2013 has been quite a year AMT!

US News ranked Parsons #8 for Best Grad School for Multimedia / Visual Communications and Graphic Design USA Magazine rated Parsons in the Top Five Most Influential Design Schools Today.

AMT’s Design and Technology and Illustration programs both got recognized at #3 in Animation Career Review’s Top 20 Animation and Game Design Schools on the East Coast list!

AMT hosted three well-attended, first-time public events this year: Gender Play, the Gender Design and Art Conference, the New York Comics and Picture-story symposium and the hackathon, Re3 StoryHack, that addressed justice based persuasive writing in addition to our usual, great annual events, including Playtech, the Photographic Universe conference and the Fine Arts Lecture Series.

There have been many AMT faculty accomplishments in 2013, so let’s highlight a few up front, such as Illustration Faculty Nora Krug winning a Guggenheim Fellowship and a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators.  MFA Photo Faculty Laura Parnes also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in film and video, while AMT Associate Dean and CD faculty Lucille Tenazas was recognized with the AIGA Medal for her prominent role in translating postmodern ideas into critical design practice; her exploration of the relationship between type, photography and language; and the development and leadership of highly-respected design education programs.

If you’re staying in town for the holidays, please check out the windows at 2 W.13th St., where Lucille Tenazas will be installing an interactive window display with QR codes that link directly to websites which support the victims of superstorm Haiyan, called Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines. Here are ways to help right now.

Fine Arts faculty and interim MFA Fine Arts director, Andrea Geyer, received a Global Residency Grant from Creative Time; Ernesto Pujol’s 24-hour performance Time After Us, which included current and former MFA Fine Arts students, was featured in New York Times art critic Holland Cotter’s Favorite 2013 Art Events list; Alexandro Segade and his performance collective, My Barbarian, was selected to show at the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Caroline Woolard got onto the Wired Smart List for her organizations Ourgoods.org and Trade School. During Art Basel week in Miami, standout exhibitions from our faculty included Saya Woolfalk’s work at SCOPE (called out as a must-see by the Huffington Post) and BFA Fine Arts Director Anthony Aziz and faculty Sammy Cucher’s video installation at The Screening Room in Wynwood (called out as a must-see by the Miami Herald).

Photo Faculty Graham Macindoe also showed at the Miami Project Art Fair, while Photo faculty Arthur Ou showed at NADA Miami.

Arthur Ou was also interviewed by Richard Vine about the exhibition he curated here, “Cross-Strait Relations”. Photo faculty Colin Stearns’ work was featured in Oxford American and Charles Harbutt was featured on Time Magazine’s Lightbox blog.

Among the Illustration Faculty, Steven Guarnaccia was featured on PBS’s OFF BOOK for the episode, The Art of Illustration, while Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories, by Ben Katchor, was named on NPR and Time Magazine’s Top 10 Comics and Graphic Novels list!

An Occupy Wall Street screenprint by Graphic Design faculty Jeanne Verdoux was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Included in MOMA’s “Designing Modern Women” exhibition was a poster by AAS GD Director Julia Gorton, designed in 1978 while she was a CD student at Parsons!

Communication Design faculty Gabriele Wilson’s design for Middle C by William H. Gass was included in The New York Times Sunday Book Review’s Best Book Covers of 2013.

Director of MFADT Katherine Moriwaki along with her MFADT faculty collaborator Louisa Campbell were awarded a HIVE catalyst grant from the New York Community Trust for gadgITERATION.  DT faculty and PETlab founders Colleen Macklin and John Sharpe’s Kickstarter campaign for the reboot of their “Metagame” more than doubled it’s Kickstarter funding goal. Dr. Sabine Seymour, MFADT faculty, has been featured this year in Cool Hunting, PBS Off Book, Gizmodo and on NOVA’s “30 Second Science” program. MFA DT faculty Dave Carroll and students were featured on BBC World News.  The MFADT booth at this year’s Maker Faire, populated by the fun, innovative projects of students, alumni and faculty, won an editors choice ribbon at Maker Faire!

AMT had their first all-program student rep meeting this year, and it was a great chance for students to interact with one another, ask questions, voice issues and make suggestions for positive solutions. We will continue to meet with student reps on a monthly basis in the new year.

Student achievements this year were as plentiful as faculty achievements. Parsons swept the Amazon Fashion Studio Sessions Competition, as students (three from AMT and seven from the School of Fashion) took top prize in both the menswear and womenswear categories, competing against teams from SVA, Pratt, and FIT. Photographer: Spencer Kohn (BFA Photography ’14), Graphic Designers: Gabrielle Guglielmelli and Julie Chea (BFA Communications Design ’14) made AMT very proud!

Illustration and Parsons alumna and Fresh co-founder Alina Roytberg recently collaborated and the winners of that competition were students Vincy Cheung and Mitsi Solano.  More winners from Illustration: students Kristen Davis, Katie Gross, Masuko Jo, Rachel Levit, Monica Ramos, Meghann Stephenson, Janet Sung, and Linnea Gad were selected by a distinguished jury to be included in the 3×3 Illustration Annual.

The ambitious Get On The Bus campaign was started by GD and CD students, Christoffer Laursen Hald, Felicitas Kofler, Joely Saravia, and Cole Cooper, while taking GD and Print Director Julia Gorton’s “Designing For Non-Profits” class.  The goal is to raise $10,000 in order for the New York based non-profit organization The Supply to purchase a school bus for children in the Matopeni slums in Kenya.  Work by MFA Fine Arts Student, Mark John Smith, was featured during October in the Regent’s Park tube station promotion for the United Kingdom’s largest art fair, The Frieze Art Fair.  You can currently see Mark’s design work in the lobby of 66^th Fifth Avenue and then AMT CD Faculty Pablo Medina’s work featured as the wallpaper in the 2 West 13^th Street lobby.

Altos de Chavon alums studying in the BFA Fine Arts program took home honors from the 27th Biennial of the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo.  Joiri Minaya (BFA Fine Arts ’13) won the first place Grand Prize (approximately $12,500) for her performance piece, “Satisfied”, which she created while at Parsons and performed as part of AMT’s “Crossing Screens” thesis exhibition.  Jonnathan Sanchez also received an Honorable Mention for his piece “Pajaro”, and Moisés Pellerano, Monica Pagès and Mencia Zagarella (all BFA Fine Arts ’13 Alums) also had pieces in the Biennial. Both Moisés Pellerano and Monica Pages created their pieces while at Parsons.

The Huffington Post named MFA Fine Arts ’10 alum Alexandria Smith one of 10 Female Artists to Watch, Fine Arts had a considerable alumni showing during Art Basel week in Miami, representing at Aqua Art Fair (Peter Lapsley–also our esteemed AMT Academic Fabrication Facilities Manager–and Langdon Graves), Select Fair (Vanessa Turi), and Art Untitled (Brolab’s Adam Brent and Tvvinhaus’ Tara Long–who helped do the projections and constructions for the TM).

Following a juried selection of 15 finalists out of 130 entries from Parsons, Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland, and Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, the Nokia Lumia 820 Design Challenge opened the competition up to a democratic Facebook voting system, which revealed one of our own, Marisa Glick (MFA DT ’13), as the grand prize winner!

Maya Weinstein’s MFA DT 2013 thesis project, D.I.Y Corn Syrup Kit, got major internet buzz after being covered by Bon Appetit. Another MFA DT alum, Aisen Caro Cachin, got her buzzy project, the Play-A-Grill, featured in the ’Future Tech’ segment of Discovery Channel Canada’s science & technology show, Daily Planet. Carrie Mae Rose, MFA DT ’09 recently completed a year long fellowship at Eyebeam was interviewed by MakerBot, while fellow MFA DT class of ’09 alumnus, Jennifer Dopazo, won the prestigious American Graphic Design Awards 2013!

Meryl Vedros, BFA CD ’11 won an award from Communication Arts for her program design for the 2013 AIGA Bright Lights award ceremony.

Illustration Alum Sophia Chang collaborated on project with global brands PUMA and Steve Madden, while Illustration ’12 alum, Rachel Levit had her work featured in Juxtapoz.

BFA Photo student, Lior Tamim, was recently featured in Burn Magazine as part of the Emerging Photography Fund 2013 shortlist and Matthew Shrier and Kate Stone, BFA and MFA respectively, were featured in Wallpaper Magazine’s 2014 Graduate Directory.

A portrait of Greate Gerwig by Parsons BFA Photography ’10 alumni Tessi Öhrvall and Joel Jägerroos was named one of Time magazine’s best portraits of the year! MFA Photo alum, Noelle Theard was featured in the New York Times for “(1)ne Drop” Project, while the very in-demand Erik Madigan Heck continues to dominate the MFA Photography blog!

Congratulations to our entire community for the all of the accomplishments that exceed more than we can list here and thank you for the ongoing hard work and creativity.  We wish you a very well deserved and happy holiday break and are looking forward to another exciting and productive year in 2014!