Michael Diaz
Assistant Professor
About
Michael Loren Diaz, born in Tampa, Florida, received an M.F.A. from Arizona State University and a B.F.A. from the University of Central Florida. Drawing is the heart of all the work he does, which for him is more than just material on paper; it is a way to explore, examine, doubt and change. This process is how he approaches everything – both in and out of the studio – and is the fundamental subject of his work.
Diaz’s artwork is actively shown nationally, being included twice in the annual Drawn exhibition at Manifest Gallery, one of the leading forums for contemporary drawing, and recently as a part of Printmaking 2022, an exhibition at The Art Center in Dover, New Hampshire. Other notable exhibitions of his work include a solo exhibition at the Foundry Art Center in St. Charles, Missouri, and the 2017 Great Lakes Drawing Biennial at Eastern Michigan University, which was juried by Clair Gilman, the senior curator at the Drawing Center in New York. Diaz has won several awards, like the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize, the former of which sent him to Vienna and Salzburg to study drawing at the International Summer Academy of Fine Art, founded by Oskar Kokoschka. In addition, he was a finalist for the 2019 AXA Art Prize, which included his work in a traveling national exhibition of emerging figurative artists, juried by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and MoMA. Diaz has been teaching since 2017 and is currently an assistant professor of drawing and printmaking at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Classes Taught
- All levels of Drawing courses, including figure/life drawing
- Introduction to Printmaking
- Intaglio
- Screen Printing
- Experimental Printmaking
- Advanced Printmaking
- Senior Exhibition
- Art Appreciation
- 2D Design
Interests
- Philosophy, especially Philosophy of Mind
- Science, especially Neuroscience
- Reading
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