Cristina Molina – President’s Award for Excellence in Creative Activity

In her 12 years as Professor and Gallery Director at Southeastern, Cristina Molina is proud of the high-caliber artistic research and scholarly activity she has achieved on a regional, national, and international level. This includes 16 solo and two-person exhibitions and 43 group exhibitions.

“Professor Molina is an incredibly talented artist,” said Professor of Sculpture and Theatre Interim Department Head Jeff Mickey. “Over the past 12 years at Southeastern, she has produced an impressive body of innovative work that has pushed the boundaries of what is possible in her art form. Her projects consistently demonstrate incredible imagination, technical skill, and a strong vision.”

As an art educator and artist, Molina has a history of developing service-learning curricula that gives students the opportunity to work directly with their communities, which has had an incredible impact on student learning.

“It has been a privilege to engage undergraduate students of all levels in courses that focus on time-based technologies and critical discourse surrounding 2D experimental animation, video and moving image installation, performance art, and sound design,” she said. “Throughout my teaching career, I have led initiatives to bring my students to off campus locations that have engaged them with other artistic cohorts – some as near as the Southern Repertory Theatre, where students worked with playwrights to research the mercantile history of New Orleans trade route Bayou Road and created a site specific projection for the theatre’s tower, and others as far as Cuba, where I partnered with colleagues in sociology to discuss Cuba’s political history and consider social issues of race, class, and gender equity.”

Under Molina’s stewardship, her classes have collaborated and presented digital media public art projects with the New Orleans Arts Council, The Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans, The New Orleans Jazz Museum and the Hammond Regional Arts Center in Louisiana.

Most recently, she was selected as a Fulbright Scholar in Latvia, where she spent half a year as an artist scholar and visiting professor at the Art Academy of Latvia. There, Molina engaged students in a course she designed titled “Storytelling as Environmental Stewardship,” where they acknowledged the Latvian tradition of using folklore to preserve inherited knowledge. Moving forward, she is interested in the possibilities that arise when bridging the tradition of Latvian folklore and environmentalism together with Louisiana Folklore and environmentalism.

“In just the past two years, Professor Molina’s professional activity includes over 20 prestigious and significant grants, awards, exhibitions, screenings, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and curatorial projects that span from regional to international in scale and scope,” Mickey said. “Through these works and many others, she has established herself as a relevant artist on the national and international contemporary art landscape.”