NEWS RELEASE                      

For Immediate Release

 

Contact: 
 
 Charlene Teters, Academic Dean
505.424.2354, or cteters@iaia.edu
 Eric Davis, Marketing & Communications Director
505.424.2351, or eric.davis@iaia.edu 
  
Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA)
Announces Addition of New Faculty
New Department Chair, Professors, Faculty, and
MFA Mentors    

SANTA FE: June 12, 2019


IAIA Academic Dean Charlene Teters (Spokane )   announces new faculty member appointments.

UNDERGRADUATE



 
Jennifer Love, Interim Department Chair  of the Creative Writing Department, and will serve in that capacity for the 2019-2020 academic year. 
 
Jennifer Love (Malagasy), is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing. She is the 2019 recipient of the AICF Faculty Member of the Year award at IAIA. She is also the 2019 recipient of the The Southampton Writer's Conference's First Gen award,  a full scholarship for a five day workshop in Southampton, NY . She is the co-chair of the IAIA Pathways Council (Achieving the Dream), served as Developmental Education Coordinator from 2016-2018, and as the Summer Bridge Coordinator in 2017 and co-coordinator in 2018. She is the 2017 winner of the Santa Fe Reporter's Writing Competition in Non-fiction. She received her MFA from IAIA in 2017. 


 
Kay Holmes,  PhD, Assistant Professor, Indigenous Liberal Studies

Dr. Kay Holmes is a Mvskoke Creek descendant. She received her PhD in Education with an emphasis in Language, Literacy, and Culture in 2013 from the University of California, Davis (UCD) and an MA in Native American Studies in 2006. She works from an Indigenous perspective, incorporating other disciplines and methods into her research and teaching -- which is both transformative and social justice oriented. 


 
Andrea Otero, Assistant Professor, Math/Indigenous Liberal Studies

As a long-standing enthusiast of both mathematics and music and the infinite connections they share, Andrea studied at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. After studying Performing and Fine Arts abroad in England and Scotland through a Tulane University exchange program, she discovered that the combination of mathematics, science, physics, and nature were perfectly entwined, and those connections have remained her passion ever since. In 2008, she arrived in New Mexico, hoping to explore various avenues of mathematics in the classroom that were less typical and more creative, allowing for exploration and discovery. After hearing and reading about IAIA, she came to speak to the department head -- and in 2011, was hired as adjunct faculty. In 2018, she served as Visiting Professor, while also completing her MEd in Mathematics Curriculum and Instruction. 


 
Daisy QuezadaAssistant Professor Studio Arts, Ceramics

Daisy Quezada received her BFA in Studio Arts from the Santa Fe University of Art and Design in 2012 and her MFA from the University of Delaware, Newark in 2014. She has exhibited internationally including the Denver Art Museum, New Taipei City Yinngge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan, Icheon Ceramics Festival in South Korea, Summerhall in Scotland and Hubei Institute of Fine Arts in China.



Mattie Reynolds, Assistant Professor in Museum Studies and Director of the Balzer Contemporary Edge Gallery
 
Mattie Reynolds, (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), former  Preparator and Exhibition Coordinator at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, is the new Director of the IAIA Balzer Contemporary Edge Gallery. She will also teach in the Museum Studies department.  Mattie holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Montana and a MS in Arts Management from the University of Oregon


 
Anthony Deiter, Assistant Professor in Cinematic Arts, Gaming/Virtual Environments

Anthony Deiter is an enrolled tribal member of the Peepeekisis Cree Nation. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, a BFA from Arizona State University and an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts.  
 
He brings to IAIA 19 years of teaching   experience in 2d/3d animation, virtual technologies, Vicon motion capture with applications for gaming, production, post production. His teaching experience includes editing, production, post-production, web design, and online learning. He is a published media artist and teacher nationally and internationally.


GRADUATE



 
Santee Frazier (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), Director of the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program

Santee Frazier is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He received his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and his MFA from Syracuse University. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, The School for Advanced Research, and The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Frazier's poems have appeared in Ontario Review, American Poet, and Prairie Schooner, among others. The author of Dark Thirty, University of Arizona Press, 2009, Frazier's second collection of poems Aurum is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in Fall 2019.
 
Santee Frazier has served as a Poetry Mentor in IAIA's MFA program since the its inception in 2013 while also teaching at Syracuse University and maintaining an active presence in the literary field. He will be moving back to Santa Fe to direct the MFA program.  Santee brings with him substantial experience in higher education and writing programs, demonstrated leadership skills, and a respected career in the literary arts. 


 
Layli Long Soldier, Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing

Layli Long Soldier  is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a poet, writer, and artist currently teaching in Randolph College's MFA program. Her book of poems WHEREAS, published by Graywolf Press in 2017, received the PEN Jean Stein Award and National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. The book was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. Layli is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Culture Foundation. Her work has been featured on NPR's On Being and PBS's NewsHour.
 
Her poems and critical work appear in Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Reader, Kenyon Review, New York Times, American Indian Journal of Culture and Research, PEN America, The Denver Quarterly, and  Brooklyn Rail, among others. In 2010 Q Ave Press published the chapbook Chromosomory, and in 2013 she participated in the art exhibit Pte Oyate at the Red Cloud Indian School.
 
Layli is a contributing editor at Drunken Boat and the poetry editor for Kore Press, a literary press that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by women. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA with Honors from Bard College


 
Jamie Figueroa, Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing

Jamie Figueroa (Afro-Taíno), is Boricua by way of Ohio and a long-time resident of northern New Mexico. She explores identity, familial relationships, place, culture, and ancestry. A two-time graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, (BFA and MFA in Creative Writing), she publishes across genres including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has been published in McSweeney's,    Catapult, Epoch, Hinchas de Poesia, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Flash: International, Eleven Eleven, and  Sin Fronteras, among others. Her collaborative community work facilitates an engagement with underrepresented voices and highlights intergenerational, multi-racial and multi-ethnic, gender and sexuality difference, and equity. Currently, in addition to advising in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College, within the Indigenous/Decolonial Art focus, Jamie facilitates modern myth making for personal and collective restoration and healing.


 
Esther Belin, MFA Program Mentor

Esther Belin (Diné) is a multimedia artist and writer. She is the author of two collections of poetry,  From the Belly of My Beauty  (1999), which won the American Book Award form the Before Columbus Foundation, and  Cartography  (2017). She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley


 
Brandon Hobson, PhD, MFA Program Mentor
 
Brandon Hobson is the author of Where the Dead Sit Talking, a winner of the Reading the West Book Award and finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. His other books include Deep Ellum and Desolation of Avenues Untold. He has won a Pushcart Prize, and his stories and essays have appeared in such places as Conjunctions, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, NOON, Publisher's Weekly, and elsewhere. In addition to mentoring in the MFA program, Brandon is beginning in the Fall 2019 as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at New Mexico State University. He holds a PhD from Oklahoma State University and is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation.


 
Brooke Swaney Pepion, MFA Program Mentor
 
Brooke Swaney Pepion (Blackfeet Tribal Member & Salish Descendent) is a 2003 Stanford graduate. She went on to obtain her MFA from NYU.  A 2013 Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, a 2014 Sundance Native Lab Fellow and a Time Warner Fellow, her work has screened at Sundance, ImagineNative, the Autry, and the Museum of Modern Art amongst others.  She is versed in both short and long-form content creation.


 
Cedar Sigo,  MFA Program Mentor
 
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. He studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. Sigo is the author of Royals (Wave Books, 2017), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), and Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010). He is also the editor of There You Are: Interviews, Journals, and Ephemera, on Joanne Kyger. He has taught at St. Mary's College and Naropa University.

 
David Treuer, PhD,  MFA Program Mentor
 
David Treuer (Ojibwe) is from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a Professor of English at USC. After graduating from high school he attended Princeton University where he wrote two senior theses-one in anthropology and one in creative writing -- and where he worked with Toni Morrison, Paul Muldoon, and Joanna Scott. Treuer graduated in 1992 and published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel The Translation of Dr Apelles and a book of criticism, Native American Fiction; A User's Manual appeared in 2006. The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. He published his first major work of nonfiction, Rez Life, in 2012. His next novel, Prudence, was published by Riverhead Books in 2015. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta, Harper's, Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, Lucky Peach, The New York Times, The LA Times, Orion, and Slate.com. His most recent book of nonfiction, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee(2019), is a New York Times Bestseller.

Dean Teters commented: "I'm excited about the new faculty coming in this next academic year. They are strong in their field; many are Native, and many are alumni."

To arrange an interview with any of the new faculty, please contact Eric Davis at 505.424.2351, or eric.davis@iaia.edu .
 

# # #
 
Offering undergraduate degrees in Studio Arts, Creative Writing, Cinematic Arts and Technology, Indigenous Liberal Studies, Museum Studies, and Performing Arts -- an MFA in Creative Writing -- along with certificates in Business and EntrepreneurshipMuseum Studies, and Native American Art History -- IAIA is the only college in the nation dedicated to the study of contemporary Native arts. The school serves 495 full time equivalent (FTE) Native and non-Native American college students from across the globe.  IAIA is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission -- and is the only college in New Mexico accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design

 
About IAIA  -- For over 50 years, the Institute of American Indian Arts has played a key role in the direction and shape of Native expression. With an internationally acclaimed college, museum, and tribal support resource through our Land Grant Programs, IAIA is dedicated to the study and advancement of Native arts and cultures -- and committed to student achievement and the preservation and progress of their communities.  Learn more about IAIA and our mission at  www.iaia.edu.

The Institute of American Indian Arts Foundation is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization.  To make a donation on-line, please click here -- or call toll free: 1.800.804.6423.