San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
As part of its global search to appoint at least 10 tenure-track faculty members over the next five years, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) announces the appointment of three new faculty members, effective July 1, 2015: Sampada Aranke, Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art; Lasse Scherffig, Assistant Professor of Art and Technology; and Lindsey White, Assistant Professor of Photography.
Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs Rachel Schreiber remarked, “With this group of three tenure-track hires, SFAI is actively achieving its goal of investing in full-time faculty and building on its superb legacy of engaging extraordinary artists as instructors. Aranke, Scherffig and White together bring a wealth of accomplishment, creativity, energy, and commitment to pedagogy that will be an amazing resource for the entire SFAI community for many years to come.”
Sampada Aranke earned a PhD in Performance Studies from University of California, Davis, and a BA in Politics from University of California, Santa Cruz. Aranke recently served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at University of Illinois, Chicago. Her research encompasses performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Aranke’s work has been published in Art Journal, Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: A Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on a manuscript titled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
Lasse Scherffig earned a PhD in Experimental Computer Science at Academy of Media Arts Cologne. He received an MS in Digital Media at University of Bremen and a BS in Cognitive Science at University of Osnabrück, Germany. Scherffig was a Visiting Professor and Adjunct Lecturer at Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, where he taught locative media art and activism. Scherffig’s research explores cybernetics and the relationship of humans, machines, and society; technological infrastructures of communication and control; and the culture and aesthetics of computation and interaction. His projects have been shown at Tranzit Bucharest, Romania; Science Gallery, Dublin; Transmediale, Berlin; International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Ruhr, Germany; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; and ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.
Lindsey White earned an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her work employs the language of magic and comedy to present the unexpected and impossible in everyday life. White’s projects have been exhibited at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Eli Ridgway Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; ACME, Los Angeles; Museum Bärengasse, Zurich; and Deadpan Exchange II Festival, Berlin. She was a 2010 and 2013 Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and a 2009 Fellow at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. She is also a co-founder of the collaborative, artist-run project Will Brown, a group dedicated to manipulating the structures of exhibition, programming, and narrative as a critical practice.
About San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), founded in 1871, is one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in the practice and study of contemporary art. As a diverse community of working artists and scholars, SFAI provides students with a rigorous education in the arts and preparation for a life in the arts through an immersive studio environment, an integrated liberal arts and art history curriculum, and critical engagement with the world. Committed to educating artists who will shape the future of art, culture, and society, SFAI fosters creativity and original thinking in an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary environment.
SFAI offers BFA, BA, MFA, and MA degrees, a dual MA/MFA degree, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, and a range of exhibitions, public programs, and public education courses. SFAI enrolls approximately 680 students in degree programs. Notable past faculty and alumni include Lance Acord, Ansel Adams, Kathryn Bigelow, Enrique Chagoya, Angela Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Kos, George Kuchar, Annie Leibovitz, Barry McGee, Catherine Opie, Peter Pau, Laura Poitras, and Kehinde Wiley.
