Jamie Zill Senior Portfolio 2010-11: Graduate School Application

Application can be accessed at link below

http://www.risd.edu/pdf/applications/GRappform1011.pdf

I am interested in the Rhode Island School of Design because I would still be able to be on the East Coast, where I grew up, and it’s graduate photography program is the third most prominent program in the United States. RISD’s graduate program as a whole is the number one program in the nation. They offer interdisciplinary seminars, the opportunity to work with faculty and critics, and hold lectures by distinguished artist, scholars, and critics. RISD also has a collaborative relationship with Brown University to allow the student to have further access to courses, lectures, and events. The faculty is internationally renowned, and they offer sixteen distinct programs to prospective students. The MFA photography program offers various courses, intertwining technical, conceptual, and aesthetic ideas. They encourage both still photography and time-based photography, encouraging students to experiment with video, digital imaging, etc. The program is based more on independent study, yet graduates are allowed to take undergraduate, more structured, courses as well. The department also encourages conversation between all levels of the program, undergraduate, graduate, and faculty, and holds several events per year to allow this integration.

PROFESSOR - Ann Fessler

MFA, University of Arizona, Tucson

MA, Webster University

BA, Ohio State University

“Since the mid-1970s, Ann Fessler has created narrative audio and video installations, photographs, artists’ books and short films that address the impact of mass media and family on women’s lives and intimate relationships. Her installations and photographs have been exhibited at galleries and museums including the California Museum of Photography, Riverside; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her photographs and works on paper are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum; Museum of Modern Art; Museum for Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. She has been the recipient of numerous residency awards including Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Nexus Press, Atlanta, Georgia; and Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY. Her award winning films have been screened widely at festivals including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Taos Talking Pictures Festival and Women in the Director’s Chair International Film Festival. Ann has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the LEF Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and Art Matters, New York. In 2003, Ann was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, to continue her oral history interviews for a new audio installation and film (currently in progress) and to conduct research which ultimately culminated in her critically acclaimed non-fiction book THE GIRLS WHO WENT WAY: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v Wade, published by The Penguin Press in May of 2006.”

http://photo.risd.edu/faculty/fulltime/ann-fessler/

Close to Home

Installation View

Bell Gallery

2001

Close to Home

Installation View

Bell Gallery

2001

Close to Home

Installation View

Bell Gallery

2001

Close to Home

Installation View

Bell Gallery

2001

Close to Home

Installation View

Bell Gallery

2001

View of cover of novel The Girls Who Went Away

GRADUATE – LAURA SKINNER

“Laura Skinner was born in Connecticut and raised in Louisville, KY. She received her BA in English from Kenyon College in 2005, and is currently working toward an MFA in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been in a number of group exhibitions, and most recently a solo show at Zephyr Gallery in Louisville. Laura is photographing private investigators for her current project.”

http://www.lauraskinner.com/bio.html