THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE

THINKING THROUGH DRAWING: PRACTICE INTO KNOWLEDGE 157

biographies

Harvard University and an M.A. from Tufts Uni-
versity and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
She is also an alumna of the Skowhegan School of
Painting and Sculpture. Jane is a recipient of grants
from The New York Foundation for the Arts, The
Pollock-Krasner Foundation and The National
Endowment for the Arts. She has been a resident at
the Cité Internationale des Artes in Paris, the Fine
Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a four-time
guest at Yaddo. Jane had her first solo show in New
York City at White Columns in 1994. Since then she
has had solo shows at Casey Kaplan Gallery and at
Pierogi in New York as well as Michael Rosenthal
Gallery in San Francisco and Barbara Davis Gal-
lery in Houston. Her work has been exhibited in
group shows at The Tang Museum, The Brooklyn
Museum, The Neuberger Museum, Jack Tilton,
P.P.O.W., The Drawing Center and White Columns
all in New York, as well as at Völcker & Freunde in
Berlin, g-module in Paris, Vilma Gold in London,
Post Gallery in Los Angeles, and The Weatherspoon
Museum in North Carolina.

Doug Fitch is a multivalent thingmaker who
uses drawing as a way to manifest the thinking pro-
cess. He has worked in media ranging from archi-
tecture and opera to puppetry and food. He has
created a number of performance installation feasts
involving whole villages in France and designed
and constructed the interior and furniture for a
home for violinist Joshua Bell. In a traveling exhi-
bition of drawings and painted sculptures entitled
Organs of Emotion, he proposed a new design for
the human anatomy aimed at better serving the
life of emotions. An exhibition of tactile pictures,
called Mit Haut und Haaren, is currently traveling
around Germany. As director/designer, he created
a production of Elliot Carter’s opera, What Next?,
conducted by James Levine, that was filmed and
premiered at MOMA. He has also created opera
productions for the Santa Fe Opera, the Los Ange-
les Opera, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the
National Symphony Orchestra. Recently, his pro-
ductions of Le Grand Macabre and the Cunning
Little Vixen with the New York Philharmonic were
met with great acclaim. He is currently creating a
touring production of Peter and the Wolf, to happen
in a tent, with his company, Giants are Small.

Tara Geer got her BA from Columbia Univer-
sity with a double major in Art and Art History, she

graduated Magna Cum Laude & Phi Beta Kappa.

She went back to Columbia with a Teaching Fel-

lowship to get a MFA. She has been drawing and

teaching drawing for the nearly 2 decades since.

She has also worked at WNYC, the NY public radio

station, writing and producing culture pieces for

Morning Edition, Studio 360, Leonard Lopate and

other national radio shows. She taught art in every

borough of NYC, every age, in public and private

school, frequently using Visual Teaching Strategies.

Recently she has been drawing and teaching private

classes out of her studio in Harlem and teaching

drawing classes at Columbia. The private students

range from advanced drawers working on specific

projects, professionals in the arts having blocks, to

kids with delays working on perceptual challenges.

She has been to several residencies at MacDowell

and Denniston Hill and shows her work in galleries,

including Tibor de Nagy, The Drawing Center reg-

istry and the Four Seasons Hotel in Wyoming. She

will have a solo show at the Outpost this winter. She

received the Loius Sudler Prize for excellence in the

Arts and the Joan Sovern prize.

Andrea Kantrowitz is an artist, teacher and

doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia

University and a member of the Drawing Research

Network. She holds a B.A in Art and Cognition

from Harvard University and a MFA in Painting

from Yale, and teaches graduate students in art

education at the College of New Rochelle. She has

also worked for many years as a teaching artist in

the New York City public schools. Her research

examines the cognitive interactions underlying con-

temporary artists’ drawing practices. Her art work is

represented by Kenise Barnes Fine Art.

David Kirsh is Professor and past chair of the

Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD. He was

educated at Oxford University (D.Phil), did post

doctoral research at MIT in the Artificial Intelli-

gence Lab, and has held research or visiting profes-

sor positions at MIT and Stanford University. He

has written extensively on situated cognition and

especially on how the environment can be shaped

to simplify and extend cognition. He runs the Inter-

active Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on

the way humans are closely coupled to the outside

world, and how human environments have been

adapted to enable us to cope with the complexity of

everyday life. He has written extensively on the use