Faculty perform the primary functions of the university through teaching, research
and creative activity, shared governance, and curriculum design. Our program of interdisciplinary
exchange and increased collaboration in teaching will better prepare our students
for the realities of the art and design worlds, in which traditional distinctions
among diverse media are increasingly blurred.
The MTSU Department of Art and Design faculty includes a participant in the Whitney
Biennial, which is America's leading contemporary art exhibition. Also among us are
a Fulbright award winner, the founder and webmaster of the largest printmaking information
website in the world, and contributors to national art education journals. Our studio
art faculty members have exhibited their work in hundreds of national and regional
competitive exhibitions, video and audio internet exhibitions, and have won prizes
in many of them. Several faculty members have had their works of art reviewed and
reproduced in national publications. The faculty also includes several winners of
MTSU awards for teaching, for creative research, for excellence in student advising,
and for innovative uses of technology.
Faculty members have for many years generated service projects and creative collaborations
with local schools, the Nashville airport authority, art departments at other universities,
with on-campus academic and non-academic units, and with talented high school students
attending the Governor's School of the Arts. Service has always been a quiet though
important feature of the department's activities. Our faculty members believe that
the increased and improved classroom spaces in Todd Hall, along with an increase in
service project funding, will allow us to meet more of middle Tennessee's growing
desire for visual arts activities.
