Academics . Foundation . Faculty
Foundation Faculty
Title Studio Manager, Foundation + CECO
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7947
Degree BFA, Painting and Literary Studies, Maryland Institute College of Art
Allison Bogard Hall is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. Hall earned her BFA in Painting and Literary Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2014, and has since been expanding her work through many mediums such as printmaking and installation. Her pieces are often autobiographical and heavily influenced by current events, photography, found imagery, and literature.
She is the Studio Manager for the Foundation and Continuing Education departments at CIA, and continues to make work out of her studio at the Screw Factory in Lakewood, Ohio.
Title Associate Professor
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7355
Degree MFA, Pratt Institute
Anthony Ingrisano is an instructor in CIA's Painting and Foundation departments. Ingrisano shows with Lesley Heller Workspace in New York. Before he started at CIA, he taught at Briarcliffe College. He was a contributing essayist to Sharon Louden’s book, Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. He earned an MFA from Pratt Institute.
Degree MFA, Ceramics from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University
BFA, Studio Art from Kent State
Kautenburger's sculpture functions to contain sensations of the natural environment, housing and presenting natural phenomena as an invitation for anyone so inclined to poetic ponderance. Work often involves insect habitats (crickets and honeybees), natural material from the Rocky River basin, as well as substances collected from his bee yard, such as propolis, wax, and pollens.
He is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and has exhibitited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Allentown Museum of Art, among others. He has an MFA in Ceramics from Tyler School of Art, and a BFA from Kent State University.
He has been teaching at CIA since 2001, where he teaches Foundation Design and Environment, Art and Engaged Practice.
Title Assistant Professor
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7355
Degree MFA, Sculpture, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Post Baccalaureate Certificate, Maryland Institute College of Art
BA, Art, Hiram College
Amber Kempthorn explores time and nostalgia through drawing. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S. and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art and recently in More is More: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art at the Akron Art Museum.
In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a $54,000 Knight Arts Challenge Akron grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for her animation project, Ordinary Magic: A Sunday in the Cuyahoga Valley, a series of four animations visually translating Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes (1945). Blending traditional hand-drawn and contemporary computer animation, Ordinary Magic builds on the tradition of playfully merging classical music with animation, premiering with live accompaniment by the Akron Symphony Orchestra in October 2022. Also in 2022,
Kempthorn was awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize Award for Emerging Artist and was the recipient of the Cleveland Institute of Art's Dan Tranberg Teaching Excellence Award.
Title Professor | Chair, Sculpture + Expanded Media
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7000
Degree MFA, University of Texas at San Antonio
BFA, Truman State University
Kuehnle has had solo shows at museums, galleries and universities in the United States and internationally.
In 2019 he opened a solo show, Wow, Pop, Bliss, at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC that will span 4 interior galleries and include a monumental site-specific inflatable sculpture on the museum’s exterior.
He exhibited a site-specific interactive inflatable installation at Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco in 2018. His 2016 solo exhibition at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York was favorably reviewed in The New York Times, featured in New York Magazine’s “Approval Matrix” and recommended by online sites such as the New York Daily News, Artnet and Hyperallergic. In 2016, Kuehnle received a Creative Workforce Fellowship, a program of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture funded by the citizens of Cuyahoga County. In the fall of 2016, Kuehnle exhibited new monumentally scaled site-specific inflatables at the Akron Art Museum in an exhibit titled, Wiggle, Giggle, Jiggle. This installation was reviewed in the Plain Dealer, Akron Beacon Journal, Canvas Magazine, CAN Journal, WCPN’s the Sound of Applause. In 2014, he was selected for the national survey exhibition State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. As a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow in Japan, 2008, he pursued his interest in public art and sculpture.
Selected group exhibitions include Inflatable, Exploratorium, San Francisco (2018) How to Remain Human, MOCA Cleveland (2015); ARS, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, Milan, Italy (2010); and Betsu no Sekai, Nagakute Cultural Center, Nagoya, Japan (2008). Kuehnle has been awarded artist residencies from, SPACES, Cleveland, Ohio (2013); Sculpture Space, Utica, New York (2010); Albion College, Albion, Michigan (2009); and Ateljé Stundars, Vaasa, Finland (2009).
Focusing on sculpture and performance, Kuehnle works in various media and has exhibited his projects nationally and internationally. His recent work features site-specific inflatable installations in museums as well as public performance treks through rural and urban cities in the U.S. such as Chicago, Detroit, Austin, St. Louis, Cincinnati, San Antonio, Dallas, and New York as well as international performances in Japan, Italy, and Finland.
Degree MFA, Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art
Scott Ligon has written a book about creating digital fine art in Photoshop, “Digital Art Revolution”, published by Random House. His animated short film, “Escape Velocity,” has played in festivals and theaters all over the world and has won numerous awards. “Escape Velocity” is distributed by Shorts International in London, and has been shown on television in the US, UK, Europe and South America. His second short film, “Figure/Ground” is about the death of his father. It features veteran actor Allan Kulakow who appeared as the Joint Chief of Staff on NBC’s West Wing. The film has also been shown in festivals all over the world and has signed a distribution deal with Future Shorts in the UK.
Scott is currently nearing completion on his first full length feature film, “Max, A Short Life.” about the life and death of his son Max Ligon. Music for the film is being composed by Gideon Freudmann, whose music has been included in many television shows and films.
Title Assistant Professor
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7355
Degree MFA, Washington University, St Louis
BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art
Mike Meier is a painter whose work examines how violence reverberates in the American psyche through media, art history, and popular culture. Meier has exhibited in numerous galleries and non-profit art spaces in Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, and Spartanburg, South Carolina. Notable solo exhibitions include Man Out of Time at FORUM Artspace (Cleveland, OH) and TGIF at Waterloo Arts (Cleveland, OH) which included 12 paintings and 200 drawings made throughout the Covid 19 quarantine.
Title Professor of Practice, Graphic Design
Department Foundation
Phone 216.421.7930
Degree BFA, Communication Design, College for Creative Studies
Katie Melnick is a partner at Fizz Creative with her husband, Jasen. Together, they have built Fizz as a creative powerhouse specializing in branding and packaging design for food and consumer goods. Katie has become her clients' cheerleader, creative conduit, and brand therapist, empowering her clients to blaze their own trails based on the unique brand positions she helps them build.
Having studied in Holland, Switzerland and Italy, Katie strongly believes in always pushing her creativity in new ways to create innovative solutions for their clients.
She was a driven entrepreneur from 10 (yes 10) when she sold bracelets and mixed tapes to her classmates. Now Katie's work can be seen on grocery store shelves all over the Midwest and beyond!
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