Foundation

Petra Soesemann

Title Professor / Chair of the Foundation Environment
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7930

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Courses  Charette: Self & Other Voices | Design I | Design II

Petra Soesemann is a Professor and Chair of the Foundation Environment. In 2009 she was granted a year-long sabbatical leave to focus on her creative practice at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. Selected awards include Artist-in-Residence at the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain; Fulbright Fellowship to study Incan architecture in Peru; exhibition Grant to Sao Paulo, Brazil; travel grants to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala to research Mayan art and architecture; and travel grants to Turkey to study Islamic art and architecture as well as contemporary art. She has also taken CIA students to Mexico, Germany and Italy on team-taught foreign study trips. Soesemann’s recent work explores the conventional relationships between seeing and representing; her fabric constructions often manipulate light and color to bring perception into conflict with uncertainty, engaging the basic mechanisms of “mind seeking meaning” as a process of consciousness.

Degree MFA, Sculpture, School of the Art Institute of Chicago BFA, Sculpture, Cleveland Institute of Art Graduate work in Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois; summer study in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University; summer study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture