Wyszomirska

The Department of Art is pleased to announce that Prof. Shannon Collis, Prof. Jowita Wyszomirska, Prof. Matthew McLaughlin and MFA candidate Dan Ortiz-Leizman are the recipients of the 2023 Clarvit Research Fellowships. This award - the result of generous support from the Clarvit Family provides critical support for our faculty and graduate students to engage in new methods and modalities of research, giving them the time and resources to undertake ambitious new trajectories within their respective fields of creative research.

In its second year, the Clarvit Faculty and Graduate Student Research Fellowship aims to foster new uses of creative technology within the University of Maryland and to aid in the professional development of faculty and graduate students within the Department of Art, as described in the mission statement of the fellowship:

"The creation of new knowledge in the arts does not usually come from commonly sourced techniques; this is doubly so where technology intersects with the arts. Oftentimes, works of creative technology involve the invention of entirely new and novel visual media, which can create a significant barrier to entry for artists. This fund will provide opportunities for faculty and students in need of time and resources to create new works of creative technology in the arts and design and will help recruit graduate students to the Department of Art MFA program.”

More information about each recipient is below:

Professor Shannon Collis:

Shannon Collis investigates relationships among multiple sensory modalities and
between visual and acoustic phenomena in perception. She creates audiovisual
installations and interactive environments that highlight the situated, embodied
experience of hearing and seeing.
Her work has been widely exhibited across North America and abroad, including solo
exhibitions at The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art (Ursinus College, PA), The
Dalton Gallery (Agnes Scott College, GA), Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), and Open
Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre (Toronto, Canada). Other collaborations and
screenings include projects at the Murray Art Museum (Albury, Australia), the Walters
Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art (Baltimore, MD), and the Currents New
Media Festival (Santa Fe, NM). She has been awarded the Robert W. Deutsch
Foundation’s Rubys Artist Grant and was a finalist for the Janet and Walter Sondheim
Artscape Prize. She has received numerous individual and project grants from the
Canada Council for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. Collis is a 2005
graduate of the Master of Fine Art program at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Professor Matthew Mclaughlin:

Matthew McLaughlin is a mixed media artist and curator whose work explores the human
relationship with their environments and spaces, both physically and psychologically. He
received his BFA degree in Fine Arts from Ringling College of Art and Design and his MFA
degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University. Matthew has had solo exhibitions in
Washington, DC and Phoenix, among other areas. His work has been included in group
exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, in commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and
museums. He has received numerous awards including the Maryland State Art Council
Individual Artist Award 2016 in Works on Paper. His work is in the collections of the Library of
Congress, the Zuckerman Museum of Art and various universities, along with private collectors.
He has curated for numerous national exhibition spaces including the American University
Museum in Washington, DC.

Professor Jowita Wyszomirska:

Jowita Wyszomirska is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing and large-scale installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally in solo and two-person exhibitions. Some of her honors and awards include the Good Hart artist residency, MI; Andy Warhol Preserve Artist in Residence program, Long Island, NY; Wrangell Artist Residency in McCarthy, Alaska; Jentel Foundation, Wyoming; Soaring Gardens artist in residence program, PA; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska;  Maryland State Art Council Individual Artist Award, and Board of Governors Award (b grant), William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund, Baltimore, MD . Wyszomirska's work, represented by a DC-based gallery, Neptune & Brown, has been included in many private, corporate, and institutional collections, with a recent acquisition by the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

MFA Student Dan Ortiz-Leizman:

Dan Ortiz Leizman is an artist, writer, and educator currently working towards an MFA at the University of Maryland. They received a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College in 2020. Ortiz Leizman’s work approaches mark-making as an embodied practice that sometimes leads to communication but often actively resists legibility. Their practice is utterly interdisciplinary, rejecting false divisions between art, performance, theory, science, and technology.  Themes in their work can be distilled into the endlessly repeating and very queer phrase “words and bodies and words and bodies and words.”