Biographical information on Elizabeth Ingraham: Recipient of 2003 Thatcher Hoffman Smith Prize

Elizabeth Ingraham is a sculptor who works in a variety of media. She has a bachelor of arts degree in art history from the University of Colorado, a jurist doctorate from the University of Denver and a master of fine art in sculpture from the University of California - Santa Barbara. At UCSB, she was the first visual artist to be awarded a fellowship from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Humanities and she was studio assistant to the installation artist Ann Hamilton.

Prior to her training in sculpture, Ingraham was an activist lawyer for Native American groups in Alaska and a participant in the radical social change resulting from federal settlement of aboriginal land claims in Alaska.

Her current work in progress is a series of life-size, fully dimensional female “skins” (with hands, head and feet), which embody mental states like “longing”, “desire”, “guilt” and “regret”. Made of materials as diverse as velvet, neoprene rubber and cotton chintz, her skins are designed to be touched and handled by the viewer; unzipped, unbuttoned, rattled and read. She says that these skins “explore how expectation, desire and convention -our own and others- form casings which become so familiar they seem like our own skin.”

She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska where she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. At UNL, she teaches visual literacy, a nationally recognized yearlong interdisciplinary foundation design program for all art, architecture, interior design and textiles students.

In 2001, she received the Nebraska Arts Council’s Distinguished Achievement Fellowship, its highest honor.

Visit her Web site by clicking this link: Cultural Terrain

A few of the top contenders for the Thatcher Hoffman Smith prize were the following:

Barbara King – “Creativity in Communication: An Evolutionary Perspective,” co-creating meaning.
Luis Argueta – “The Buscine Chapin: Itinerant Popular Cinema in Guatemala”.
Scott Momaday – “The Darker Species,” a new book of fiction.
Leonard Shlain – “Leonardo da Vinci,” a scientific analysis.
Diane Stout – “Know-Its, the Link to Reading”, a children’s educational inspiration.
Claudia Cogliser - "The Symphony as a Creative Organization," a study in leadership
Blaise Ferrandino - "Gesualdo," an opera.