Faculty members bring their professional experience to students in the classroom. Read about their recent accomplishments.
Art Faculty
Linda Swanson
Chair, Art Department
MFA, Goddard College
BFA, Indiana University
Linda Swanson chairs the Art Department and teaches courses that address issues in painting and drawing; her own work reflects these interests. She has shown her work nationally and her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Newark Museum. Her drawings are included in And They Called It Horizon: Santa Fe Poems (2010), a collaborative project with Santa Fe Poet Laureate Valerie Martinez. In September 2010, Swanson curated an exhibition and presented a lecture on the work of Gerry Snyder in Sofia, Bulgaria. See examples of her work in our gallery.
Tom Miller
Faculty, Art Department
MFA, University of Arizona
BFA, Columbus College of Art and Design
Tom Miller teaches sculpture and foundations at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. His studio practice includes sculpture, painting, and video. In 2010, Miller’s work was included in the exhibition Case Studies from the Bureau of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. His artwork has recently been acquired by The Museum of Contemporary Art- Tucson, New Mexico State University, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. Miller exhibits with Box Gallery in Santa Fe, and his solo exhibition Holes, Walls and Slabs will open in August 2011. He has also taught at the University of Arizona and the Santa Fe Community College. See examples of his work in our gallery.
Khristaan D. Villela, PhD
Faculty, Art Department
BA, Yale University
MA, PhD, University of Texas – Austin
Khristaan Villela specializes in the art of Precolumbian Mesoamerica and the history of the field of Precolumbian studies. He is a Scholar in Residence at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Santa Fe, New Mexico. His book, The Aztec Calendar Stone (edited with Mary Ellen Miller) was published by the Getty Press in March 2010. He is Consulting Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the Miho Museum, Shigaraki, Japan, and curated the exhibition, Ancient Civilizations of the Americas: Man, Nature, and Spirit in Pre-Columbian Art (2011). He was Consulting Curator at the Getty Research Institute, for the exhibition, Obsidian Mirror Travels: Refracting Ancient Mexican Art and Archaeology (2010-2011), which presented key images of ancient Mexican archaeological sites from the eighteenth century to the present day, including Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969), lithographs by Frederick Catherwood, photographs by Desire Charnay, Augustus and Alice Le Plongeon, Alfred Maudslay, and Teobert Maler, and contemporary works by Enrique Chagoya and Guillermo Gomez Pena.
Villela has served as Consulting Curator of Precolumbian Art at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Until 2009 he was Eugene V. Thaw Professor of Art History and Director of the Thaw Art History Center at the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Villela is a coauthor of Contemporary Mexican Design and Architecture (with Ellen Bradbury and Logan Wagner, 2002) and has published numerous articles on Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions and culture. He earned a PhD in the History of Art at the University of Texas at Austin.
Susan York
Faculty, Art Department
MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art
BFA, The University of New Mexico
At Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Susan York directs the Sculpture program and teaches courses in professional practices and installation, among others. She shows her work internationally; recent exhibitions include the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM, and exhibitions 2d, Marfa, Texas. York’s site-specific installations and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and Artforum International Magazine. She is represented by galleries in the United States and Germany.
