Visiting Artists & Designers

The visiting artists and designers lecture series is an important component of the Visual Arts program at UMBC. By bringing contemporary artists and designers from around the country to discuss their work, students gain a greater perspective about local, regional and international art communities. The lectures are also inspirational and provide students and faculty with different insights and potentials for their own art practices.   

 2026

  • Wei Long Tay

Based in Singapore, artist Wei Leng Tay works across photography, video, and installation and explores constructions of identity, memory, and history through her practice. Her works draw on long-term engagements with individuals, families, and communities, and include research into photographic archives, interviews, and collaborative processes. Central to her practice is a sustained inquiry into the medium of photography through its materiality, modes of circulation, and communicative possibilities. By working at the intersection of the intimate and the structural, Tay unpacks the complexities of belonging, displacement, and the politics of representation, bringing attention to what it means to be human within today’s shifting political and cultural contexts.

Originally trained in biology at McGill University, Tay’s early professional experience was in photojournalism, working as a photo editor and photographer for news organisations such as TIME Magazine’s Asia edition in Hong Kong. This background continues to inform her inquiry into the instrumentalization of photography and the politics of image-making. Tay later completed her MFA at Bard College and has since developed a practice that bridges research, pedagogy, and collaboration. She was most recently a lecturer of art practice at Yale-NUS College and remains invested in teaching as a form of knowledge exchange and artistic inquiry.

 

  • Amina Ross

Amina Ross is an artist whose practice scrutinizes the subtle workings of systems of power and their influence on sense perception and behavior. Ross’s creative output spans video, sound, sculpture, and installation, emphasizing nonlinear storytelling, free association, and plural meaning. Their work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (Queens, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art, (Chicago, IL), Ruffin Gallery (University of Virginia), Someday (New York, NY), the Hessel Museum of Art (Hudson, NY), the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY), and Sentiment (Zurich, CH). Ross’s films have been screened internationally, including at MIXNYC Festival, Tate Modern, The New Museum, and The Walker Art Center. In the summer of 2023, they were a featured artist at the 68th annual Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World Mending, and in 2024, they were a MacDowell Fellow. Ross was the 2023-2024 Estelle Lebowitz Artist in Residence at Rutgers University. They have recently completed residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Denniston Hill, Fire Island Artist Residency, Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, Wave Hill, Abrons Art Center, and Harvestworks. They hold a BFA from SAIC and an MFA from Yale School of Art, where they received the Fannie B. Pardee Prize in sculpture. Ross’s work has been featured in critical writings, including an essay by scholar Kelly Chung in Liquid Blackness, Vol. 8, Issue 1 (Duke University Press). Other discussions of their work can be found in The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press at CUNY), Where the Future Came From by Meg Duguid (Soberscove Press), and Support Networks by Abigail Satinsky (University of Chicago Press). An interview with Ross can also be found in BOMB Magazine.

Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. The New York Times has described Barry as “among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images, known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels, both graphic and illustrated.”Widely credited with expanding the literary, thematic and emotional range of American comics, Barry’s seminal comic strip, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, ran in alternative newspapers across North America for thirty years. Barry has authored 21 books, worked as a commentator for NPR, and had a regular monthly feature in Esquire, Mother Jones Magazine, Mademoiselle, and Salon.

Barry has received numerous awards and honors for her work, among them two William Eisner awards, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, the Wisconsin Library Association’s RR Donnelly Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award, the Holtz Center for Science & Technology Outreach Fellowship, The Museum of Wisconsin Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2017 Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society. She also received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Philadelphia University of Art in 2015, and was inducted into the Cartoonist’s Hall of Fame in 2016. In 2019 Lynda Barry was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). In 2020 she received the 2019 NCS Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year, and in 2021 Oregon State University presented her with the Stone Award for Literary Achievement.

 

2025

With a career spanning 40 years, Rich Zim‘s notable credits include Gumby, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, and The SpongeBob Movie. He is currently the CEO and president of Zim animation, where he has been making psychedelic oozing dripping clay animation sequences in his own studio for projects such as Smiling friends, Rick and Morty, Middlemost Post and many other TV shows and movies.

Ada Pinkston is a multimedia artist, educator, and cultural organizer living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Her performance work has been featured at a variety of spaces including The Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Walters Art Museum, The Peale Museum, Transmodern Performance Festival, P.S.1, The New Museum, Light City Baltimore and the streets of Berlin, Baltimore, Orlando, Washington DC, and New York. A graduate of Wesleyan University (B.A.) and Maryland Institute College of Art (M.F.A.) Her work has been supported by The Yaddo Artist Residency and McDowell Colony. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the augmented reality sculpture garden at Magic Johnson Park in South Central Los Angeles. Limited editions of her most recent work can be found at The Mimosa House London.

Kei Ito is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is centered around utilizing the conceptual framework of photography to visualize the invisible. Mainly employing camera-less photographic techniques, performance, and installation, Ito creates large-scale installations and a variety of photographic projects that excavate hidden histories. As a third-generation atomic bomb victim living in the US, Ito employs his generational history as a series of case studies that often applies the language of monuments and memorials, initiating a journey of healing and growth while inviting audiences to explore nuanced social issues and honor the memories of those lost to both historical and contemporary tragedies. Notably, his pieces are included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Norton Museum of Art, the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, the Candela Collection, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Johns Hopkins University, and the Georgia Museum of Art.

Previous Visiting Artists & Designers:

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000