through pedagogical metadata.”

Collins has produced a wide breadth of creative work including new media exhibitions, furniture, web interfaces, drawings, product concepts, and animations. His most recent exhibition work centers around digital privacy, identity, and security. He is the lead faculty coordinator for the multi-college World Campus digital multimedia design program and enjoys teaching design to students that work across subjects.

Anna Divinsky is an assistant teaching professor of art at the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture Office of Digital Learning. She is also the digital arts certificate and digital multimedia design program coordinator. Her passion and research focus on exploring best teaching and learning practices in online art education.

As a recent Innovator in Residence grant recipient from the Center for Pedagogy in Arts and Design, Divinsky continues to share best practices in online teaching, assessment, and engagement through the College of Arts and Architecture Graduate Certificate in Online Teaching, fostering a place for growth and community for graduate students within the college. Being an artist inspires and informs Divinsky’s approach to pedagogy, integrating studio techniques, appreciation of detail, love for design, and hands-on art-making.

Dr. Eduardo Navas teaches on the principles of cultural analytics and digital humanities in the School of Visual Arts, College of Arts and Architecture, at Penn State, researching the creative and political role of recyclability and remix in art, media, and culture. He has lectured internationally, and he produces art and publishes on remix studies.

Courtney Redding is an adjunct lecturer with the School of Visual Arts and teaches courses in the digital multimedia design program and the digital arts certificate program. Her work encompasses the art and design world, with a focus on multiple media forms of expression. Redding's influences are from a diverse array of disciplines. From science and history to the natural world and technological field, her imagery integrates these backgrounds into a philosophy of symbols and a personal typographic and textural array.

Leanna Rosas’ teaching and new media studio work is concerned with issues of identity, inequality, irony and manipulation, and the various relationships within visual culture. Her recent work is in music composition, collaborating with the visual work of partner Carlos Rosas, Penn State School of Visual Art, and the audio remixing of Robert Dansby, California Institute of the Arts. Much of the work resulting from their collaborations seeks to explore the means in which one identifies with the continually evolving conditions within a technology-driven culture.

Christine J. Shanks teaches and creates work in both traditional studio and digital media. She applies her design background to her multifaceted work in academia by utilizing user-experience principles, creativity, and design thinking in her curriculum and pedagogy. As an educator, her primary goal is to establish a supportive classroom that emboldens students to explore and refine their process, motivations, and skills. She feels her work in academia and design are intertwined; new projects and pursuits in one field develop from ideas and exploration in the other.