Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

July 09, 2003

Mary Stieglitz is center's first scholar

Mary Stieglitz, professor of art and design, has been named the Distinguished Arts and Humanities Scholar for 2003-04 in Iowa State's new Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. The award provides a full semester's leave (spring 2004, in this case) for an outstanding scholar in the arts and humanities. Each scholar is free to pursue his or her own research interests and is asked to present one public lecture on campus.

Stieglitz's lecture has been scheduled for March 9, 2004. Details will be announced as they are finalized.

Stieglitz has been on the Design college faculty since 1997. Trained as a studio artist at the bachelor's and master's levels, she studied photography with Henry Holmes Smith at Indiana University. Her Ph.D. work combined research in art, visual perception and perceptual learning. She works in both traditional and digital (wide format) photography, and researches imaging history. Her images draw on patterns in the natural world.

Her work has been in more than 250 exhibitions nationally and internationally, and published in catalogues, periodicals, books and electronic venues. It is represented in over 25 national and international collections.

Some of her recent activities include lectures at the National Gallery of Art in London, Brunel University in England, the University of Washington, Rochester Institute of Technology, YLEM Forum in San Francisco and the Imaging Management Institute in Scottsdale, Ariz. During 2002, Stieglitz was photographer in residence for the National Park Service at the Hoover National Historic Site in West Branch, Iowa.

She will present a paper on the question of beauty in photography in October at the annual conference of the International Visual Literacy Association, of which she is a past president.

Calls for the center's 2004-05 Distinguished Arts and Humanities Scholar will go out in spring 2004. For more information, contact Sheryl St. Germain, center director, 4-7104.