We’re thrilled to welcome three extraordinary artists and educators to the Department of Art!
Rambod Vala is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and educator whose work spans graphic and moving images. His practice integrates video, installation, typography, storytelling, and layered narrative structures interweaving realism and fantasy, politics and romance, skepticism and belief.
In 2019, Vala co-founded Unche Studio, a collaborative platform at the intersection of graphic, architectural, and object design through the lens of fine art. Named after the Farsi word “آنچه” (meaning “that which”), the studio embraces uncertainty, the unseen, and the not-yet-defined.
Vala earned his MFA in Art, Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2015. His projects have been presented internationally, including the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and were featured in The New York Times in January 2020.
He is a two-time recipient of the Award for Typographic Excellence from the Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago (2010, 2025) and has received the Luminarts Fellowship and the Runner-Up Award from the Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation. In March 2022, Vala completed a residency at Delfina Foundation in London, further expanding his international research and collaborative practice.
Eric J. García combines illustrated history and a bold graphic style to create political art that confronts our understanding of the present. Using printmaking, drawing, murals, and multimedia projects, he aims to prevent historical amnesia and cultural erasure. By reexamining forgotten stories in an accessible and visually striking way, his work becomes a tool to share, learn from, and spark critical dialogue.
He received his BFA with a minor in Chicano Studies from the University of New Mexico and earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. García is a member of the Veteran Art Movement, as well as the printmaking collectives Justseeds Print Cooperative and Instituto Grafico de Chicago. His work has been exhibited nationally and can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress.
Ji Yoon Chung is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher conducting doctoral research in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. As a visual arts educator at a children’s hospital, she explores how arts education can be integrated into hospital school settings, developing approaches that are inclusive and responsive to the evolving needs of pediatric patients.
In her studio practice, Ji Yoon investigates ways to translate fleeting, immaterial experiences into tangible forms. She often dissolves ink from printed photographs to evoke the erosion of memory, allowing new forms and meanings to emerge through the gradual degradation of imagery. Her work spans drawing, photography, sculpture, and digital fabrication, and has been exhibited in Providence, Boston, Reykjavík, and Seoul.
She holds an MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, an M.Ed. in Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a BFA in Contemporary Art from Seoul Women’s University. She has worked as a research assistant with Project Zero and the Learning Innovation and Technology Lab and has taught as a lecturer at Seoul Women’s University.
We’re excited to have Rambod join us as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design, Eric as the Assistant Professor of Painting & Drawing, and Ji Yoon as the Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Education.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
LEARN MORE about the new faculty by visiting https://art.unm.edu/people/faculty
EXPLORE the work of Rambod Vala by checking out his website at unche.studio or following on Instagram @rambodvala.
EXPLORE the work of Eric J. Garcia by checking out his website at ericjgarcia.com or following on Instagram @elmacheteillustrated.
EXPLORE the work ofJi Yoon Chung by checking out her website at jyjenchung.com or following on Instagram @jenjyoon.
