Fall 2026 MFA Faculty | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Community and Context

Anniessa Antar (she/her)

MA, Education – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
BA, Philosophy & Arabic – McGill University

Anniessa Antar is a filmmaker, performance artist and software engineer based in Minneapolis. Her pedagogy and creative practices center the power of sensory, playful and collective work to make liberation irresistible. She has worked with Springboard for the Arts, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Mizna, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Body Watani, the School for Poetic Computation and Backwoodz Studioz. Before teaching at MCAD, she was a professor of English and social practice at l'École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. Anniessa received a Master of Education from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Arabic from McGill University in Montréal, Québec. She is a recipient of Forecast Public Art's Artists as Witness grant for an upcoming experimental documentary.

Graduate Critique Seminar III

Eli Brown (he/they)

MFA - School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University
Certificate in Organic Farming - Center for Agroecology, University of California, Santa Cruz
BA, Visual Art - Smith College

Eli Brown is an interdisciplinary artist whose work in the field of queer ecologies spans sculpture, social practice, and public art.

Their work has been exhibited at the deCordova Museum & Sculpture Park Biennial, Flux Factory, and Creative Time X. Eli’s exhibitions and public projects have received press through Sculpture Magazine, CULTURED, WGBH’s Open Studio with Jared Bowen, and Chronicle 5 News. His writing and work have been published in the UK-based publication, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Routledge's Artists and The Practice of Agriculture, and the long-running, queer, sex-ed comic, Not Your Mother’s Meatloaf. Eli received an MFA from SMFA at Tufts in 2018. Since then, they have taught courses at Montserrat College of Art, Maine College of Art and Design, and UMass Lowell.

https://www.theelimachine.net/
https://www.anothermother.co/

Photo by Eric Mueller

Graduate Critique Seminar III

Andy Graydon (he/him)

MFA, Radio, Television & Film – Northwestern University

Andy Graydon is an artist and filmmaker originally from Maui, Hawai’i. His work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices. Recent projects have focused on island ecologies and the imaginal and narrative forms employed by the natural sciences. His projects frequently engage structures of music such as the ensemble, the score, improvisation and variation, and techniques of the voice.

Graydon’s work has been presented internationally including shows at the New Museum; Mass MoCA; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Honolulu Biennial. Grants and fellowships include the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Media Arts; the MacDowell Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Projects; Film Study Center at Harvard Fellowship; NKD Nordic Artists‘ Center Residency; and the Headlands Center for the Arts Residency. Graydon has collaborated widely as a sound artist and composer, including work with Jennifer Walshe, Ernst Karel, Michael Pisaro, Delia Gonzalez, Stephen Vitiello, France Jobin, Cecilia Lopez, John Hudak, and Jan St. Werner. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the journals Sound Stage Screen and Opera Quarterly, and the periodicals BOMB and Artforum.com.

Criticism and Theory I
Graduation Preparation I

Gabriel Saloman Mindel (he/they)

PhD, History of Consciousness - University of California, Santa Cruz
MFA - School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University

Gabriel Saloman Mindel is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar who works primarily in sound, text, visual mediums, and socially collaborative forms. He received an MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and a PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. His scholarly research focuses on the relationship between noise, protest, and power and his writing has appeared in Sound Stage Screen, Studies in Social Justice, Resonance: Journal of Sound and Culture, RadioDoc Review, Sounding Out!, Folklife Magazine and The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. He is currently working on a book about Prince and the end of the world. For over two decades Mindel has composed experimental music under his own name for dance and film, and currently records and performs with transmission artist Anna Friz, in Bottling House with Andy Graydon and Luke Martin, and as one half of the allegedly legendary noise duo Yellow Swans. Mindel is a Visiting MFA Faculty at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

https://diademdiscos.com/
https://gabrielsaloman.bandcamp.com/
https://yellowswans.bandcamp.com/

Photo by Lucien Jacobs

Graduate Critique Seminar I

Rini Yun Matea (she/her)

MFA - University of Minnesota

MFA - Temple University

BA - University of California at Berkeley

Raised in California and Guatemala, Rini Yun Matea (리니 연) is an interdisciplinary and moving image artist based in Minneapolis on Dakota and Anishinaabe land. Engaging experimental cinematography and sound, staging, found footage and material objects, her practice investigates archival, historic and mythic conceptions of language, race, time, disease and ecology. Matea’s work is informed by a manifold worldview situated in her Korean-Guatemalan and rural heritage, early childhood in Guatemala during its civil war, many migrations, and life-long illness.

Matea has been awarded the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship; Jerome Foundation Film, Video and Digital Production Grant; McKnight Media Artist Fellowship; and MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She was artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA; Anderson Center at Tower View; and University of Minnesota Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. She earned her MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and her BA in Geography from UC Berkeley. Matea has taught at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, University of California at Santa Cruz, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and Carleton College.

Her work is in the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center, Flaten Art Museum, and British Library. Screenings and exhibitions include: Center for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow); REDCAT Gallery, Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles); Galerija Nova (Zagreb); Souvenirs from Earth International TV Project (Cologne); Raum für Projektion (Bergen, Oslo & Buenos Aires); Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis); Minnesota Museum of American Art, PAPA Projects, (Saint Paul); Flaten Art Museum, (Minnesota); Light Industry (Brooklyn); Mind TV/Media Independence, Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery Philadelphia Film Festival, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia); Wits School of the Arts (Johannesburg); Festival Images Contre Nature (Marseille); Berlinale Talent Campus Editing Studio (Berlin).

Graduation Preparation I

Patricia McMeans (she/they)

PhD, practice-led, Contemporary Art Practice – Edinburgh College of Art
MFA, Sculpture and Combined Media – University of Minnesota
BFA, Media Arts/Film - Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Patricia Healy McMeans is an independent artist, curator, and writer living and working in Minneapolis and sometimes Edinburgh, Scotland. There, she completed her practice-led PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art/University of Edinburgh in 2021, investigating how artists learn together in the social studio artist residency model. Her artistic work is entirely situational, and manifests in video, sound, photography, printmaking, sculpture, site-writing and site-engaged social practice.

Since 2012, she has instigated itinerant social studio projects, such as Ten Chances Art Res, Third Outpost Art Res, and Moveable Feast Bothy based in Minneapolis and Edinburgh, which now serve an alumni of over 50 artists. These iterative projects build structures that bring together an international cohort of artists, writers, and thinkers for 3-6 weeks across urban and rural places for experiment, research and communal living.

Her varied works are affiliated with The Number Shop, Fruitmarket and Embassy Gallery (Edinburgh), Cove Park Residency, Hospitalfield Arts Residency (SCOT), Waterbury Building (Mpls), formerly Art of This Gallery and Soap Factory (Mpls), HIAP/Saari Residency in Turku (FIN), Kunsterdorf Schoppingen (GER) as well as locations in New York, Cleveland, Richmond VA, Washington DC, London, Glasgow, Istanbul (Turk), Barcelona (Spain), Helsinki (FIN), and Shanghai (CHI).

Since 2020, she has been a part of the transnational research group called ARRC: Art Residency Study Collective which investigates the context of residential learning in the fugitivity of today’s climate crisis and destabilizing socio-political times. Along with her PhD, she holds an MFA in Sculpture and Combined Media from the University of Minnesota and a BFA in Media Arts: Film from MCAD.