Biography

Frank Geiser is an artist and arts educator based in the greater Chicago area. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Geiser received his MFA at the University of Kentucky in 2021, where he was the recipient of a funded TA position. He received his BFA with concentrations in painting and photography from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio in 2018, where he was the recipient of a Xavier University Art Award and a Winter-Cohen Family Brueggeman Fellowship.

Geiser currently teaches art and design at Purdue University Northwest. Before this he taught at Purdue University Fort Wayne. His artwork has been exhibited internationally and is part of the 21c collection.

Having studied photography, painting, sculpture, digital fabrication, and electronics, Geiser uses his multifaceted educational background to explore a wide variety of working methods in his artworks. In addition to gallery-centered works, Geiser's practice also involves a long-term documentary photo project studying monks and ascetics in different religious contexts. This series of photographs, taken at over twenty different monasteries across three different continents, serves as research for Geiser's installation works.

Geiser's artworks call viewers into quiet contemplation through a focus on time, memory, and light. Using the visual language of photography, installation, and architecture, his artworks abstract and interrogate mundane occurrences and their narrative potential.

Statement

I am writing to express my interest in consideration for the 2023 SPE Board of Directors election. I believe I would be an effective and productive board member, and I am excited at the prospect of contributing to SPE's impact on the field of photographic education. I care very deeply about fostering the connections that SPE offers to its members, and I believe SPE has an important role
to play in shaping conversations within our increasingly image-based world.

I have been a member of SPE since 2018. I joined SPE while I was a graduate student TA at the University of Kentucky, at which time I was able to sit in on planning committee meetings for SPE Midwest 2018 held in Lexington, Kentucky. Conversations I began at this conference still shape my experiences as a photographic artist and educator. In 2018 SPE provided me an opportunity to
discuss the aesthetics of my practice as a student, but conversations with SPE members in group shows and conferences have become even more valuable to me as a professor of photography.

I would bring my experience as a multi-disciplinary photo-based art practitioner and professor to the Board of Directors. This is also an exciting time for me to become more involved with SPE, as I have been given the role of redesigning and developing the Visual Communication Design program and curricula in my current position at Purdue University Northwest.

I am a flexible worker with broad interests, and I feel I would be helpful within many of SPE's standing committees and sub-committees depending on the organization's needs. If elected, I would strive to help expand programming that SPE offers to contingent faculty and new photo educators. I also believe SPE is poised to serve as a bridge between different academic fields which rely on a nuanced understanding of photography and images; my current role within a
communications program has helped me see the value in these connections.

Biography

Meggan Gould is a photographer living and working in the mountains outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she is a Professor of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied anthropology, the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, where she studied non-fiction writing, and Speos (Paris Photographic Institute), where she finally began her studies in photography. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth, and taught at Kutztown University and Bowdoin College before coming to UNM. Her photographs have been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. She was a resident at LightWork in 2009, and her photographs are in public collections including the DeCordova Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Preus Museum in Oslo, Norway. She is a 2022 recipient of the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship. Her multifaceted practice is an open-ended dissection of vision and photo geekery, a celebration of places where technology fails us, or where we fail technology. 

Statement

SPE has been hugely important to me over the course of two decades, since my first conference in Newport, RI, which I attended as a graduate student. I honestly couldn't believe that there were that many people in one place, talking about the things I wanted to hear about and talk about. I was named Honored Educator for SPE SW chapter in 2019, and I have served in leadership roles at the University New Mexico, as Associate Chair of the Art Department and as Chair of the Research Allocations Committee. As a member of the board, I would have the opportunity to combine my administrative and leadership skills with a specific passion for everything photography can be in the world. I hope to continue to grow SPE as an inclusive, challenging, and relevant community for all of us.

Biography

Ann Huang is a multilingual Chinese American poet, filmmaker and visual artist based in Newport Beach, California. She's begun producing a limited short-film series Ann Huang Presents based on her award-winning poetry since 2016. Huang's film series echoes metaphysical and multiverse themes such as life and death as well as social ills of the man's world perceived by the female eye.
They are marked by broad philosophical and spiritual overtures such as the collective unconscious by Carl Jung. Her films have received numerous accolades in the film festival circuits and showcased in museums worldwide. Her work can be found at SaffronSplash.com and AnnHuangPoetry.com.

Statement

When I was eight in mainland China, I marveled at The Third Man by Orson Welles and The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock on pirated DVDs my uncle used to bring us. Ever since, I wished I had made those films myself.

15 years ago, I was fortunate enough to get to know Jean Valentine in person and her work during the AWP Denver and had been her student until she passed in 2020. During those year of her mentorship and alongside her friends like Ralph Angel, Rickard Jackson and Ilya Kaminsky, I had instilled in my poetry writing the visual, erasure, elliptical and lyric poetics. I also learned to be a more responsible writer with heightened purposes for humanity. There, I started to make Ann Huang Presents, a poetry film series that weaves humanistic and poetic gestures, to be seen and appreciated through the cinematic lens.

It's for this reason that I'm so very honored to be on the final slate as a candidate for the Society for Photographic Education's Board of Directors 2024-2028. Not only my mission as an multidisciplinary artist is in line with your core mission of promoting a broader understanding of the medium in all its forms through its interdisciplinary programs; but also my fervor as an artist in experimenting the development of the intersections of poetry, visual and cinematic arts in their full light. Your many fellowship and awards programs especially spoke to me since
those are the very components that could help a practicing artist to ensure her work without disruptions from the financial standpoint.

To get to know me better: I majored in both finance & investments and creative writing, which made me an entrepreneur before a poet and an experimental filmmaker, priding myself in creative leadership and problem-solving skills that are required in today's self-effacing and fast- paced (profit and) non-profit arenas. At the brink of COVID19, I became the Traveling Show Manager (and the board member) for the Marin Poetry Center in San Francisco, where I steadfastly managed the summer Traveling Show poetry reading series across several counties in Northern California; from in-person to virtual, and now back to in-person events. I was fascinated with making event coordination and collaborations with prominent local art centers and libraries for our members' poetry readings. For my colleagues and members alike, I made an impression by making the process seamlessly heartfelt and free of obstacles. Simultaneously my own film cast and crews were under well-managed timelines that each of them had brought about the best of their art in an efficient and collaborative way. To me, the most rewarding part of my day is helping my team members to be productive, motivated and inspired, for us as a team to achieve our best work possible. With this experience and skill set, I am more than ready to leap into the non-profit/educational world and work for an organization whose ideals align with my own.

Thank you for considering me to join this fantastic team of innovators and educators in the immersed creative fields.

Biography

Brett Kallusky was born in 1975 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He completed his MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since 2007, he has taught photography full-time while maintaining an active photographic studio practice. He is an associate professor of art and chair of the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. Kallusky has been a Fulbright Fellow to Italy, received three Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and numerous Faculty Professional Development and Research Grants from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and is a two-time finalist for the McKnight Fellowship for Photography and Visual Arts. His book Landfill: Elegy for the Santa Maria Valley was published in 2022 by George Thompson Publishing. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his daughter, a dog, two cats, and a chinchilla.

Statement

I advocate for transformative education in photography, and my experience in multidisciplinary, student-centered learning positions me to contribute to the strategic directions of SPE.

Over the past ten years, I have learned that organizations gain from cross-collaborative ventures. I intend to utilize my network and ability to forge lasting relationships and grow partnerships with other organizations and disciplines. This collaborative momentum will foster a blend of perspectives beneficial for our shared photographic vision. To quote a respected colleague: "There are still conversations to be had within photography."

I am eager to contribute my expertise and passion for photographic education to SPE and uplift our shared journey's education-centered, collaborative organization.

Biography

Ann Kaplan is an educator, an artist who both practices and writes about photography, and a cultural worker with over twenty years of experience working with non-profit organizations in arts and education like SPE to meet their goals. Before joining academe, Kaplan served as curator at the North Carolina Museum of History, research specialist at Duke University, and director of the Orange County Arts Commission. In all of these positions, she collaborated with organizations, their staff, and boards to clarify and reach their programmatic, financial, and diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. Kaplan has been a member of the Society of Photographic Education since 2011, co-organized and presented in "Loop de loop, in The Feedback Loop of Contemporary Feminisms: Teaching, Learning, and Making" at SPE's 50th Annual Conference, and in (post-election) 2017 was an invited presenter by the combined Multicultural, Pride, and Women's Causes in the at the "Strategies of Resistance" panel. She has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, South Arts, and the Ford Foundation. Kaplan has also been awarded two artist residencies with fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center.

Currently an associate professor at Appalachian State University in the mountains of western North Carolina, Kaplan previously served as visiting assistant professor at Elon University and Philippines Women's University in Manila, Philippines. Her photographic work and teaching consider issues of difference, privilege, and the potential of rights for humans and other beings. She teaches classes such as Photography as Social Critique, serves as faculty affiliate with Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies, Global Studies, and the Graduate Faculty, and is the founder of a new program in Creative Engagement & Social Change. She is in the final throes of a PhD from the European Graduate School and holds an MFA from Clemson University, an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a BA from the University of Mary Washington, and a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from Duke University.

Kaplan exhibits nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Münster, Germany; Department of Digital Arts, University of Malta; tête gallery, Berlin, Germany; De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines and group exhibitions at Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; Manchester School of Art, UK; Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University; Venice International University, Venice, Italy; and the Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC, among others. She believes in keeping meetings short, sharing chocolate, the occasional necessity of cursing as punctuation, and practicing kindness.

Statement 

My intentions for potentially serving on the board Society of Photographic Education include these:

1. Listen deeply to students, teachers, and independents about their educational wants and needs, 

2. Use my decades of experience in non-profit management to benefit SPE and its members,

3. Make SPE the most welcoming organization possible for everyone involved in the study of photography,

4. Ensure the future of SPE through careful planning, teamwork, hard and strategic work,

5. Take care that we appreciate one another and have fun at the same time.

Biography

Frank has represented photographers for thirty years as business partner, advocate, curator, and manager. This collaboration has produced hundreds of award-winning ad campaigns, art shows, provocative editorial content and successful books.

His PROJECTIONS platform is a moderated event that showcases the talent of visionary photographers to an eclectic audience of creatives. Presenters have included numerous winners of the Pulitzer Prize among other prestigious international awards. These photographers have had their work appear around the world.

Creative Business Workshop, is recognized industry wide for its insightful, dynamic and passionate overview of the current photographic landscape. This reality business-based workshop addresses topics such as estimating, negotiation, client relationship building and retention, effective promotion, industry trends and best practices.

Frank has shared his photographic and business expertise at learning institutions that include Syracuse University, New School, Parsons, ICP, SCAG, SVA and Tampa University.