Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg named inaugural Faculty Research Fellows

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is pleased to announce Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg have been named the inaugural Faculty Research Fellows of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice. Eisenberg is Professor in the Departments of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation and Visual and Critical Studies; and Rothenberg is Adjunct Professor in Fiber and Material Studies. 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.

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. The Institute serves as a laboratory for the development of research and engaged artistic practices. 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.

Eisenberg and Rothenberg’s work will bring together practitioners from a range of disciplines to examine issues of economic insecurity. Eisenberg and Rothenberg note: “It’s time, once again, for artists, critics, and theorists to turn their attention to the issues of labor and unemployment; to produce new images, representations, and critical frameworks with a renewed sense of urgency, and to address fear and insecurity with imagination, empowerment, clarity, and humor. There is no change in advance of comprehension, empathy, and a sense of shared destiny. Art and culture can bridge those gaps of communication.” 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.

Daniel Eisenberg, who has taught at SAIC since 1994, is a filmmaker working at the edges of documentary and experimental media. Over the last three decades, Eisenberg has created a unique body of films that have become internationally recognized for expanding the boundaries between traditions of the personal avant-garde film and historical documentary. His films have been screened throughout North America, Europe, and Asia with solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; among others. 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 is also the recipient of a Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin for 2014–15. In 2016–17, Eisenberg was a guest of the director of the International Research Center at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Ellen Rothenberg’s work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. From her performances, to her installations, and research projects, Rothenberg has probed formal boundaries for what they can produce, designing responsive structures that encourage participation. 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. Awards include NEA Regional Fellowships, The Bunting Institute Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University, and grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, among others. As SAIC faculty since 1995, Rothenberg has produced a hybrid pedagogy in her teaching as well. Working with established communities, and forming new ones has become an essential part of her working process.