Elizabeth Ingraham

Elizabeth Ingraham is a sculptor whose work gives form and voice to lived experience and ranges widely across a physical and cultural terrain. Prior to her training in sculpture she was a lawyer for Alaska Native groups, implementing the settlement of their aboriginal land claims.

She received the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Award for Creativity for her series of life-size sewn fabric “skins” sculptures and her poetry about these sculptures became the basis for SKINS, a multimedia theatrical performance directed by Kathryn Moller and performed at La MaMa Theatre in New York City. The Museum of Nebraska Art and the Racine Art Museum have acquired pieces from the Skins series for their permanent collections. 

Her nine-year project, Mapping Nebraska, is a stitched, drawn and digitally imaged cartography of that state and is the result of 9,500 miles of travel on state and county roads. Mapping Nebraska received the Distinguished Artist Award from the Nebraska Arts Council and her work toured the state as the centerpiece of the Sheldon Museum’s "Picturing Nebraska" series of traveling exhibitions. A solo exhibition of this work, "Regarding Nebraska," was displayed at the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln in 2017 and the entire project has since been acquired by the museum for its permanent collection.

As part of a team with faculty from Computer Science and Educational Psychology she was awarded $1.15 million in National Science Foundation grants to integrate creative thinking into computer science and other courses to improve student learning. Computational and Creative Thinking, her innovative online course open to all students, came out of this evidence-based NSF research and her team won a national Engagement Excellence Award from the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) for a creative thinking exercise in this course.

She is a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies and the International Quilt Museum and received the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities. Her research into computational creativity is part of her on-going interest in combining the digital (pixels and code) with the digital (the work of the hand).

Selected Articles

“Computational Creativity: An Interview with the UNL’s Elizabeth Ingraham and Leen-Kiat Soh,” Beth A. Quinn, ACM Inroads, March 2018, Volume 9, No. 1.

“Ingraham honored for contributing outstanding intro computer science curricula,” UNL Announce, Wed. Oct. 24, 2018.

“Ingraham excels in teaching creativity,” Kathe Anderson, Hixson-Lied College of Fine & Performing Arts, Alumni Magazine, Fall 2018.

“New Course at Nebraska Explores Computational Creativity,” Kathe Andersen, Hixson-Lied College of Fine & Performing Arts News, August 24, 2017.  

“Ingraham seeks sense of place with ‘Mapping Nebraska,’” Kathe Anderson, Arts at UNL, April, 2013. 

Selected Presentations

“Behind the Stitches: the Fabric of Nebraska,” International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska. 2017. 

“Prairie Skin: A Quilted Shelter,” International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2015. 

“Stitching as Knowing: Mapping Nebraska with Textiles and Thread,” International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2012.  

“Mapping Textile Space: Stitched and Woven Terrains,” Textile Society of America 11th Biennial Symposium, From Plains Space to Cyber Space, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2010. 

Selected Publications

“Improving Students’ Learning and Achievement in CS Classrooms through Computational Creativity Exercises that Integrate Computational and Creative Thinking” (with Duane Shell, Leen-Kiat Soh, Abraham Flanigan and Markeya Peteranetz), Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’2017), Seattle, WA, March 8-11, accepted for publication 2017; Exemplary Paper, CS Education Research. 

"Computation Creativity: An Interview with UNL’s Elizabeth Ingraham and Leen-Kiat Soh", ACM Inroads, Volume 9, Issue 1, March 2018. 

“Viewpoint: Improving Learning and Achievement in Introductory Computer Science through Computational Creativity” (with Leen-Kiat Soh, Duane Shell, Steve Ramsay and Brian Moore), Communications of the ACM, 58(8), 33-35, 2015. 

“Association of Students' Creativity, Motivation, and Self-Regulation with Learning and Achievement in College Computer Science Courses” (with Duane F. Shell, Melissa Patterson Hazley, Leen-Kiat Soh and Stephen Ramsay), Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE’2013), Oklahoma City, OK, October 23-26, pp.1637-1643, 2013.