The Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts welcomes the following new faculty members this fall:
Kristen Graves is assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the Glenn Korff School of Music. She is an ethnomusicologist interested in how cultural and environmental factors shape listening and sound-making practices.
She holds degrees from New York University and St. Olaf College and conducted her doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. Graves comes to Nebraska after six years at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, where she taught courses on world music, Latin American music and sound and the environment.
Her current research examines the 42-year labor history of a workers’ union in the garbage dump of Oaxaca, Mexico, highlighting the community’s remarkable sonic knowledge. Her past research explores listening and waste, as well as community songwriting.
Additionally, Graves is a touring singer-songwriter, having performed with folk icons like Pete Seeger, Harry Belafonte and Peter Yarrow, and she has released nine studio projects. She also remains actively involved with Simply Smiles, an organization supporting Indigenous children and families.
Qwist Joseph is assistant professor in ceramics/sculpture in the School of Art, Art History & Design. He is from Fort Collins, Colorado, where he spent his formative years working with his dad at the family’s bronze foundry.
He went on to earn a B.F.A. in pottery from Colorado State University and an M.F.A. in ceramics from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Informed by his experience as a hairless individual, Joseph’s sculpture interrogates conventional definitions of masculinity, complicating narrow ideas of manhood for himself and others.
He has completed residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, the University of Denver and Scripps College. In 2019, Joseph received an Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at Peters Projects in Santa Fe, the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in South Korea, and the Officine Saffi exhibition in Milan, Italy. He has also held teaching positions at the University of Arkansas, Chaffey College, the University of Redlands, the University of Denver, and Pitzer College.
Jinku Kim is assistant professor of emerging media arts in the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film. Kim was previously assistant professor of practice.
He has more than 15 years of experience working as an educator and multidisciplinary artist. He has extensive experience in audio-visual production and digital art, including audio-visual performance and installations, hardware and software design, and site-specific projects, as well as digital modeling and fabrication.
His works have been performed and installed at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, STEIM in Amsterdam, The New Children’s Museum in San Diego, and the Luminarium in Omaha.
Kim has a Ph.D. in computer music and multimedia from Brown University; an M.F.A. in integrated media and experimental sound practice from the California Institute of the Arts; and a B.M. in professional music: electronic production and design from Berklee College of Music.
Rachel Stuckey is assistant professor of practice in graphic design in the School of Art, Art History & Design. Born in central Illinois, Stuckey received her B.A. in computer graphic arts from Taylor University. She worked with international education nonprofits based in Europe as a graphic designer and Australia before returning to graduate school in the United States. Stuckey received her Master of Design degree from the University of Cincinnati in 2012. Her thesis was on the cross-cultural design process with a project with low-literacy children based in Mumbai, India.
She continued to work in India in children’s education along with other design projects in various parts of Europe and Africa. Stuckey was an art and design professor at SUNY Korea teaching courses for both Stony Brook University and the Fashion Institute of Technology in South Korea from 2017 to 2025.
Anne L. Williams is assistant professor of visual culture and public practices in the School of Art, Art History & Design. She is a historian of visual culture from 1300 to 1600 in Italy, northern Europe and their trans-Atlantic networks.
Her research addresses histories of parody and subversion, particularly the intertwining of satire and the sacred. She is the author of “Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300-1550” (Amsterdam University Press 2019) and is currently completing her second monograph, “Irreverent Images: Parody and the Sacred in Pre-Reformation Italy.” For this project, she was the recipient of the 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and the 2025 CRIA Fellowship from I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Williams received her Ph.D and M.A. in art and architectural history and her B.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.