PNCA proudly graduates students in nine undergraduate and two graduate programs, including the inaugural class of the MFA in Applied Craft and Design. The 2011 Commencement Address will be delivered by alumna Julia Fish ’76.

Julia Fish was born in Oregon and has lived and worked in Chicago since 1985. She received the BFA degree from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1976, and MFA degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1982. Her work has been presented in twenty-one solo exhibitions since 1980, and was the subject of a ten-year survey exhibition, View, at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1996. Recent paintings were included in 2010, the Whitney Biennial. In addition, paintings and drawings have been curated in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Chicago Cultural Center; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture / Schindler House, Los Angeles; and the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, among many others.

Fish received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1991, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 1993, the Cal Arts / Alpert Ucross Residency Prize in 2001, and the 2006 Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award. She has also been granted research and travel awards from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she is Professor of Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design, College of Architecture and the Arts. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, in addition to other public and private collections.

Read an interview with Julia Fish ’76 on Untitled.

Official Graduation DVDs will be available through GradMemory. Visit their website for details and pre-order at a discount.