CCAD Goes Live: Namita Gupta Wiggers

columbus college of art and design

CCAD Goes Live: Namita Gupta Wiggers

March 2021
CCAD Goes Live with educator, curator, and writer Namita Gupta Wiggers, hosted by Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies Jennifer Schlueter, PhD. Wiggers is an educator, curator, and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She is the Director of the Master of Arts in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College, the first low-residency graduate program to focus on this field. She is the Director and Co-Founder of Critical Craft Forum, which offers real-time conversations about critical issues of interest to the field. From 2014 to 2017, Wiggers lectured, juried and curated exhibitions, conducted research, and taught workshops across the US, and in Denmark, France, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, South Korea, and Sweden. During this time, she taught in the MFA Applied Craft + Design, co-administered by Oregon College of Art + Craft and Pacific Northwest College of Art, at Portland State University and Oregon College of Art and Craft. From 2004 to 2014, she served as the Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon. She contributes to online and in-print journals and books, and serves on the Editorial Board of Garland, Norwegian Crafts and CRAFTS (UK), and on the advisory board of The Journal of Modern Craft. Her current projects include: Critical Craft Forum podcasts (funded by a Craft Futures Grant from the Center for Craft); a forthcoming craft anthology, and an ongoing research project with Benjamin Lignel on gender and adornment.

While Columbus College of Art & Design’s physical campus is primarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you can still hear from guest expert artists, designers, and innovators across our program areas who will share their knowledge and answer questions from the CCAD community during interactive Instagram Live sessions. These sessions come as part of CCAD’s ongoing commitment to scholarship, inquiry, and creative thinking in which the college regularly brings in leading artists, scholars, and thinkers to share their work and their insights with our students and the community as a whole.