Faculty perform the primary functions of the university through teaching, research and creative activity, shared governance, and curriculum design. Our program of interdisciplinary exchange and increased collaboration in teaching will better prepare our students for the realities of the art and design worlds, in which traditional distinctions among diverse media are increasingly blurred.

The MTSU Department of Art and Design faculty includes a participant in the Whitney Biennial, which is America's leading contemporary art exhibition. Also among us are a Fulbright award winner, the founder and webmaster of the largest printmaking information website in the world, and contributors to national art education journals. Our studio art faculty members have exhibited their work in hundreds of national and regional competitive exhibitions, video and audio internet exhibitions, and have won prizes in many of them. Several faculty members have had their works of art reviewed and reproduced in national publications. The faculty also includes several winners of MTSU awards for teaching, for creative research, for excellence in student advising, and for innovative uses of technology.

Faculty members have for many years generated service projects and creative collaborations with local schools, the Nashville airport authority, art departments at other universities, with on-campus academic and non-academic units, and with talented high school students attending the Governor's School of the Arts. Service has always been a quiet though important feature of the department's activities. Our faculty members believe that the increased and improved classroom spaces in Todd Hall, along with an increase in service project funding, will allow us to meet more of middle Tennessee's growing desire for visual arts activities.