IAIA Academic Dean Charlene Teters (Spokane), a nationally-known artist, activist, and educator has a long relationship with IAIA, dating back to 1984 when she first attended as an undergraduate. Since being named to her current position at the college, she has not relinquished any of these roles.

Recently, Teters was named as one of the "5 Amazing Indigenous Women to Celebrate Instead of Christopher Columbus"-alongside such notable candidates as Anacaona (Taino), Sacagawea (Shoshone), Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee Nation), and Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabekwe Ojibwe), by Bust.com.

Teters graduated from IAIA in 1986 with an Associate of Fine Arts in painting. She then attended the College of Santa Fe (now Santa Fe University of Art and Design), graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting in 1988. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Illinoise at Urbana-Champaign, plus an honorary doctorate in fine art from Mitchell College in New London, Connecticut.

Teters is a founding board member of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and the Media (NCRSM), which was created to fight the powerful influence of major media who choose to promote messages of Native American oppression.

On October 10, 1997 she was honored as Person of the Week by Peter Jennings on the ABC World News Tonight program for her commitment to her work and her people.

Her paintings and art installations have been featured in over 21 major exhibitions, commissions, and collections. Additionally, Teters was the first Artist-in-Residence at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, New York.

She was born and raised in Spokane, Washington, near the Spokane Indian Reservation.

Guests explored the IAIA campus and programs during our annual open house on November 13, 2015, and learned more about our exciting opportunities, met students, faculty, and staff.

The open house was free and open to the public. Light food and refreshments were provided.

Native America Calling conducted a live broadcast of the radio show in the IAIA Library. Guests on the national call-in show discussed such topics as "what it means to be a working artist" and included Dean Charlene Teters (Spokane), Student Activites Coordinator Nocona Burgess (Comanche), IAIA President Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation), student Frost Fowler (Navajo Nation), and Artist-in-Residence James Luna (Pooyoukitchum/Ipi/Mexican-American).

IAIA hosted various exhibitions, demonstrations, and ceremonies, and a bronze pour-a sight not often seen by those outside of the art world-that took place at the Allan Houser Sculpture & Foundry Building on campus at 3:30 pm.

Other highlights of the day included:

• Tours of the IAIA Campus every half-hour led by the Admission's Office
• Performing Arts department showcase featuring music, dance, and theater in the Auditorium in the Library and Technology Center
• Screenings in the Digital Dome
• Archery demonstration
• Polaroid photography booth
• Screen printing and printmaking in the Printing Studio
• Sand casting demonstrations in the Jewelry Studio
• Fabrication Lab demonstrations
• Hand game demonstrations
• Bookstore specials
• An exhibition of recent acquisitions to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Permanent Collection
• Public curated exhibition competition in the Robert & Barbara Ells Family Collection Gallery

Visitors who collected an IAIA Open House Passport and had it stamped at the 5 required locations received a special gift.

Participating media on campus included Native America Calling (KUNM 89.9 FM) and Honey Harris from The Big Show (KBAC 98.1 FM).

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, New Mexico Museum of Art, Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and The Lensic Performing Arts Center presented Acting Out performances by iconic Indigenous performance artists.

James Luna (with Sheila Tishla Skinner), Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Rebecca Belmore presented peformances that amazed those in attendance. For more than 30 years, James Luna has provocatively explored the Native American experience and has created some of the most iconic artworks of our time. McArthur Award recipient, Guillermo Gómez-Peña's spoken word and actions engage notions of the "living archive" and radical citizenship. Rebecca Belmore's performances activate the charged space between the personal and the political, memory and trauma.

Following the performance was a keynote discussion between the artists led by writer, activist, and curator Lucy Lippard.

The performances were presented as part of Acting Out: A Symposium on Indigenous Performance Art which took place December 3 & 4, 2015. The symposium was made possible in part by a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council.

IAIA held hold its Holiday Market on Saturday, December 12, 2015, from 9 am-4 pm in the Academic Building on the IAIA campus. Alumni, students, faculty, staff, and Native artists sold their artwork to the public just in time for Holiday giving. This years market was a sell-out with 65 artist booths and a record crowd.

The 2015 IAIA Holiday Market featured works of art by artists including:

• Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw) IAIA 1965
• Ron Martinez Looking Elk (Isleta/Taos) IAIA 1993
• Brian Fleetwood (Muscogee Creek) IAIA 2012
• Monty Little (Diné) IAIA 2015
• Tania Larsson (Gwich'in) IAIA 2016
• Terran Last Gun Kipp (Blackfeet) IAIA 2016
• Keith Secola, Jr. (Ute/Ojibwe) IAIA 2012
• Stephen Wall (Ojibwe)

A wonderful time was had by everyone.

Santa Fe's Inn and Spa at Loretto, A Destination Hotel, is partnering with IAIA to showcase emerging Native artists. The program launched on November 6, 2015, with a pop up gallery event and live paint to honor Native American Heritage Month. Participating students included Anthony Gchachu (Zuni Pueblo), George Alexander (Muscogee Creek), LeRoy Grafe, Melissa Shaginoff (Chickaloon Village/Pyramid Lake), Monty Little (Navajo Nation) and August Walker (Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma).

This event was part of the larger programming that will be developed as a result of the hotel's partnership with IAIA.

By developing relationships with IAIA, the Inn aims to grow their already well-established Art and Soul of Santa Fe(tm) program through the addition of student artists to the Inn's collection. Student art pieces and outdoor sculptures will become fixtures on site at the Inn at Loretto. Most of the pieces are for sale. Additionally, art events will take place at the Inn throughout the year. The Inn is also working on developing a student holiday showcase as well as an exhibition leading up to Indian Market in 2016.

"The opportunities provided to IAIA students from our relationship with the Inn and Spa at Loretto are countless," said Nocona Burgess (Comanche), IAIA instructor and artist. "From exposing their work to a new audience, to having them interact with guests as well as the opportunity for them to possibly make their first sale, this program is unique and important to IAIA and the students involved. We look forward to a long and mutually-beneficial partnership with one of the great properties in Santa Fe."

The National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development (NCAIED) hosted a new, one-of-a-kind event-the Youth Entrepreneurship Summit (YES!). YES! is designed for Native high school and college-aged students interested in business and entrepreneurship to hone their skills and learn more about what it takes to become successful in business. IAIA students and faculty attended the day-long summit at Buffalo Thunder Casino and Resort north of Santa Fe.

IAIA Student Cassandra Johnson (Alaskan Native) said, "I loved the passion in the keynote speakers' voice and actions. I was inspired by all the presenters. I learned that if I really want to be successful, it has to come from within me and what I would be willing to do to get there."

IAIA has had a long and distinguished history of performing arts on its campus, with numerous alumni and faculty making significant contributions to the field. In 2014, the IAIA President's Cabinet passed a resolution in support of reviving the performing arts, which has not been an official program since the mid-1990s. The newly launched program recognizes that the field of performing arts is ever-changing and artists have multiple aspirations and motivations for entering the arts.

IAIA works with Tribal Education Offices to assist students applying for scholarships. IAIA Students Mildred Raphaelito (Navajo) and Emma DeMarr (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) discussed the visit from Senior Financial Aid Counselor Todd Wilcox from the Office of the Navajo Nation Scholarship & Financial Assistance (ONNSFA). Mr. Wilcox was on the IAIA campus answering questions about applying for college scholarships funded by the Navajo Nation.

Spring 2016 application is available at www.onnsfa.org

The Senior Graduating Exhibition showcased the final projects of studio arts and museum studies seniors. In their final semester, the seniors developed exhibitions and worked closely with advisors, gallery and museum studies staff, faculty and students, to realize their artistic visions.

Seniors include George Alexander (Muscogee Creek), Melissa Shaginoff (Chickaloon Village/Pyramid Lake), Tazbah Gaussoin (Picuris Pueblo/Navajo), and Natasha Martinez (Navajo).

The opening reception took place Friday, November 20, 2015, at 5 pm. Congratulations seniors!

William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., an enrolled member of the Assiniboine Tribe of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation of northeastern Montana, is not only a former member of the IAIA faculty, he is also the former artistic director of the Inter-Tribal Playwrights' Center of Arlee. William is also a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency for 2014. He is a faculty affiliate in the English/Creative Writing Department at the University of Montana in Missoula, and a former Libra professor in the English Department at the University of Maine, Orono. He is now an adjunct faculty member at the same university.

Yellow Robe presented two special events while he was at IAIA: Native Stories Disney Wouldn't Touch and Art as Ritual to Life, Art as Sovereignty

The events were sponsored by Creative Writing Department in partnership with Performing Arts.

Indigenous theater collective Spiderwoman Theatre presented two special events on the IAIA Campus, December 3 and 5, 2015.

Spiderwoman Theatre was founded in 1976, when Muriel Miguel (Kuna and Rappahannock Nations) gathered together a diverse company of women, including both of her sisters. The women were of varying ages, races, sexual orientation, and worldview. The collective sprang out of the feminist movement of the 1970s and the disillusionment with the treatment of women in radical political movements of the time. They questioned gender roles, cultural stereotypes, and sexual and economic oppression. They took on issues of sexism, racism, classism, and the violence in women's lives. Their weaving of humor with popular culture and personal histories along with their sometimes shocking style excited the hearts and spirits of the women (and sometimes the men) in their audiences in the United States, Canada and all over the world.

Spiderwoman Theatre broke new ground in using storytelling and storyweaving as the basis for the creation of their theatrical pieces. The performers wrote and performed personal and traditional stories and, with Muriel as the "outside eye," they were organically layered with movement, text, sound, music, and visual images.

The events, Muriel Miguel: A Retrospective and Storyweaving Workshop were well received by those who attended.

These events were sponsored by IAIA Performing Arts, in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Native Arts/Acting Out Symposium, IAIA Indigenous Liberal Studies Program, IAIA Associated Student Government, and IAIA Student Life.

IAIA's Indigenous Liberal Studies Department is convening an interdisciplinary conference exploring the idea of Indigenous Narrative. The Indigenous Intervention on Indigenous Narrative is being convened to bring forth ideas related to the Indigenous experience, exploring "narrative" in culture, literature, philosophy, history, politics, economics, film, television, art, music, social theory, and business. The concept of Indigenous Narrative has many applications and responses in the Indigenous world including assimilation, economic development, education, cultural change, artistic expression, evolution/devolution, language, psychology, and more.

If you're interested, please submit a one-page abstract or a panel proposal with abstracts by December 11, 2015. Organized panels are encouraged. Special Undergraduate Research sections for papers and panels are available (please indicate on your proposal/abstract if yours is undergraduate research). All presenters will be required to register for the conference. Registration details will be forthcoming.

To submit your proposal or abstract please email [email protected] or mail Indigenous Intervention, Indigenous Liberal Studies, Institute of American Indian Arts, 83 Avan Nu Po Road, Santa Fe, NM 87508-1300. For more information please contact Stephen Wall at (505) 424-2376 or [email protected].

IAIA has been working to develop an online journal of papers from the Indigenous Interventions conference. We seek to digitally publish all works that are submitted by the scholars for publication.

IAIA will introduce six new courses in the IAIA Digital Dome which will be offered over a three-year period, beginning in the Spring of 2016.

These new courses will teach students computer programming, interactivity projection mapping, game development, electronics, and other related topics. Students will develop a fundamental understanding of computational thinking and project development for immersive displays. The courses are designed to investigate new forms of art and storytelling that arise from the exploration of new technologies, particularly in the convergence of traditional forms of cinema and the non-linear, user-driven nature of games and interactives.

Charles Veasey will develop and teach these courses by utilizing immersive, interactive environments and applications for a variety of platforms. He has served as a technician and researcher for the IAIA Digital Dome for the last three years as well as a senior software developer and project manager at Ideum, where he created digital museum exhibits for institutions such as NASA, Chicago MSI, and SFMOMA. Charles also worked as the principal researcher and software developer of 3D surround sound technology for New Media and Emerging Technologies. He possesses an MFA in Electronic Arts from Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute and a BS from Bowling Green State University.

The new courses are:

• Computer Programming for the Arts (Spring 2016)
• Interactive Programming and Development (Fall 2016)
• 3D Graphics and Simulation (Spring 2017)
• 3D Sound Spatialization (Fall 2017)
• Immersive Game Development (Spring 2018)
• Project Development in Immersive Environments (Spring 2018)

This month, six Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) received competitive grants totaling $160,000 through the American Indian Higher Education Consortium's longstanding Tribal ecoAmbassador partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The Tribal ecoAmbassador program empowers tribal communities to identify and address their own unique environmental needs while building the capacity of Tribal Colleges and Native students by encouraging relationships with federal scientists and offering hands-on field and laboratory experience. The program recognizes and honors an important factor that makes TCU's unique among institutions of higher education, the incorporation of traditional cultural knowledge with the western scientific method.

Under the initiative, each TCU develops its own project idea, based on its community's needs and the institution's capacity. Past projects have included recycling, traditional gardens, water and air quality research, traditional plant restoration, mercury accumulation in plant and animal tissue, and more. To date, the Tribal ecoAmbassador project has supported 26 projects at 15 TCUs.

When a college receives an award, TCU professors and students are matched with EPA staff with federal scientists who are working in the same field on similar projects and can offer expertise, connections, or training.

Six TCUs received grants this year, including IAIA, which received $10,000. The IAIA Tribal ecoAmbassador project will use art and permaculture to enhance public spaces and to create restoration and passive water harvesting systems and bio-retention rain gardens.

This newsletter edition includes a feature that highlights the excellence and accomplishments of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

IAIA's students, faculty, staff, and alumni are consistently involved in research, scholarly, and artistic activities, that help to further IAIA's outstanding reputation.

Some recent professional accomplishments include:

From The Santa Fe New Mexican-A national nonprofit focused on supporting the arts recently awarded grants of $50,000 each to two Santa Fe artists.

United States Artists recognized Diego Romero, a ceramist, and Kade Twist, a multi-disciplinary visual artist, as fellows.

Romero is a full-time potter who is able to live off his artistic creations. But he often has to create many small pieces to support himself and his wife rather than the larger museum pieces he would prefer. The money will take the edge off his daily grind and allow him to create several large pots in the coming year.

"I just hope I'll live up to the scholarship," Romero said. "I want to earn it."

The United States Artists awards grants to artists in nine fields, including dance, literature, traditional arts, and visual arts. Romero and Twist are among 36 artists who won grants this year.

Once nominated, artists compete in a rigorous application process. In addition to the grant, the selected artists also have a chance for a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's retreat at Lake Como, Italy.

Romero, 51, a member of Cochiti Pueblo, was named a fellow in the traditional arts category. He creates pottery adorned with scenes of Native American life. He was born in Berkeley, Calif., though his father hailed from the pueblo.

Romero, who has attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, now lives in central Santa Fe and displays some of his work at the Robert Nichols Gallery on Canyon Road.

This collection of original articles, edited by Troy Lovata and Elizabeth Olton brings together for the first time the research on graffiti from a wide range of geographical and chronological contexts and shows how they are interpreted in various fields. Examples range as widely as medieval European cliff carvings to tags on New York subway cars to messages left in library bathrooms. In total, the authors legitimize the study of graffiti as a multidisciplinary pursuit that can produce useful knowledge of individuals, cultures, and nations. The chapters represent 20 authors from six countries and offer perspectives of disciplines as diverse as archaeology, history, art history, museum studies, and sociology, eliciting common themes of authority and its subversion, the identity work of subcultures and countercultures, and presentation of privilege and status.

Elizabeth Olton teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of New Mexico, and is affiliated with the Institute of American Indian Arts. With a PhD in Art History from the University of New Mexico, she has also taught at St. Mary's Honors College in Maryland and the University of Texas at San Antonio. Through her dissertation research, Dr. Olton became fascinated with ancient Maya graffiti from the Central Acropolis at Tikal.

Peter M. Kershaw directing Jamison Banks (Seneca-Cayuga Tribe) on location shooting a tease for a Gothic Horror written by Peter M. Kershaw. The shoot was devised as a collaboration of film industry professionals with IAIA Cinematic Arts and film students from SFCC. Jamison's effects make-up created by IAIA graduate, Brian Bolman (Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota).

Author and poet Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq) will serve as guest editor for the 2016 edition of TCJ Student. She joins an esteemed cadre of writers, poets, and artists who have served as guest editor or essayist for TCJ Student, including Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Luci Tapahonso, and last year's guest editor LeAnne Howe.

Tribal College Journal is currently soliciting short stories, poetry, memoirs, artwork, and short films from tribal college students for the contest. The winners will be awarded prizes and will be published in the 2016 edition of TCJ Student and online at TCJStudent.org. The deadline for writing submissions is February 12, 2016. For contest guidelines and more information, visit www.tcjstudent.org/contest.

TCJ Student helps foster creative writing and highlights the talents of tribal college students. Tribal College Journal will announce the winners at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium's (AIHEC's) student conference in Minneapolis, March 14-16, 2016.

Kane is the author of The Cormorant Hunter's Wife, Hyperboreal, and The Straits, and has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including the Whiting Writer's Award, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, an American Book Award, the Alaska Literary Award, and fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and the School for Advanced Research. She makes her home in Anchorage, Alaska. Kane studied at Harvard and Columbia University's School of the Arts where she earned her MFA. She is also an instructor in the IAIA Low Residency MFA in the Creative Writing program.

Two members of the IAIA faculty won awards. James Lujan (Taos Pueblo) received 1st runner up and Peter Kershaw received Honorable Mention.

Layli Long Soldier holds a BFA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Bard College. She resides in Tsaile, AZ on the Navajo Nation and is an English faculty member at Diné College. She has served as a contributing editor to Drunken Boat. Her poems and critical work have appeared in The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review Online, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, The Brooklyn Rail, Eleven Eleven, and Mud City, among others. She is a recipient of the 2015 NACF National Artist Fellowship. Her first chapbook of poetry is titled, Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and forthcoming manuscript is titled Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017).

The Academy of American Poets announced the winners of the 2015 American Poets Prizes, which are among the most valuable poetry prizes in the United States. This year the organization has awarded over $200,000 to poets at various stages of their careers.

IAIA Alumna Joy Harjo received the Wallace Stevens Award, which is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a stipend of $100,000. Recipients are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy's Board of Chancellors. Past winners of the prize have included John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Adrienne Rich.

Joy Harjo's books of poetry include Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton, 2015); How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002); and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award. She is also the author of a memoir, Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012), which won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary prize for creative nonfiction. Also a performer, Harjo has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam in venues across the United States and internationally. She is Professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

About Joy Harjo, Academy of American Poets Chancellor Alicia Ostriker said: "Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth-especially the landscape of the American Southwest-and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing."

Crockett Bodelson is our new full-time Preparator and Exhibitions Coordinator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts as of November 23, 2015. He will be reporting directly to Chief Curator Candice Hopkins. Crockett is originally from Santa Fe and comes to MoCNA with great experience. He was a preparator and gallery assistant at the Jack Fisher Gallery in San Francisco and most recently a preparator at MoMA PS1 in New York.

Eileen Berry is our new Development Officer, and will be reporting directly to Director of Institutional Advancement Alex Shapiro. Eileen comes to IAIA with a wealth of Development experience, including positions as Director of Development and Donor Relations for the Moab Music Festival, Development and Marketing Director for Santa Fe Desert Chorale and most recently as Director of Development for the Cancer Foundation of New Mexico. Eileen holds a BA in Art History from St. Michael's College.