STAFF

Chair, MFA Computer Art
Director of Computer Education

bruce@mfaca.sva.edu

Bruce Wands has been working in digital media and music for more than thirty years as an artist, musician, writer, and curator. His book, Art of the Digital Age, was recently published by Thames & Hudson. He has lectured, performed, and exhibited his creative work internationally, including Europe, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Beijing, China. Recent lectures and exhibitions include Electronics Alive IV, CHArt 2006, SIGGRAPH 2006, BUDI 2005 in Pusan, Korea, the ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference and Exhibition, “Thoughts on Hesse, Digital Art and Visual Music” at SIGGRAPH 2004, the First Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition, and the SIGGRAPH 2003 Art Gallery and Traveling Art Show. Time Out New York named Bruce as one of the “99 People to Watch in 1999”. His digital art, music, photography, and writing explore the relationship between visual art, mathematics and music and the invention of new forms of narrative. Bruce was the first musician to give a live performance over ISDN lines on the Internet in 1992, and performs regularly in the New York area. He is the Chair of the MFA Computer Art Department and the Director of Computer Education at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has taught digital art for over twenty years in the graduate, undergraduate, and continuing education programs. U.S. News and World Report recently ranked his department 5th in the United States in Multimedia/Visual Communications. ImagineFX in the UK named SVA as “One of the Top Ten Digital Arts Schools in the World.” Graduates have won four Student Academy Awards, two in both 2004 and 2007. His department’s web site, www.mfaca.sva.edu, was named by Yahoo Internet Life as one of the "100 Best Sites of 2002" for Best Original Web Art. He is the Director of the New York Digital Salon, which celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2008 (www.nydigitalsalon.org). He is the author of Digital Creativity, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 2002. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA UK). As an educational and corporate consultant, his clients have included the New York State Department of Education, Hong Kong Arts Centre, College for Creative Studies, University of the Arts, Long Island University and Nanyang Technological University. He served on the NYC ACM SIGGRAPH Board of Directors for ten years. He has a BA with honors from Lafayette College and an MS from Syracuse University, where he studied computer art and mass communication.

Assistant to the Chair

dianef@mfaca.sva.edu

Diane Field is the Assistant to the Chair of the MFA Computer Art department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Assistant Director of the New York Digital Salon. She is active in all aspects of programming, developing, curating, and coordinating projects for both organizations that serve to educate, exhibit, and promote digital art in all its genres.

Field is also an artist that has exhibited nationally and internationally. Professionally she has worked as a Junior Designer at Guggenheim.com developing online exhibitions for their Webby Award winning site. She has an active pro bono practice that has been used to develop online portfolios for artists and a flash art piece for LGBT artist journal LTTR Issue One.

She received a Master of Fine Art Computer Art from the School of Visual Art (2000) and a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1991).

Academic Advisor

russet@mfaca.sva.edu

Russet Lederman received a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York City in 1999 and is currently pursuing her M.A/Ph.D track in Media Studies at The New School University, NYC. Recently, she collaborated on events and screening for Franklin Furnace Archives and the X/Fest Experimental Video Festival. In 2001-2002, she was awarded the Smithsonian American Art Museum's New Media/New Century Award, a commission to create a fine art web work about the American landscape for the museum's web site.

She has exhibited her CD-ROM, DVD and web art works at Prix Ars Electronica (where she received an Honorary Mention), Lab 01, Cast 01, The Digital Salon, Interstanding3, Neovideo International Video Festival, ISEA 2000, Sonar 2000 and 2002, European Media Art Festival 2000, Rotterdam Architectuur Film Festival, Brussels 2000, 4th Graz Biennial on Media and Architecture, File New Media Festival (second place award), Mediaterra, 15. Stuttgarter Filmwinter Festival, Docs-Online 2001, Verbindingen-Jonctions4 and Remote Lounge, NYC, 2002.

Recent writings and reproductions about her work have appeared in Leonardo , The New York Times , Die Welt (Berlin) Circa , and How Magazine (in which she received a Merit Award for Interactive Design). Her work is in the collection of The Swiss Federal Office of Culture, the Rhizome Artbase, and the Smithsonian American Art.

Since 1994, principal of Russet Lederman Productions, which is involved in the artistic design and production of interactive media. She has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn, Parsons School of Design, NYC, and is currently a faculty member and the Academic Advisor for the MFA Computer Art Program at the School of Visual Arts, NYC.

Senior Systems Administrator

levent@mfaca.sva.edu

After receiving his Computer Science degree from University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom Levent Cetiner attended the MFA Computer Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. First specializing in 3D animation, and then Max/MSP Jitter Programming. He has worked as a Systems Administrator at a web design company and freelanced as a Max/MSP Jitter programmer with various artists.

Unix/NT Systems Administrator

josev@mfaca.sva.edu

José graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a Bachelor's in Art History and a minor in Music Performance. Part photographer, engineer, historian, theoretical physicist, musician, political scientist, and general provocateur. He has been involved with secretive artist collectives in the conceptualization and execution of several political and social art projects. In 2002 he taught photography in Puerto Rico as part of a community outreach program. In 2003 he was a retoucher/QA/software tester for a startup in San Francisco. Since 2006 he has worked freelance as an IT consultant, photographer and retoucher for various companies in Puerto Rico, San Francisco and New York.

A/V Systems Administrator

jarryd@mfaca.sva.edu

Jarryd Lowder is an artist working with electronic audiovisual media (integrating forms such as video, sound and music) primarily for live performance. At the SVA MFA Computer Art department, he works as an Instructor of studio classes in Video and Sound and also as a Systems Administrator, for which he's responsible for the timely feeding & watering of the audiovisual workstations.

Administrative Assistant

charley@mfaca.sva.edu

Charley Lewis attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he majored in German Studies with a concentration in Printmaking. After graduating he received the Baden-Württemberg Fellowship, allowing him to work and further his studies at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has also worked as a designer for Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Spin magazines.