Department of Art
Phone:(907) 474-7530Email:uaf-art@alaska.edu
Zoë Marie JonesAssociate Professor of Art HistoryOffice: Fine Arts Complex, Room 409Phone: (907) 474-7726Email: zjones@alaska.edu
Fine Arts Complex, Art Wing, Room 310Monday - Friday: 8:00am - 5:00pmClosed for lunch hourClosed over weekends and for University holidays
Abigail DruckenmillerOffice: Fine Arts Complex, Room 310Phone: (907) 474-7530Email: uaf-art@alaska.edu
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Miho Aoki
Associate Professor of Digital Art
FINE ART Music 306
Miho Aoki studied digital art and animation at the Advanced Computing Center for Arts and Design and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Ohio State University. Her works have been exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, University of Alaska Museum of the North, and other art galleries. She also produces computer-generated animations for art performances and educational videos.
Sasha Bitzer
Assistant Professor of Printmaking & Painting
FINE ART 308
Patricia Carlson
Adjunct Instructor in Metalsmithing
Wendy Ernst Croskrey
Professor of Sculpture
FINE ART 312
Wendy Ernst Croskrey is a professor at UAF. She received her MFA from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio in 1990. She has served as an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University. Professor Croskrey has been a visiting artist and presented workshops in Alaska, Arizona, Canada, Colorado, Minnesota and Texas. She has commissions in various regions of the country including Alaska and the Midwest. Solo and two person exhibitions include The University of Tasmania, Australia, Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, The International Gallery in Anchorage, Alaska, Nemo Art Gallery Anchorage, Alaska, Jeffery Tabor Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Other invitational/juried gallery exhibitions include The Babuino Arte in Rome, Italy, The Poimena Gallery in Tasmania, Australia, University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, Alaska, the ASU Art Museum in Tempe, Arizona, the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Beijing, China, and Chuck Leviton Gallery in New York.
Abigail Druckenmiller
Administrative Assistant
FINE ART 310
Mareca Guthrie
Professor
FAC 304
Mareca has been with the museum since 2008. She was born and raised in Fairbanks with many years abroad in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany and Spain. She studied studio art and art history in Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge and graduated with a degree in Studio Art from Carleton College in 2003 and an MFA from California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in Los Angeles, CA in 2007.
Somer Hahm
Adjunct Instructor in Drawing
FINE ART 306
Somer Hahm is a visual artist and a visitor living and working on the ancestral lands of the Tanana Dene peoples, also known as Fairbanks, Alaska. She received a BFA from University of Montana, Missoula in 2005 and an MFA, with an emphasis in Painting andDrawing, from University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 2008.
With robust involvement in the Fairbanks art community, Somer exhibits her work statewide and teaches painting and drawing workshops for the Folk School of Fairbanks and Well Street Art Company and is an Adjunct Professor of Drawing at the Universityof Alaska - Department of Art. Employment as Fairbanks Arts Associations Exhibition Technician, installing rotating exhibits at Bear Gallery, allows her to work one on one with Alaskan artists in all career stages and hands on with a diverse variety of art works.
Motivated to create community involvement and interest in public art, Somer founded the Far North Quilt Trail in 2019. In 2020, Hahm received a Rasmuson Individual Artist Project Award, funding from the Alaska Chapter of the Awesome Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment of the Arts to further her artist-led endeavor of creative place making, initiating Alaska’s first barn quilt trail. Somer is a mother of two young children.
Jessie Hedden
Adjunct Instructor in Drawing and Color & Design
Jessie Hedden is a painter, sculptor and printmaker who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. She delights in the experience of drawing from observed subjects playing one form off another in a visual, rhythmic dance. Unique to Jessie’s work is her ability to move between abstraction and representational imagery and her skillful articulation of form in various mediums.
Hedden received her Master’s degree in painting from the University of Washington in 2004. She previously received a Bachelor’s degree in art at Hampshire College in 1997 and soon thereafter moved to Fairbanks. For the past 20 years she has been a teaching adjunct in the Art Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Her upbringing in rural Maine including frequent trips to New York City gave her the best of both worlds, an appreciation of nature and exposure to great art. On a three-week road trip across the United States, Jessie arrived in Fairbanks and unexpectedly she fell in love with Alaska.
She has had solo exhibitions throughout Alaska, notably at Georgia Blue Gallery and the International Gallery both in Anchorage. Other shows include one at the University of Alaska Kenai as well as multiple shows at the Bear Gallery at Pioneer Park and Well Street Art Company in Fairbanks. She also was a member of the Bowery Gallery, a respected artist co-op in New York City for thirteen years where she exhibited five times.
Zoë Marie Jones
Associate Professor of Art History, Current Department Chair
FINE ART 409
Lisa Kljaich
Adjunct Instructor in Explorations in Art
J. Jason Lazarus
Assistant Professor of Photography
RASMUSON 360B
J. Jason Lazarus is an Alaska-based photographer and educator that creates handmade and narrative-driven photographic work utilizing a wide range of alternative and historical photographic processes. Lazarus has served as a photographic educator at the University of Alaska Fairbanks since 2005, teaching and developing a wide range of courses in digital, alternative and traditional darkroom photography. His alternative process work ranges from abstract Chemigram prints that discuss the complex historical legacy left behind by World War II to darkroom-printed Mordançage images that show a fragile Western American landscape decaying under the pressures of resource development, economic failures and climate change. Lazarus also spends the lengthy, dimly-lit winter months in Alaska creating unique portraits of its fragile tundra with his Fujifilm xPro-3 digital camera, finding an uncanny beauty among its bleak northern latitudes, as seen in his series entitled “Resilient”.
Charles Mason
Professor of Photography
BUNNELL 105B
Da-ka-xeen Mehner
Professor of Native Art
FINE ART 407
Da-ka-xeen received his A.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and his B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico. From 1994-2000 Mehner served as the founder and director of Site 21/21, a contemporary art gallery in Albuquerque, NM, and was a founding member/owner of the (Fort) 105 Art Studios in downtown Albuquerque in 1998. Da-ka-xeen returned to Alaska in 2000 and earned his M.F.A in Native Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2007.Da-ka-xeen work in photography and sculpture has been exhibited from New York to California; Alaska to New Mexico. Collections include the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the University of Alaska Museum of the North (Fairbanks, AK), and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), C.N. Gorman Museum (Davis CA) and the Alaska State Museum (Juneau, AK). His work has been featured in the art magazines Sculpture and American Indian Art, and in numerous newspapers, art catalogs, and blogs. He is an Assistant Professor of Native Arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the director of the UAF Native Arts Center.
Igor Pasternak
Adjunct Instructor in Drawing & Inuit Art
Teresa Shannon
Assistant Professor of Ceramics
Fine Art 411
John Smelter
Associated Faculty in Ceramics
Jamie Smith
Assistant Professor in Drawing
FINE ART 314
Jamie Smith is the creator of the Alaskan cartoon feature “Nuggets” appearing weekly in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner since 1988. He also teaches drawing classes, participates in artist residencies, and gives presentations, demonstrations, workshops, and does freelance illustration for clients throughout the community. MFA Sequential Art, Savannah College of Art & Design.
Jessica Zaydak
Adjunct Instructor in Art History
Jim Brashear
Professor of Ceramics
FINE ART 411