Department of Art & Art History Announces New Faculty

The Department of Art & Art History welcomes three new full-time faculty members in the upcoming academic year. Samira ShiriDevich will join the Department in August as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design – Motion Design. Lorraine Turi will join the Department in August as Lecturer in Digital Foundations/3D. Mallory Nanny will join the Department in January 2023 as Lecturer in Liberal Studies (LBST).

“We are so pleased to announce these new additions to our Department,” said Chair Angela Rajagopalan. “Our new scholars are involved in global and interdisciplinary creative practices; in the classroom this will translate to instruction that guides students to solve problems by working across boundaries. Samira Shiridevich’s community-engaged work will be an asset to the Charlotte region and dovetails with the values that define our department and college strategic plans. Lorraine Turi is a seasoned educator, and our Foundations program will benefit from the intellectual rigor and care that define their pedagogy. And Mallory Nanny’s globally informed scholarship will help to shape the new direction of liberal studies education at UNC Charlotte.”

Samira ShiriDevich (pictured above left) is an Iranian designer and entrepreneur whose work in graphic, motion, UI/UX, Interaction, and participatory design is focused on exploring and addressing the complexities of freedom, equity, and agency through design. To do this, she uses a human-centered, horizontal approach, emphasizing participatory and community-engaged design with people as they bring their own expertise and agency. She asks “how might we use design to identify their depth of knowledge?” as she works with people in context to draw from their experiences, identify knowledges, and tell their own stories to communicate with audiences. Working with people in their communities has confirmed her belief that there is a world of hidden, and often undervalued, resources and a wealth of information in every person’s story.

Since early 2020, ShiriDevich has been actively involved in ongoing design research with Project YouthBuild (PYB), a Gainesville branch of a national AmeriCorps organization devoted to high school degree completion and career training for youth forced out of public schools. Using a co-design process which is central to her practice, she collaborated with PYB stakeholders to design a social media campaign to increase their visibility and recognize their accomplishments. Through a co-design process, she facilitated sustainable communication and collaboration between local East Gainesville community members and PYB students, whose campus is in East Gainesville. She also collaborated with the UF Shimberg Center of Housing Studies on a white paper, data visualizations, and information design as part of their National Science Foundation Grant proposal to study the impact of sea-level rise in vulnerable Florida communities. Her work helped demonstrate the importance of visual communication to better communicate the value of their proposed research and make their proposal more formidable.

Prior to joining the University of North Carolina at Charlotte as a tenure-track assistant professor, she taught graphic design as instructor of record at the University of Florida and at various institutions in Iran before coming to the United States. ShiriDevich received her MFA in Design and Visual Communications from the University of Florida, where she won the Harold Garde Studio Art Scholarship and earned an MA in Design and Visual Communications from the University of Art in Tehran.

With over a decade of professional experience in Iran, ShiriDevich worked as an art director for both the Avaye Sadra Resaneh Advertising Agency and the Municipality of Tehran, and as a graphic designer for multiple Iranian design agencies. Her work and research have been featured in national and international conferences, exhibitions, and publications. She presented the academic article “Visual Analysis of the Capital Cities of Developed Countries’ Portals” at the International Conference on Arts and Humanities (2018) in Sri Lanka. In 2020, she co-led an interactive panel entitled “Social Distancing???!!! Perspective for Nurturing Environments for Hybrid? Remote Multicultural and Multidisciplinary Collaboration” at the Digitally Engaged Learning (DEL) Conference and presented her work “Iranian Design History” on the Teaching and Learning Through Digital Archives panel at the University & College Designers Association (UCDA) Design Education Summit. Most recently, ShiriDevich presented her work at Project YouthBuild (Gainesville, FL) and participated in the 2022 UCDA Design Education Summit, “Agency” where she presented on the Expanded Practices: Positionality and Plurality in the Field Panel and shared her poster, “Connectivity through Community Asset Mapping.” Visit ShiriDevich’s website to learn more.

Lorraine Turi (pictured above right) uses photography in their work to create photographic explorations that investigate the complex relationship between humans and the environment. Turi has participated in solo and group exhibitions including Multiplicity, the UNC Charlotte Biennial Alumni Show at Rowe Galleries, and at the Lowe Gallery, Art Miami Art Fair in Miami, FL.

Turi’s images have been published in Creative Quarterly and most recently Lenscratch, The States Project and Focal Plane magazine. They have presented at SPE Society of Photographic Education conferences and at the FATE Foundations in ART: Theory and Education. Turi is an alum of UNC Charlotte, having received a BFA in Photography in 2010. In 2013 Turi received an MFA from East Carolina University. More information and examples of their work can be found at this website.

Mallory Nanny (pictured above center) specializes in contemporary American photography with an interdisciplinary focus on Vietnamese American history and memory studies. Her doctoral research examines how artists represent, re-enact, and memorialize the Vietnam War in photo-based media from the late 1990s to the present.

As a PhD candidate at Florida State University, Mallory received the Patricia Rose Teaching Fellowship (2017–20) and awards, including the I.N. Winbury Award (2018 and 2020) and the Penelope Mason Dissertation Research Award (2022). She was also the recipient of the Luce/ACLS Ellen Holtzman Dissertation Fellowship in American Art for the 2020–21 academic year.