Victoria Veenstra
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

After working as a professional photographer and artist for several years, Victoria decided to return to earn her Masters of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan. Her focus has expanded to include teaching as well as to create. Believing that students must participate actively in determining their education, Victoria has developed inventive teaching techniques towards a creative partnership. Recently she received a 1992-93 Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Michigan, and in 1991-92, she won a Margaret Dow Towsley Scholar award. Her artistic work has been in many regional exhibitions and in 1986 she had a one woman show in New York. Her current work manipulates distinctions between what is artifice and what is "real." About her work she says, "The series, Domestic Landscapes, is an act of empowerment; it attempts to bridge the conflict of having one foot in the world and the other within the domestic realm. I come to grips with domesticity as an abstraction. The resolution between reality and fantasy is then merged into where there is no in and out. The work becomes the linchpin for creating visual discourse."