Artist, filmmaker, cinematographer, and co-founder of the motion picture studio TNEG, Arthur Jafa was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

The director of Slowly This (1995), Tree (1999), Deshotten 1.0 (2009), APEX (2013) and Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016), Jafa’s Dreams are Colder Than Death, a documentary he shot as well as directed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, garnered acclaim at the LA and NY film festivals, and won Best Documentary at the Black Star Film Festival in 2014.The cinematographer for Julie Dash’s pioneering film Daughters of the Dust (1991), which he also co-produced, Jafa recently served as director of photography for Solange’s music videos, Don’t Touch My Hair and Cranes in the Sky (both 2016). In 2017, along with TNEG, Jafa conceived, shot and edited the music video for JAY-Z’s 4:44.

Jafa’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, including Okwui Enwezor’s 1999 traveling compendium, Mirror’s Edge, and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. His 2017 solo exhibition for the Serpentine Gallery, London, entitled “A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions” will travel to the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin in early 2018. Jafa’s work is represented in public collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, all in New York. Jafa exhibits at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

Huey Copeland is Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. His research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. A contributing editor of ​Artforum, Copeland has also published in ​Nka, October, Parkett, Representations​, and ​Small Axe​ as well as in numerous international exhibition catalogues and essay collections, such as the award-winning ​Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art​. Notable among his publications is ​Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America ​(University of Chicago Press, 2013). At present, he is at work on a new book, ​In the Shadow of the Negress: A Brief History of Modern Artistic Practice​, which explores the constitutive role played by fictions of black womanhood in Western art from the late-eighteenth century to the present. He is also refining a companion volume—currently entitled ​Touched by the Mother: On Black Men and Artistic Practice, 1966-2016​—that brings together many of his new and previously published critical essays and that has already been recognized with the 2017 Absolut Art Writing Award.

The Graduate Art Seminar is a forum for graduate students and members of the ArtCenter community to enter into dialog with internationally recognized artists, critics, and art historians. The Seminar is a core component of ArtCenter’s Graduate Art program. The Seminar is also free and open to the public.

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.