Mary Tsiongas is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses human relationships to technology and the natural environment.  Born in Greece and now based in Albuquerque, she holds a B.S. in Research Biology from Boston College, an MFA in Film, Video and Performance from the California College of the Arts, and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. Before joining the faculty at UNM in the fall of 2001, she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute as a Visiting Faculty for five years in the Film and Digital areas.

Tsiongas is the recipient of several grants, and awards including a WESTAF NEA grant and an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1997.  She has performed, exhibited and lectured extensively for the past fifteen years; her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Lincoln Center in New York, San Jose Museum of Art, SF Camerawork and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Artspace in Sydney, Australia, and Naga Gallery in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Tsiongas’ recent work focuses on concerns about how we as humans are impacting the natural world and how this impact is affecting us personally and globally, in return.  The work has focused on disparate themes such as hunting, dowsing, and time and often takes the form of performance, video, sound, installation, and sculpture.   This new work interacts with other longtime fascinations such as metaphysics, games, chance, flora and fauna and simple electronic technology. Current projects include the exploration of time through dendrochronology and animal behavior. 

http://www.marytsiongas.com

Claudia X. Valdes is an intermedia artist concerned primarily with issues of time, memory, perception, and trauma. She was born in Santiago, Chile.

Valdes received an MFA and was awarded the Eisner Prize in Art from the University of California, Berkeley. She was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts from 2001-2003.

Since the fall of 2001, her work has centered on the history of nuclear arms in the United States. Works on this subject have been realized in various forms including: performance, painting, photography, film, video, immersive and interactive media.

Valdes' work has exhibited internationally including at venues such as: the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; WRO Center for Media Art, Wroclaw, Poland; the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; the UCR/California Museum of Photography; Art in General, New York; Centro Multimedia/Centro National de las Artes, Mexico; and the Werkstˇ˝tten und Kulturhaus, Austria.

Recent creative awards include an Honorable Mention at the 2006 Transmediale festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, Germany and an Artist Grant from the Puffin Foundation in 2007.

Valdes has also presented co-authored papers internationally at conferences, including Refresh! First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology, Banff , Canada; Mutamorphosis: Challenging Arts and Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic; the 2005 and 2007 Annual Conferences of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts [SLSA]; and re:place 2007 :: Second International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology, Berlin, Germany.

At UNM, Valdes develops and teaches Special Topics courses. Currently these courses are focus on Physical Computing for Interactive Video and Sound. Prior to UNM, she developed and taught digital media art courses at UC Berkeley, the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington, Seattle, UC Santa Cruz, and at Mills College and Stanford University as a Visiting Artist. Her academic honors include a Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities faculty appointment within the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.