New Tenure-Track Faculty for 2020-21
2020-09-30 • Sam Fox School
Aggie Toppins has joined the faculty as an associate professor of communication design and chair of undergraduate design. Previously she taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she served as the first female department head in art. She earned a BS in Graphic Design from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning and an MFA in Graphic Design with a Certificate in the College Teaching of Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Before her academic career, she spent a decade in the graphic design industry, working at agencies in Cincinnati and Chicago.
Through her studio practice and scholarship, Toppins addresses questions of graphic design’s complicity with power. She is interested in social justice, critical histories, and their intersections with studio-based making. Her current writing investigates design historiography and its bearing on referential practices. In recent visual work, she explores social life from the standpoint of transience and becoming.
Shreyas R Krishnan has been named an assistant professor of illustration, teaching in both the undergraduate program and the MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture program. She was the 2019-2020 Wallace Herndon Smith Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School. An illustrator-designer from Chennai, India, Krishnan was trained in graphic design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and holds an MFA in Illustration Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She previously taught illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at Towson University.
Rooted in research, Krishnan’s nonfiction work takes the form of comics, zines, and documentary drawings. She is interested in the intersections between visual culture and gender, as well as personal and collective memory. Her comics Becoming Rosie, Standards, and Maqsood-i-Kainaat were acquired by the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for their collections.