Faculty

Erica Meryl Thomas is an interdisciplinary social practice artist whose projects occupy the space in-between the sometimes rigid lines that define other disciplines. She often works as an embedded artist, creating collaboratively with others to uncover layers of history in relation to the personal. The resulting projects take the form of installations, storytelling or documentary, interventions in public space, conversations, publications, and other experiential forms. In her studio practice, she is a printmaker, pigment forager, and book maker who always finds ways to fold words into her work.

Her work as an organizer grew out of her art practice. For the past 10 years, she has been digging deeper and deeper into the ways that art, education, and organizing can come together to make a better world. Her political activism, work as an educator, and work as an artist are intertwined, each informing the other.

https://www.ericamerylthomas.com/

Midori Yamanaka is a social practice artist and educator whose work bridges art, education, and cultural exchange. She holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Graphic Design from Art Center College of Design. Raised in northern Japan, in the Okhotsk region closer to Russia than Tokyo—where the sea freezes in winter and the presence of Ainu and Okhotsk peoples remains part of the cultural landscape—she developed a unique awareness of cultural diversity and education. Drawing on experiences in both Japan and the United States, she creates participatory projects and academic initiatives that foster intercultural dialogue, mentorship, and socially engaged art practices. Her teaching and program leadership emphasize inclusivity, collaboration, and critical reflection within diverse communities.

https://www.midoriyamanaka.com/

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/midorisees/
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/midoriyama

M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates events, public exchanges, and artworks that help to reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their culture, and the land they live on. She works individually as well as with the collective, next question on projects that have been exhibited nationally as well as in Italy, Poland, Germany, and Serbia.

In 1982, Illuminato began working in the steel mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Over the next several years she invited hundreds of artists to collaborate with each other, the towns people and the place. The project received, ‘Best Event in Pennsylvania’, the key to the city for Illuminato, as well as broke ground on new ways that socially-community-driven artworks could receive art funding. After visiting Aliquippa, curator Mary Jane Jacob included her in a year-long project, ‘Points of Entry’, funded by the Three Rivers Art Festival and included Group Material, Ann Carlson, Fred Wilson, Daniel Martinez. Recent work includes: Momentary Monuments for a Wednesday Afternoon, Portland,Tripoli Street BakeYard, Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center, Pittsburgh, and Lost & Found Factory, Pittsburgh and Denton, Texas, which received a national award from Americans for the Arts. With next question, she created, The Neighborhood Revisited, a trolley tour that used Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood tours as a way to better understand shifting city spaces.

For 2023-24, Illuminato will be the Coordinator of the Art + Social Practice Program and since 2016 has been the Head of the CORE Program at Portland State University. Deeply interested in alternative teaching practices, she received the Master Teaching Award from Foundations: Foundations: Art, Theory, and Education in 2017.

michelleilluminato.com

Namita Gupta Wiggers is an educator, writer, curator, and artist based in Portland, OR. Wiggers founded and directed the MA in Critical Craft Studies, Warren Wilson College, the first and only low residency program focused on critical craft histories and theory from 2017 – 2023. She was a Paul J. Smith Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center, NYC in the Fall of 2023, and a Senior Fellow, Smithsonian Institution in the Spring of 2024. Her most recent publications are co-edited of the Journal of Modern Craft Special Issue on the MA in Critical Craft Studies (Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2024) and This is not a Retreat, co-edited with Ben Lignel for The MACR Papers. Wiggers serves on the Board of Trustees, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and began serving as President in the Fall of 2023. She is an editor-at-large for Crafts magazine, and on the Advisory Board, The Journal of Modern Craft.
Wiggers directs and co-founded Critical Craft Forum (since 2008), and served as the Director and Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland OR from 2004 – 2014.
An American of South Asian heritage, her work combines platform building roles with prior experiences as a museum educator, design researcher, and studio jeweler to understand craft and culture.

criticalcraftforum@gmail.com
instagram @namitapdx; @criticalcraftforum

Laura Glazer (she/her) is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. Her background in photography and design inform her social practice, and her projects appear as books, workshops, radio shows, zines, festivals, exhibitions, installations, posters, signs, postal correspondence, videos, and sculpture.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. Her book of photographs and interviews, I Want Everyone to Know: The Black History Month Doors at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, was published in collaboration with the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2022. She was a 2022–2023 Artist Fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

She holds an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. Born in northern Virginia, she was a longtime resident of upstate New York and is now based in Portland, Oregon.

lauraglazer.com  @helloprettycity

Emily Fitzgerald is a consultant, photographer, artist, educator, and storyteller. Her practice focuses on the intersection of the social, political, and visual in order to inspire dialogue around complex issues and reframe our ways of relating to one another. Emily facilitates conversation and creates site-specific art installations in non-traditional, public, and unexpected places. She is the co-founder of Works Progress Agency, a socially-engaged art studio and consultancy, and from 2016-2019 was a co-curator of MATTER, a storefront space dedicated to social practice exhibitions, workshops, and other happenings. She teaches art, photography, Design Thinking classes at Portland State University.

efitzgerald.com

Art + Social Practice Program Director

Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?

She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and the collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.

Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 17+ year art investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design where she leads the Art + Social Practice MFA program.

Contact
Russo Lee Gallery:
805 NW 21st Avenue
Portland Oregon, 97209
p: (503) 226-2754 
e: gallery@russoleegallery.com
i: @lisanicolejarrett

Alison Heryer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines costume, installation, performance, and community engagement. As a costume designer, she is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829.  Her design credits include productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 59E59 Theaters, La MaMa, The New Victory Theater, Portland Center Stage, Portland Opera, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theatre, ZACH Theatre, The Hypocrites, and Redmoon. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, World Stage Design, and The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Awards include a RACC Build Grant, Drammy Award and Austin Critics Table Award for Costume Design, and the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant.  Heryer is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Texas at Austin.  She is a faculty member at Portland State University where she was recently granted the Sue Horn-Caskey & Charles F. Caskey Professorship of Textile Arts & Costume Design.

Alison Heryer’s 2021/2022 projects have been generously supported by a RACC Build Grant.

www.alisonheryerdesign.com

Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded, occupied, stolen and colonized lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics and the expansion of community based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music and socially engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements in the US and Mexico. Patricia’s work can be explored at patriciavazquez.art.