Department of Art & Art History Welcomes New Chair
The College of Arts + Architecture is pleased to welcome Lydia C. Thompson as the new Chair of the Department of Art & Art History. Thompson has held positions as the Director of the School of Art at Texas Tech University, Department Head at Mississippi State University, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, Assistant Dean of Multi-Cultural Affairs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Director of the Educational Opportunity Program at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She has served on the boards for the National Council of Education for Ceramics (NCECA), National Council of Arts Administrators (NCAA,) and most recently the Lubbock Arts Alliance.
A ceramic artist, Thompson’s work has been exhibited in galleries, art centers, and museums such as the Society for Contemporary Crafts (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Baltimore Clayworks (Maryland), the Ohr O’Keefe Museum (Biloxi, Mississippi), and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (Louisville), nationally, and Te Temauta Gallery (New Zealand) and Guldegaard (Denmark), internationally. She has completed public commissions for businesses, and her work is in private and public collections in North Carolina, Virginia, New Mexico, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy.
Professor Thompson received a Fulbright Hayes grant to conduct research on traditional architecture in Nigeria and a VCUarts Institutional Grant for research at the International Ceramic Research Center Artist-in-Residency in Denmark. In 2012 she completed a residency at the Medalta Ceramic Center in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. She has conducted workshops and given lectures throughout the United States, has served as both juror and curator for national and regional exhibitions, and has worked with community youth groups in her region.
A native of Columbus, Ohio, Thompson received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The Ohio State University and her Master of Fine Arts degree from the New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University.