The School of Art is pleased to introduce new and promoted endowed faculty advancing research in the fields of art education, art history and graphic design.

This talented group of scholars joins other established endowed professors within the School of Art, all generously funded by the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.

This fall the School of Art welcomed graphic design endowed associate professor Gaby Hernández and endowed assistant professor Dina Benbrahim to campus. Each brings a diverse portfolio of research, experience and perspective to share with students and the community.

Dónal O'Donoghue, endowed professor, joined the art education faculty in the spring of 2021. In addition to his research and instruction, O'Donoghue is the director of graduate studies in art education. The Master of Art in art education program plans to welcome the first cohort of graduate students in fall 2022.

School of Art faculty Ana Pulido Rull and Injeong Yoon-Ramirez were both promoted to endowed positions in spring 2021.

Pulido Rull is an endowed associate professor of art history and Yoon-Ramirez is an endowed assistant professor of art education. Both scholars have made a significant impact to their fields of study, students and the Northwest Arkansas community.

"The School of Art is thrilled to have such a high caliber of expertise advancing research in the arts," said Marty Maxwell Lane, director of the School of Art. "These endowed faculty are not only serving the mission of the university and school, they are serving a greater mission to support diverse and marginalized communities, pursue social justice, expand pedagogical potential and share new perspectives about the historical impact of indigenous art."

Dina Benbrahim is an Arab multidisciplinary creative who uses a feminist lens to focus on illuminating the power in human beings to be transformative forces in society. She is an endowed assistant professor of graphic design, joining the School of Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo. In addition to her academic experience, she has eight years of industry experience in design, art direction, copywriting and entrepreneurship in New York and Casablanca.

Benbrahim's research investigates design for visibility, civic action and social justice for marginalized communities to collectively reimagine equitable futures. One of her goals is to showcase the power inherent within stories of marginalized communities to inspire individual and societal impact.

Her work has been featured in national and international exhibitions and has received numerous awards including Activist Campaign x Flawlessness a project that gave light to victims of domestic violence in Morocco. The campaign went viral helping to drive conversation about women's rights and ultimately resulted in the reconsideration of existing laws that did not protect women against violence.

Gaby Hernández is a Costa Rican designer, researcher and endowed associate professor of graphic design. Prior to joining the School of Art, she served as assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Florida.

Hernández has 15 years of professional experience and extensive experience working with international communities and indigenous groups in México and Costa Rica. Her current work concentrates on the exploration and integration of topics of heritage and diversity in the design classroom, community engagement, design for good and decolonial design theories and practices. 

She is an avid visual storyteller and advocates for the use of visual storytelling as an inclusion tool for marginalized cultures. Hernández challenges herself and other design educators to integrate students' social and cultural identities, as well as their own identities and lived experience, to create a path for cultural connection.

Hernández has presented her work nationally and internationally and has been published in numerous journals and media. Most recently, in summer 2021, she was invited by Polymode to be a speaker for their 2021 series BIPOC Design History: Incomplete Latinx Stories of Diseño Gráfico.

She is a leader in design education and diversity, having served both on the AIGA National Design Educators Board and the AIGA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force for over four years. 

Dónal O'Donoghue is an endowed professor of art education and director of graduate studies. He came to the School of Art from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he was a professor of art education and served as senior adviser to the dean of the faculty of education strategic and academic planning.

He studies contemporary art, curatorial practice and education, with a particular interest in contemporary art's pedagogical potential, educative quality and distinctive capacity to function as a mode of scholarly inquiry and research. Informed by contemporary art theory, continental philosophy and the study of art making and aesthetics, his research and teaching contributes most significantly to two fields: art-led research and teaching, and art and aesthetic education. He is the author of Learning to Live in Boys' Schools: Art-Led Understandings of Masculinities published by Routledge in 2019.

O'Donoghue is a distinguished fellow of the National Art Education Association and senior editor of Studies in Art Education. He is the co-founding chair of The Art Education Research Institute and previously served as chair of The Council for Policy Studies in Art Education. Throughout the years, he has received many awards for his teaching, research and scholarship including the 2019 Sam Black Award for Education and Development in the Visual and Performing Arts, the 2018 International Edwin Ziegfeld Award and the 2018 Pacific Region Higher Education Art Educator of the Year Award.

Injeong Yoon-Ramirez is an endowed assistant professor of art education and affiliate faculty in gender studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Her research projects are deeply interconnected with her teaching and community organizing.

Academically, her work addresses critical race feminism and its pedagogical implications, decolonial aesthetics, transnational feminisms and translanguaging pedagogy. Her works were published in prestigious journals including Studies in Art Education, International Journal of Education and Multicultural Perspectives.

She is currently co-editing a transdisciplinary anthology, Transnational Feminist Arts Praxis and Pedagogy for Decolonization: Critical Engagements with Arts and Activism, forthcoming in 2022, to be published by Routledge.

Yoon-Ramirez has founded a translingual community program, InterWeave: Multilingual Community School, in Springdale, Arkansas, in collaboration with local non-profit organizations. As a director of the program, she organizes art-based classes and workshops for Latina/o families and adults creating a translanguaging space and bilingual community through art.

Arkansas Art Educators Association recently named Yoon-Ramirez the 2021 Arkansas Higher Education Art Educator of the Year.

Ana Pulido Rull, endowed associate professor of art history, received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and joined the U of A and former Department of Art in 2012. A native of México City, she holds a B.A. in history from the National Autonomous University of México, where she began her research on indigenous painted maps and manuscripts.

In her new book, Mapping Indigenous Land. Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain, she examines a corpus of maps, previously unpublished, designed as legal evidence to be used in land disputes. Her research underscores how these maps enabled indigenous communities to translate their ideas about the contested spaces into visual form, offered arguments for the defense of these spaces, and in some cases even helped protect indigenous land against harmful requests. 

Her research focuses on indigenous agency and the various ways in which the native population of New Spain succeed in making their traditional practices constituent elements of colonial life. Pulido Rull has been invited to talk about her work at major national and international venues.

She is currently working on a book about the representation of space, both secular and sacred, in pre-Columbian and colonial Indigenous manuscripts. The book will explore space as a social construct and a category for historical analysis by examining how it was produced culturally in Mesoamerica and the ideologies that informed this production.