Elizabeth Ingraham
Elizabeth Ingraham is a sculptor and poet whose work gives form and voice to lived experience. Best know for her series of life size sewn
fabric “skins” sculptures, for which she received the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award for Creativity, she is also the author of SKINS, a multimedia theatrical performance which debuted at La MaMa Theatre in New York City.
Her current work, Mapping Nebraska, is a stitched, drawn and digitally imaged cartography of the state (physical and psychological) where she resides. This multi-year project, which includes quilted reliefs of the
Nebraska terrain as well as mixed media textile pieces documenting the Nebraskan landscape in imaginative ways, is supported by grants from the Hixson Lied Foundation, the Arts & Humanities Enhancement Fund and the Research Council at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She will be lecturing about her project in conjunction with the Studio Art Quilts Showcase at the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska in October, 2012. Recent exhibitions of her work include a solo show at the Museum of Nebraska Art as well as exhibitions at the Haydon Art Center, Yeiser Art Center, the Kentucky Museum of Art & Craft and the Fuller Craft Museum. An Associate Professor in UNL’s Department of Art & Art History and a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies, she teaches Visual Literacy, a first year interdisciplinary design program for art, architecture and textiles students, as well as Creativity 101, an Honors seminar in creative thinking for first year science and business majors. As part of a team with faculty from Computer Science, Digital Humanities and Educational Psychology, she was awarded an National Science Foundation grant to integrate creative thinking into beginning computer science courses and her team just received a UNL grant to develop a Center for Computational Creativity at UNL. Her research into computational creativity is part of her on-going interest in integrating the digital (pixels and code) with the the work of the hand.