I’d like to start by expressing my gratitude to the Art, Art History, and Design department and the College of Arts and Letters for supporting me during these formative years of my career. I’d like to also thank the members of my Designation B Committee for your guidance and support during this time.
My appointment at MSU began in Fall of 2021 as a full-time, fixed-term, teaching-focused Assistant Professor teaching courses in the Electronic Art and Intermedia (EAI) and Foundations programs. In the past four years, I have taught a wide range of different courses1 which equally reflect the needs of the department and my wide range of expertise. During this time, I have successfully taught and developed curriculum within the Electronic Art and Intermedia, Integrative Studies in the Arts & Humanities, AAHD Foundations, and the Studio Art Master of Fine Arts departments. My ability to do so effectively is predicated on my interdisciplinary educational background and my consistent engagement in contemporary art, research, and service as a faculty member.
My goal for the next five to ten years is to continue teaching in EAI and other areas which have departmental need and to develop interdisciplinary curriculum which teach students how to use and think about emerging tools for creation including AI, Game Engines, and Poetic Computation (making art with code) in a Studio Art context. I will continue to develop my art and research practices, focusing on how they contribute to my
1 I have taught nineteen unique courses between Fall 2021-Spring 2026, including independent studies.
teaching philosophy, while building professional networks with peers and institutions across my field such as the College Art Association, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and the Universities Art Association of Cananda. Within this ten-year window, I plan to apply for a promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor.
Teaching Philosophy
As an educator, I also identify as a student and an artist, and these identities have a symbiotic relationship. While earning my MA and MFA with honors at the University of Iowa’ Intermedia program, I learned that the most vital teaching moments emerge from active practice. I continually expand my pedagogical toolkit through exhibitions, academic conferences, and artist residencies, bringing fresh technical skills and conceptual frameworks directly into the classroom. This cycle of learning, unlearning, and relearning models for students what a sustainable creative practice looks like.
My own educational journey taught me that students need different kinds of support as they grow. This awareness shapes how I structure courses. I use name and pronoun practices that affirm all students, build flexibility into deadlines to accommodate varying access to resources and stability, and design assignments that allow students to explore topics which relate to their larger art interests. In all my courses, students consistently tell me they feel safe taking artistic risks and many create their first works exploring gender, sexuality, or cultural identity in my classes. Students identify me as a faculty with whom they feel confident will support them and their research interests whether they want to learn how to make their first video game or how to incorporate motors and sensors into their painting practice.
I have experience teaching across the studio art curriculum, from introductory courses for non-majors to advanced graduate seminars. At MSU, I've developed Studio Art courses from scratch on the topics of Sound Art and Performance Art, as well as an Integrative Arts and Humanities course on Transgender Art and Visual Culture (which is the first Transgender Studies course ever taught at MSU).
I incorporate professional practice skills into every course I teach, and my students consistently achieve success which lays a foundation for a long-term career in the arts. As a faculty mentor, I have sent art students every year since 2022 to the National Conference for Undergraduate Research to exhibit their art and present their research. These projects have ranged from a crystallized artist book about queer identity to a sound sculpture made from an Arduino, a motion sensor, and a haunted doll. My students have also participated in local public presentations of their art at the annual Intermedia Festival, over the airwaves of our college radio station, and in group exhibitions organized by the students themselves in our department’s art galleries. Post-graduation, my students are working in museums, universities, arts non-profits, and one has recently started her own DIY artist gallery.
Assessment
My assignments deal primarily with formal analysis, ongoing critique, creative production, and research. Formal analysis may include a focus on readings including the course textbook, history, or theory which gives context to the creative assignment. Informed by my experience as a MSU 2024 Epistemic Justice Fellow, I encourage students to incorporate their home language and community knowledge into the classroom to help support their learning.
In STA-384: Experiments in Digital Video, the first TouchDesigner2 project introduces students to Nam June Paik, the father of video art, by writing a formal analysis of one of his video artworks on their course blog. We then have a group discussion about Paik’s work and a lecture provided on the influence of Paik on contemporary art and the military/corporate technologies which enabled artists to begin experimenting with video in the first place. In the following class, we have a workshop in which I show students how to develop their own video synthesizers in TouchDesigner based off the Paik/Abe analog video synthesizer which Paik used to create his art. From this foundation, students are given a creative assignment on a topic of their choosing in which they must make their own video art project using the tool they have coded from scratch. By teaching in this way, students are directly connected to the history of this medium, gain an appreciation for analog tools through accessible digital remediation, and develop their own voice as they determine what the subject of the artwork will explore. This method of teaching is directly influenced by my participation in the Signal Culture artist residency in 2024 which I would describe as a bootcamp for learning analog video/audio signal processing and is arguably the most important video art residency in the United States. When students have completed their work, we then have a formal critique in which students present the concepts and research which inform the work. The last step of this assignment is another workshop in which students are taught how to apply to film and video festivals so that they can find an audience for their work. Students enrolled in this course have successfully screened their work at conferences and festivals outside of Michigan including Richmond (Virginia, USA), Moscow (Russia), and Almaty (Kazakhstan).
Mentoring Students
As a faculty member, I have worked on Studio Art MFA Guidance Committees and supported students in Honors Option and other independent undergraduate research projects. Stemming from conversations and workshops in the classroom, these projects have led to thirteen of my undergraduate mentees being accepted to share their art at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research between Spring 2022-2026 in states including California, Wisconsin, and Virginia. My mentees have also presented their art at the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum here at MSU, where one of my students, Phoenix Poole, was awarded the Spartan Choice Award for their artwork The Prominence of Book Bans (2025). I have been acknowledged by the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) as a faculty who supports undergraduate research and was invited by Deric McNish, the Director of Undergraduate Research in CAL, and Ellen Moll, Assistant Dean for
2 TouchDesigner is a visual programming language used for creating real-time interactive multimedia art.
Undergraduate Studies in CAL, to serve as the Interim Associate Director of Undergraduate Research in CAL for the Spring 2026 semester.
I have served on MFA Guidance Committees for Patrick Taylor (2022-2024), Emily Burkhead (2022-2024), Jaelene Tatum (2024-Present), Niloufar Fallahfar (2023-Present), and Hailey Becker (2024-Present). I am currently serving as co-chair for Hailey Becker’s Studio Art MFA (2026) and Forestry PhD (2027) Guidance Committees with Dr. Emily Silver. Hailey sought me out as her AAHD co-chair because of my inter/anti-disciplinary expertise which was helpful in supporting her to discover her role within the art world as someone with a complex educational background.
Service
Within AAHD, I have been committed to service that supports my teaching focused appointment. This has included serving on the BFA Review Committee in 2024 and 2025, which gives me the opportunity to give feedback to students as they apply for the BFA degree in our program. I am currently serving as the Faculty Sponsor for the MSU Weezers, a Weezer fan club on campus, and the Studio Art Development Club, a club started in 2025 by a cohort of my undergraduate students who wanted to build a student organization which supports student artist’s professional development outside of the classroom. The S.A.D. club has been a success, in that their President, Matt McGill, has been selected to present their research on AI Art at the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in February 2026 – an honor very rarely given to undergraduates.
I am the faculty sponsor for the MSU AAHD Hollander Lecture Series visiting artist, Lindsey French for Spring 2026, in which I am organizing a public lecture, dinner with peers, and studio visits with our graduate students. I sought to invite Lindsey to campus because of her work as an artist who explores sound as I have been approached by many art students to mentor them on how to incorporate sound into their practices. In 2025, I served on two distinct committees which supported visiting artists, the Diana Al-Hadid Exhibition Advisory Committee and the Stanley and Selma Hollander Lecture Series Proposal Review Committee. As part of my work on the Diana Al-Hadid Exhibition Advisory Committee, I made an audio recording as part of her solo exhibition to help engage viewers and also hosted Diana in my STA-898: Professional Practices course where she offered our graduate students a two-hour masterclass on how to have a career in the arts. I would like to highlight that as part of the STA-898 course, we hosted many visitors including working artists, gallerists, curators, critics, and art historians. The names of all the visitors to that class can be found in the syllabus calendar for the course earlier in this document.
As part of the STA-112: Concepts and Practices course, I lead a field trip to Chicago for students and the wider AAHD and MSU community in which students are tasked to visit museums, galleries, and public art works. This field trip is a transformative moment in our AAHD student’s education as it brings the classroom into the real world and introduces students to one of the most important cities for the arts in the country.
Professional Development
I am proud of the professional development opportunities I have engaged in as a faculty at MSU including my participation in the Epistemic Justic Faculty Fellowship and the Integrative Arts and Humanities Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Fellowship at MSU.
Currently, I am a fellow in the Hope and Resilience Faculty Fellowship program. This CIEG funded professional development program and has allowed me to connect with fellow UNTF faculty at different stages of their career. We are currently working on an expanded, interdisciplinary research project meant to capture our experiences and communicate the needs of UNTF faculty during a time in CAL when there are many conversations happening about what teaching-focused faculty could mean in the future.
I am also receiving mentorship as part of the All College Mentoring Program by Dr. Emily Katz, who is actively supporting me as I work on this application and other similar professional development opportunities.
Service to the Profession
I have been a proud member of UNTF, serving on the Bargaining Committee and the What is Teaching? Committee in 2022. My work within these committees helped negotiate our current UNTF contract with MSU and helped define what the “teaching” in teaching-focused faculty means so that the union can better support the diverse needs of our members.
Outside of MSU, I have served as a board member of the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM, 2022-2024) and am currently a member of the Services-to-Artists Committee at the College Art Association (the largest academic arts organization in the United States). At IAWM, I helped fundraise for programming and advocated for queer and gender diverse musicians and sound artists as the co-chair of the Development Committee. As part of my duties with the Services-to-Artist Committee, I am co-chairing a roundtable at the upcoming CAA Annual Conference in Chicago on “The Politics of A.I. as a Medium of Art” to help CAA develop their position as an organization on a controversial topic which is challenging our discipline. Additionally, at the conference I will be serving as a portfolio reviewer, giving professional feedback to artists, designers, and students in the Chicago area. Knowing how faculty and students in other parts of the country are working allows me to bring diverse skills and perspectives back to our students to help train them to be the future peers we wish to see in the art world.
In 2025, I chaired the first panel of my career at the Universities Arts Association of Canada on the topic of “Politically Engaged Bio Art” which included speakers such as PhD candidate Christopher LaCroix, artist/scholar Micha Cardenas, and curator Giorgia Liapi.
I have completed several prodigious and competitive artist residencies, which directly supported my teaching, including Wave Farm (Acra, NY), the Institute for Electronic Art (Alfred, NY), and Signal Culture (Loveland, CO). In 2026, I will be completing artist residencies at the Gibraltar Pointe Center for the Arts in Toronto and at Vermont Studio Center, where I have received a seven thousand dollar resident fellowship. During my time at MSU, I have also been invited to speak as a visiting artist at universities including Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), the University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA), and at Cornell College (Mt. Vernon, IA). For the past few years, I have screened my video art
work internationally as part of the Light Matters Film festival and have had my work featured in exhibitions at the South Bend Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. In 2026, I will have two solo exhibitions of my work in Iowa and Michigan and will debut my work in South Korea at the CICA Museum as part of a group exhibition in the Fall. My activity in all of these areas enhance my abilities as a faculty in the classroom immeasurably.
Pedagogical Goals
My pedagogical goals over the next five years include continuing to update EAI curriculum to emphasize poetic computation, interactive media, new methods in video art, and sound art. I’d like to expand into teaching more courses on the topic of art and technology and am open to teaching lab or lecture courses outside of AAHD to meet this goal. I will continue to support undergraduate research and hope to hire an undergraduate researcher next year to help with a project that involves developing patches in TouchDesigner for working with 3D assets for live performance contexts. In order to model for students what a career in the arts can look like, I will continue to produce art and research at an international level by speaking at conferences, participating in artist residencies, and exhibiting my work. My dream is to lead a study abroad program in East Asia on the topic of New Media Appreciation, where students would engage with museum and gallery programming and then return to present their own artworks and research inspired by their journey. I am also planning to apply for CIEG and HARP funding to support the production of new art and research within the topics of transgender studies and electronic art and intermedia. My long-term goal is to evolve into a leadership position at MSU where I can better support and advocate for arts curriculum which supports our students and keeps us at a competitive level with other R1 art programs.
Conclusion
In summary, I’d like to express that as a faculty member I am committed to teaching excellence. I believe my materials present myself as a valuable member of the AAHD, CAL, and MSU faculty who is dedicated to providing transformative learning opportunities to our students. In this reflective essay, I have left out many moments out of necessity; the unforgettable instances when students have recognized the work that I have put into this career. One such moment that comes to mind was when a student was accepted to NCUR and they said, “I didn’t think anything like this would be possible for me.” In that moment, they found a form of self-worth and recognition that we rarely have the privilege of witnessing as faculty. It’s impossible to express the weight of that moment in this document, and given the chance, I will keep working on making more moments like this happen for our students in the future.
I am excited to see what continued growth and development are possible within my position at MSU and I’d like to once again, thank my Designation B committee and the AAHD community for their support and consideration. Thank you.
-Lorelei d’Andriole, Spring 2026