SAIC Names Inaugural Faculty Research Fellows

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) has announced Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg have been named the Inaugural Faculty Research Fellows of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice.

Daniel Eisenberg / Photo: SAIC

Ellen Rothenberg / Photo: Art21

Established in 2016, the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC serves as an incubator for creative inquiry leading to future SAIC exhibitions, programs, and publications. It offers opportunities for critical exchange between SAIC, the Chicago arts community, and the curatorial field-at- large, fostering advanced thinking in the field. In this capacity, it offers a forum in which to pose critical questions about how curators and artists develop their work in partnership with others and in relation to audiences.

Daniel Eisenberg is a Professor in the Departments of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation and Visual and Critical Studies who has taught at SAIC since 1994. His films have won numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and most recently, a grant from the Graham Foundation, Chicago. Eisenberg was a guest of the director of the International Research Center at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Ellen Rothenberg is an Adjunct Professor in Fiber and Material Studies, concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Weserburg Museum, Bremen; among others. Working with established communities, and forming new ones has become an essential part of her working process.

Eisenberg and Rothenberg’s work will bring together practitioners from a range of disciplines to
examine issues of economic insecurity. Their project is envisioned to be nodal in its relationship to research—with the process of inquiry providing the central core, and resulting work to take multiple forms in order to produce arguments and responses that are formally subjective and documentary, sensual and critical. They will share this two-year term that begins this fall and culminates in a major project at SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries in fall 2019.