Anne Burdick, Chair
Anne Burdick is a regular participant in the international dialogue regarding the future of graduate education and research in design. In addition, she designs experimental text projects in diverse media, for which she has garnered recognition, from the prestigious Leipzig Award for book design to I.D. Magazine’s Interactive Design Review for her work with interactive texts. Burdick has designed books of literary/media criticism by authors such as Marshall McLuhan and N. Katherine Hayles and she is currently developing electronic corpora with the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Burdick’s writing and design can be found in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine and Electronic Book Review, among others, and her work is held in the permanent collections of both SFMOMA and MoMA. Burdick studied graphic design at both Art Center College of Design and San Diego State University prior to receiving a B.F.A. and M.F.A. in graphic design at California Institute of the Arts.

Tim Durfee, Core Faculty
An architect and partner of Los Angeles-based Durfee|Regn, Tim Durfee’s work includes exhibitions, urban sign systems and interfaces. Durfee has created exhibitions for The Hammer and The Huntington and a permanent gallery for Target’s corporate headquarters. He has collaborated with artists—Doug Aitken’s installation “Ultraworld”— and developed an award-winning Web site for LACMA. He taught at Woodbury University and at SCI-Arc, where he was director of Visual Studies from 2001 to 2005. Prior to receiving a master’s degree in architecture from Yale University, he studied literature and history at the University of Rochester.

Ben Hooker, Core Faculty
Although artist and designer Ben Hooker’s back- ground is in screen-based multimedia design, lately he finds himself collaborating with architects, industrial designers and computer scientists working in the field of human-computer interaction. Before joining Art Center, Hooker was visiting faculty at Intel Research in Berkeley. Previously, he taught at Central Saint Martins College and at the Royal College of Art, London. He continues to realize many creative projects in partnership with designer Shona Kitchen, including an electronic artwork installation at San Jose International Airport. Ben has a B.S. in electronic imaging and media commu- nications from the University of Bradford and an M.A. in computer related design from the Royal College of Art, London.

Phil van Allen, Core Faculty, Director, N.E.T. Lab
Philip van Allen is an interaction designer, educator, researcher and technologist with 30 years experience at the intersection of technology and the creative arts. He founded interactive production company Commotion in 1993 and has worked with a range of clients including Philips, Nestlé, U2, Yoko Ono, Infiniti and Acura. Van Allen is also the lead author of the transmedia publication (book, Web site, mobile phone content and a poster) The New Ecology of Things. As part of van Allen’s ongoing research, the publication explores the emerging world of ubiquitous networks, smart objects and spaces and approaches to design practice that embrace mythology, meaning-making and embodiment.

Kevin Wingate, Director
An artist and educator, Kevin Wingate cares about cultural fetishes, geometric abstractions and the physical limits of materials. He exhibits his paintings at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles. While exhibiting nationally, he has been a part of Pillow Lavås, a collaborative group that intersects lifestyle, culture and social interaction. In 2004, the group was part of the Class: C gallery for the Orange County Biennial of Art. Kevin holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.A. and B.F.A. from Webster University in St. Louis.

Rob Ball
Rob Ball is a Los Angeles based spatial experience designer and design educator. His interests in both collections based exhibits and branded environments have given him expertise in a wide variety of 3 dimensional projects over 25 years. In the past few years he has also championed a new program of a real world, real project studio, abroad. Students move to a targeted city and evaluate it from the outside in / inside out. This “Fresh Eyes” approach allows them to delve into a variety of branding issues, acting not only as problem solvers but opportunity seekers for city governments and private foundations. Students have explored the potentials of Copenhagen and Berlin in 2005 and 2006. Rob is a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Environmental / Industrial Design as well as the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in Fine Arts / Art History.

Brad Bartlett
Brad Bartlett earned his master’s degree in design from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1998, and holds a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from North Carolina State University. His work at Cranbrook, which explored the relationship between media and culture, was presented at MIT and Fabrica of Benetton in Italy. In 1999, Print magazine selected him as “New Visual Artist.” That same year he established a design studio whose clients have included UCLA Live, MOCA and the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising.

John Brumfield
John Brumfield received his B.A. from UC Berkeley, his M.A. from California Institute of the Arts and his M.F.A. from CSU Los Angeles. John has received an NEA Grant and his work has been seen in Afterimage, Art Issues, Artweek, Artforum, Graphis, LAICA Journal, Camera Obscura and SF Camerawork.

Elise Co
Elise Co is a media artist and founding partner of Aeolab, a design and technology consulting firm in Los Angeles. Co holds an M.S. in media arts and sciences and a B.S. in architecture from MIT. Previously, she taught courses in interaction design and physical computing at the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Switzerland. Her work has been shown internationally, including at MoMA, SIGGRAPH and IMRF Tokyo.

Peter Cho
Peter Cho is a Los Angeles-based media artist and designer. Cho holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the UCLA Design | Media Arts department, where his work dealt with issues of language, writing, and meaning and a Master of Science degree from the MIT Media Lab, where his design research explored custom models for typography in time-based and reactive media. He has received honors for his work from Ars Electronica, Tokyo Type Directors Club, New York Art Directors Club, ID Magazine, and Print Magazine. His work has been shown at the Telic Gallery, Ginza Graphic Gallery, Ars Electronica, Art Sonje, Seoul Arts Center, the Art Directors Club, and Cooper Union.

Sean Donahue
Sean Donahue is principal of Research Centered- Design, a Los Angeles-based design practice that explores how design can be utilized to make significant contributions to society. Donahue has lectured and published internationally on the practice of media design and design research and has led studios at RISD; Royal College of Art, London; and North Carolina State University, where he was the 2004 Designer-in-Residence. Recent research has been published by the University of Cambridge, Princeton Architectural Press, MIT Press and ID Magazine.

Garnet Hertz
Garnet Hertz is a contemporary artist and Fulbright Scholar whose work explores themes of technological progress, creativity, innovation and interdisciplinarity. Hertz is an Artist in Residence in the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction at UC Irvine. He has shown his work internationally, including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotic art. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture series on electronic art and design.

Geoff Kaplan
Geoff Kaplan of General Working Group has produced projects for a range of academic and cultural institutions, including MOCA, the Walker Art Center, and CalArts. His work is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Geoff received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Shona Kitchen
Shona Kitchen is an internationally renowned multi-disciplinary artist/designer with a passion for technological advancement. Her work explores the intersections between the physical and virtual and the ways in which they manifest themselves as new spatial experiences. Kitchen uses technology to enhance and enrich, rather than distract from, the culture and aesthetics of its surroundings and she considers its subsequent social, political and environmental consequences.

Norman Klein
Norman Klein is a cultural critic, media historian and novelist. He is the author of The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; and The Imaginary Twentieth Century, a science-fiction database novel and exhibition which ran at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Klein is a professor at CalArts, has taught as adjunct faculty at Art Center since 1982 and is now also a thesis advisor for the Media Design Program.

Lisa Krohn
Lisa Krohn is the creative director and lead designer at Krohn Design, a brand and design practice whose clients have included Herman Miller, Walt Disney Imagineering and the San Diego Children’s Museum. Krohn studied art and art history at Brown University, trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and worked with renowned designer Mario Bellini. A winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, Krohn’s work can be found in the collections of SFMOMA, MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

Catherine MacLean
Received her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria, British Columbia and M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. She has had solo exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Open Space Gallery, Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff and El Camino College Art Gallery in Los Angeles. She has won numerous Canadian Council Arts Awards Service Grants.

Jason Pilarski
Jason Pilarski is co-founder of MachineHistories, a collaboratie design group. The designs are derived from the idea of involving a collection of machines and technologies, and factoring in the language, the gesture -- i.e., the history of that said device. Jason received his MFA from Art Center College of Design and BFA from School of Visual Arts.

Thea Petchler
Thea Petchler is Art Center’s Director of Writing. She teaches courses on postwar U.S. history, creative nonfiction and visual studies and her research focuses on the democratization and professionalization of creativity in American business and education. Petchler has served as a visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy and as a program officer at the Center for Arts and Culture in Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

Holly Willis
Holly Willis is an Associate Director at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things and the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. The former editor of RES magazine, Willis has written extensively on experimental media practices for a variety of publications. She holds a Ph.D. in critical studies in cinema- television from USC.