melissa m button

As Associate Director for Academic Affairs & Student Success, my attention is toward building frameworks of orientation and mentorship with a focus on teaching design, management, and support systems in an effort to grow student retention and success.  This includes providing high-level student-centered oversight of their experiences, pedagogy, and professional development. My goal is to align values and intention around outcomes by structuring innovative pedagogy among students and colleagues in a manner that bridges what students learn at the School of Art to what they encounter in their lives personally and professionally.  i model and build proactive approaches to solutions that create greater efficiency and impact with our programs, to ultimately position these functions so they are more equitably distributed at the School of Art.

i also serve as Senior Lecturer in Painting/Drawing.  Having received my B.S in Architecture from Arizona State University in 1994 and an MFA in Drawing in 2001, my practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and mixed media collages. The works explore my interest in space and constructed realities whereupon i seek the collaboration of interior and exterior spaces - creating distortions through perspective, layered transparencies, and disappearing edges.  The goal toward reinventing the viewer’s observed reality and continually shifting the narrative inside these spaces.  My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally throughout China and Europe.  As an artist and a scholar, i am dedicated to innovative pedagogy and implementing inclusive and diverse teaching practices.  As such it has garnered invitations to speak at FATE-Foundations in Art: Theory & Education Conference, the Thinking Through Drawing Symposium in London, UK, and being published in the book Let's Talk about Critique: Reimagining Art and Design Education.