Nate Schultze is the ‘Expert Product Designer’ for the Jordan Women’s Footwear team. He began his career at Nike over 10 years ago shortly after graduating from the University of Oregon in 2013 with a BFA in Product Design. In addition to his current role, his footwear experience most notably includes time on Nike’s Innovation team and the Nike Sportswear Men’s team (lifestyle) where he has worked on key franchises like Nike Air Force 1, Nike React, and Air Jordan 1. Outside of work, Nate enjoys playing soccer with his 2 daughters, restoring old BMWs, and binging K-dramas with his wife.

Jenna Lechner is an illustrator based in Portland, OR. She has worked as a professional illustrator for the last 10+ years. Working in watercolor and ink, she creates whimsical, nature-inspired illustraDons, which explore issues around the environment and how humans create a sense of place. She loves to create maps, paGerns, and educaDonal materials. Jenna’s illustraDons have been featured on a wide range of projects, including: staDonery, adverDsements, books, retail store window displays, packaging, and more. Some previous clients include: Adobe, Facebook, Starbucks, Travel Oregon, and Timber Press. You can find her work on Instagram @jennamlechner, and on her website: www.jennalechner.com

Terry Haggerty (Born 1970 in London), recently moved to Eugene in 2022 from Europe after spending 12 years in Berlin and Santa Marinella, Italy. He is represented By Sikkema, Jenkins & Co, NY, Von Bartha, Basel, Bernhard Knaus Fine Art GmbH, Frankfurt & F.S Art, Bodensee, Germany. He has exhibited widely at galleries and museums around the world, including Sikkema Jenkins, New York; Max Hetzler, Berlin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Aldrich Museum, Connecticut; and PS1, Long Island City. Commissions include wall drawings for Dallas Cowboys Stadium, Munich Re, London, Roche Diagnostics, Indianapolis and private collections in the US and Europe. Haggerty is the recipient of several awards including the For-Site Foundation Award (2009), John Anson Kittredge Award (2003); and the Natwest Art Prize (1999). He Is best known for creating paintings, drawings, and large-scale wall drawings that expand the vocabulary of abstraction: he combines the reductive elements of Minimalism with the phenomenological approaches of Op Art in a new way. In their reduction to what is mostly monochrome color and their formal simplification, Haggerty's varying line/stripe combinations oscillate between the planimetric structure of the surface and the illusory perception of three-dimensionality. The incredible precision of Haggerty's handiwork is also responsible for the impressive effect of his pictures with an appearance of quasi-mechanical perfection. Transcend presents the artist’s oeuvre from the late nineties to the present and represents his ingenious synthesis of Minimal Art’s striving towards a conceptual order and Op Art’s prosaic play with perception and the illusion.

Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University. Serving both an academic and community audience, the Schneider Museum of Art builds a challenging environment that engages with the visual arts through exhibitions and programs supporting interdisciplinary study, research, and discourse. Malbaurn is responsible for overall curatorial, administration, planning, policy, and budget development and management of the Museum. As an artist, Malbaurn has exhibited his work internationally with most exhibitions in New York, NY. Malbaurn has held positions at Pratt Institute serving as the Assistant Chairperson of Fine Arts and Professor of Drawing and Painting. Malbaurn has also held positions at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in the Curatorial and Collections Department and Design Department. He has lectured and been a visiting artist at Yale University, New Haven, CT; the School of the Visual Arts (SVA), New York, NY; School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Chicago, IL, and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He has received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Malbaurn is a descendant of the Narragansett Indian Tribe and the Nipmuc Tribe.

Zara has worked with organizations of various sizes as a UX Research leader, including GitHub and the famed/failed Portland-based fintech startup Simple, to help them better understand their customers and build products that speak to their needs. She has been involved with the Oregon design community since 2007 as an instructor, speaker, and mentor. She is currently a Principal UX Researcher at Zillow.

Holly Newlands (then/them) is an artist and developer who makes games and other playful experiences. Their work has been exhibited at shows including Currents Virtual, A MAZE. BERLIN, Indiecade, XOXO, and Sundance's New Frontiers. After graduating from UO, Holly worked at Glowbox for two years. Since then, they have been working as a freelance game developer from their home studio in Portland, Oregon. They are currently working on a VR game called Diatribes with Most Ancient about grappling with anxieties evoked by climate change.

By day, I am a user experience researcher and designer working in the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Intel. My job is to explore the human side of artificial intelligence in technology with a focus on mixed reality and educational experiences. Together with a team of researchers, developers, engineers, and generally creative folks, we explore the application of multi-modal sensing and sense-making to understand user engagements and personalize their experiences. In my free time, I enjoy various creative endeavors such as illustration, 3D modeling, and tinkering. When I’m not working on creative projects, I can be found exploring my beautiful home state by bike and hiking trails.

Lead Product Designer at Grovemade
Dog Dad since 2012
Human Dad since 2014

Sean may not look it but he graduated from the UO twelve years ago with a BFA in Product Design. Sean spent the majority of the last twelve years working with his friends at Grovemade. During his time there Sean interned working in production, managed production teams, helped grow the company and designed numerous products. While also fitting in a few side hustles here and there. When it comes to his work Sean is a huge nerd for process not only in design but also in business and manufacturing. In the studio and out Sean is always playing. When he is not playing at work he is out and about playing with his family and friends adventuring around Oregon and slurping every ramen he comes across.

My name is Erick Ikeda, born and made in Los Angeles. I was a kid that was always infatuated with hoops, sneakers, graffiti, and cooking. The game of basketball taught me lessons and skills that I still hold firmly to this day; communication, teamwork, and grit. As a little spud as a 9 yr old, watching the “dream team" in the ‘92 Olympics, planted the seed of wanting to become a footwear designer. The thought of helping an athlete through design is where my passions live and burn. It’s where industrial, graphic, apparel, and fashion design all collide and that's exactly where I want to be.

Liz Zarro is an Independent Industrial Designer specializing in technical soft goods and CMF. She began her career in 2013 as an independent contractor while still in college. In 2015, she earned a BFA in Product Design from the University of Oregon, and joined one of her clients, Ruffwear, as its lead in-house Product Designer. As of 2022, Liz leads initiatives in product design, R&D, strategy, and sustainability. Her process, from initial ideation through to commercialization, is heavily informed by user behavior. Her goal is to create joyful experiences for those who interact with her work.

Kate Ali was awarded an Oregon Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowship soon after graduating from CCA. She participated in residencies at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY and the Gallery Sudoh in Odowara, Japan. After managing public art projects for both herself and her husband Lee Imonen, she worked for the Oregon Arts Commission for five years as a Public Art Project Coordinator. She is currently the Public Art Manager for the City of Eugene actively managing percent for art projects and designing professional development opportunities for artists interested in gaining experience in public art.

Tiffany Harker is Co-Director of HOLDING Contemporary (2019-present) and Arts Education & Grants Coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. She previously served in the role of Curator-in-Residence for the Center for Art Research at the University of Oregon, Eugene (2021-22), was a Gallery Associate at Elizabeth Leach Gallery (2018-2023) Advisor to the nonprofit arts organization, Gather:Make:Shelter (2018-present). Harker was recently board president of the Contemporary Arts Council at the Portland Art Museum (2020-2022). She has worked in contemporary art museums, galleries, and nonprofit organizations in San Francisco, CA including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Crown Point Press, and Fraenkel Gallery where she was Artist Liaison to the Estate of Diane Arbus, Sophie Calle, Christian Marclay, Alec Soth, and Hiroshi Sugimoto among others. After relocating to Portland, OR in 2016, she was Project Manager for Converge 45's Ann Hamilton's habitus installation and was an Art Mentor for The King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) .

Katherine Spinella is a collage-based artist working with print, objects, and digital media. She is co-founder of Carnation Contemporary and co-founding director of Well Well Projects and Thunderstruck Collective. Recently, she completed a collaborative installation named Where the Future Can Meet with artist Marcelo Fontana which explored ideas of the post-image and it’s on-linear way of creating narratives and reality through the use of light, fabric, text, moving, and still image. Her recent exhibitions include The Nexus of Here at Sator Projects in Portland, What’s Different at SOIL in Seattle, and Future Landscapes in Venice, Italy. Spinella currently lives in Portland, OR.

John Whitten is an interdisciplinary artist who uses drawing and digital tools to examine the relationship between technology, materiality, and human experience. His artwork mines the philosophical significance of what it means to wander through a sea of signals and noise that envelops our world. His work has been recently exhibited in New York City, Los Angeles, and throughout the Pacific Northwest region, and he has been the recipient of numerous grants, residencies, and awards. Whitten co-founded the artist-collective galleries Well Well Projects and Carnation Contemporary and the artist-collective project Thunderstruck. He is an art educator and web developer with his home and studio located in Portland, OR.

www.johnwhitten.com

Nic is a content creator and consultant focusing on video and motion design. With over a billion views across his work, he's created content across the digital landscape. Nicholas has been a strategic mind on video content for Nike Training Club, overseen animation systems for Apple Music, built augmented reality experiences for Rick Owens, and started multiple viral TikTok series. He also founded and led the studio team at the digital agency Instrument. He currently runs his own consulting firm.

I graduated with a BA in Art & Technology, with minors in Comic Studies and Art History. I worked at UO as a student designer from 2018-21, and I currently work at a B2B tech agency called Brand Definition in Portland. In my free time, I volunteer my art and labor to the People’s Housing Project, a community org building emergency shelters for houseless folks here.

karyn fiebich is currently working for a skincare company based in San Fransisco as a digital art director full-time and works from home. fiebich has been in the creative space working for agencies – corporate and freelance – for the last 13 years. On the side, fiebich runs a small business, osa floral, which has been a creative outlet for the last 8 years. 

By day, I am a user experience researcher and designer working in the Intelligent Systems Research Lab at Intel. My job is to explore the human side of artificial intelligence in technology with a focus on mixed reality and educational experiences. Together with a team of researchers, developers, engineers, and generally creative folks, we explore the application of multi-modal sensing and sense-making to understand user engagements and personalize their experiences. In my free time, I enjoy various creative endeavors such as illustration, 3D modeling, and tinkering. When I’m not working on creative projects, I can be found exploring my beautiful home state by bike and hiking trails.

Sean Kelly is a product designer at Grovemade in Portland, Oregon where he creates home office accessories from natural materials which he hopes help people to do their best work. Sean graduated from the University of Oregon in 2011 with a BFA in Product Design. For the past 11 years aside from working at Grovemade his side hustles have included co-founding and designing for a tech startup and mentoring art and design students at local high schools and colleges. 

When it comes to his work Sean is a huge nerd for process not only in design but also in building companies and manufacturing. When he is not being a complete and total nerd you can find him being a Dad and eating the many ramens and bagels that Portland has to offer. 

Maddy Landis-Croft is a furniture, product, and interior designer from Portland, Oregon. Wanting to pursue a career in furniture design after graduation from the UO, Maddy moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she has lived and worked since. 

Upon arriving in New York, Maddy worked as a wood shop assistant, putting those PD 240 skills to work. Shortly after, she landed a job at West Elm. During her tenure there, she worked as the designer for both upholstered furniture and outdoor furniture. 

She is currently an FF&E designer for Parts and Labor Design, designing for hospitality spaces.

Maddy loves to explore new restaurants, and spends a lot of time reading sci-fi novels. She’d love to give you a recommendation on either!

Heidi Schwegler works in the interstitial ruins of Beijing, Los Angeles, New York City and suburban America. She rescues haphazardly disused scraps from the bowels of the megalopolis: chicken bones, Big Gulps, broken signs, lost shoes, crumpled pylons, take-out containers. Plastic, fiber, and bone: these materials decay but never decompose. A peerless craftsperson, she resynthesizes her sources into facsimiles with cast glass, gold, silver, wax, resulting in artwork that persists in a “living death.”

Recent exhibition venues include WBG London Projects (London), Asphodel (New York), Sheldon Museum (Lincoln, NE), and the Portland Art Museum (Portland, Oregon). Schwegler is a Ford Family Fellow, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a Yaddo Artist-in- Resident. Reviews of Schwegler’s work have appeared in Art in America, Daily Serving, ArtNews, Modern Painters, and the Huffington Post. Schwegler is the founder of the Yucca Valley Material Lab, a platform for making and thinking.

Sara Mikenis (USA, b. 1986) makes sculptural paintings, manipulating canvas to suggest an interaction between body and textile. Her recent series of striped paintings consider the conflict between the surface of a composition and its form. The artist was born in Portland, Oregon and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, Eugene and was an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Her paintings were included in Shelter From The Storm (2022), The Creator Has a Master Plan (2020), The Seven YearItch (2019), and Transfigured. (2018), at Diane Rosenstein Gallery and she had her most recent solo exhibition, Cover-Up (2018), at Nationale in Portland, OR. Her paintings were featured in New American Paintings (Juried by Rita Gonzalez), Pacific Coast Issue #133 (2018).

Jesse Sugarmann (’10) is an artist and educator based in Bakersfield, California, where he serves as Professor of New Media and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at California State University, Bakersfield.  Beyond his teaching practice, Sugarmann participates in the development and management of non-traditional art venues, having been a founding director (2008 – 2011) of Oregon’s Ditch Projects Artspace (www.ditchprojects.com) and the director of Oregon’s Coast Time residency (2011 – 2017).  He is currently developing New Country, a new exhibition and performance space in Bakersfield that will open its doors in 2023. 

Sugarmann’s artwork uses sculpture, video, photography, and performance to engage the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural progress and social development. Sugarmann has exhibited work both nationally and internationally in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander; High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; and both the Paris and Berlin exhibitions of Les Recontres Internationales.  Sugarmann’s work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, the Atlantic, Hyperallergic, Art F City, Frieze Magazine, the Huffington Post and The New York Times. 

Brian Aebi is an Art Director and Designer primarily working in motion design, visual identity, and concept design. He's worked at different creative agencies, and is currently co-founder at PRETTY NICE, a design and motion studio working with both global and boutique brands across various mediums. 

Aidan Grealish is Creative Director at anti software software club, an employee-owned not-for-profit software company building a soon-to-be-announced website. She has previously worked in video game marketing, eCommerce, and educational game development for various Fortune 500 companies; she has also contributed to multiple independent video games as an art director and designer. While at UO, she was a longtime tutor for the ARTD 250 series and took Game Art with Rick Silva until they wouldn't let her do it again. She lives in Portland where she designs and builds custom mechanical keyboards in her free time.  

"Denise Lutz is the Senior Designer and Art Director for Ninkasi Brewing Company. Known for her vibrant and graphical image-making, Denise has worked on creative for Copic Markers, Target, Kate Spade, Laurelwood Brewing, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. A Designer focused primarily on brand development for consumer goods she has over 7 years of experience. When she's not working on professional projects, she enjoys painting and chasing after her cat Ozzy."