The Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. 

Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations. 

Sept. 18: Janhavi Khemka
Khemka is an interdisciplinary artist who works between Santiniketan and Varanasi in India and Chicago. With her impaired hearing, Khemka looks at disability not as a disadvantage, but as a lens through which one can see, understand, and negotiate with the world differently.

Sept. 25: Cassandra Pfeifer
Pfeifer is an English instructor at Mid-Plains Community College in McCook, Nebraska. Her research and creative writing specialties are folklore studies, narrative and genre theory, and American literature.

Oct. 2: Raymond Thompson, Jr.
Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and visual journalist based in Austin, Texas. He is assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He explores how race, memory, representation and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape.

Oct. 16: Matt Belk
Alumnus Belk (B.F.A. 2011) has increasingly become known as a contemporary wildlife painter, bridging the gap between the outdoor country lifestyle and modern contemporary. His work is in constant use of tape and cutting of shapes with an X-Actoblade and airbrushing with inventive new techniques to create a seemingly digital graphic depiction of nature.

Nov. 12: Holly Willis
(co-sponsored by the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and The Awareness Lab)
Willis is chair of the Media Arts+Practice Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, where she studies reconfigurations of cinema and experimental media. She also co-directs the AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS) initiative of the USC Center for Generative AI and Society.

Nov. 13: Steve Anderson
(co-sponsored by the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, The Awareness Lab and the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center)
The lecture will be at 5 p.m. at the Ross, followed by a sneak preview of Anderson’s new film, “Reality Friction.” Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He is professor of digital media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and associate dean for academic affairs in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and is the author of “Technologies of History.”

Feb. 6: Christopher Fox/Not Design
Christopher Fox is assistant professor and graphic design program director at Calvin University. Not Design is a collaborative studio focusing on projects that step outside the boundaries of traditional design. Fox is a typographic instigator blending tactile, digital and spatial experiences. He is fully immersed in the academic function while trying to maintain a deliberate creative balance. His work is often responsive and collaborative, intentionally sharing ownership of the process of making with others. 

Feb. 13: Ella Weber
Playfully upending the existential fabrics of daily life, Weber transforms her minimum-wage day jobs into her studio. Across the counter and screen, Weber blurs the line between employee and customer, performance and reality, art and life. Trained in printmaking, Weber received an M.F.A. from the University of Kansas and her B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her debut novel, "The Deli Diaries," was published in 2023 by Latah Books

Feb. 20: Adrian Armstrong
Armstrong’s (B.F.A. 2014) multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, sound, and other mixed-media elements and documents the contemporary Black experiences in the United States. He is deeply interested in questions of how Black experiences intersect with the history of photography, portraiture, and collage. 

March 6: Michael Krueger
Michael Krueger is professor of visual art at the University of Kansas. He is grounded in drawing, and works in a variety of media including painting, printmaking, animation and ceramics. His artworks have been connected to narrative, mythology, counterculture, the history of art, and personal memoir. Recent works relate to the landscape, storytelling and evoke an emotional awareness through nuanced image making, color, drawing and paint.

March 13: Margaret LeJeune
LeJeune’s creative practice explores the relationship between art, science, and environmental studies. As a lens-based creator, she produces works that probe shifting landscapes, symbiotic relationships, and the nature of the photographic medium. In 2023, she was named the Woman Science Photographer of the Year by the Royal Photographic Society.

March 27: Vera Iliatova
Iliatova’s work employs metaphors of landscape and interior spaces and female figures that meld together in oddly disconnected perspectives. Her psychologically charged images often depict women at various stages of life at instances of impending melodramas either with each other or themselves, which can create an atmosphere of uncertainty in the painterly mise-en-scène they are populating.

April 3: Tony Orrico
Tony Orrico is a visual artist, performer and choreographer whose record of exhibitions spans five continents. He is assistant professor of dance and sculpture/intermedia at the University of Iowa.

April 9: Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker
Archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker were part of an international team that discovered a Bronze Age warrior's tomb in southwestern Greece. 

April 10: Jaque Fragua
Known for this powerful and thought-provoking works, Fragua’s artistic practice encompasses a diverse range of mediums, including studio painting, mural creation, sculpture, installation and public art. He is from the Pueblo of Jemez and grew up in New Mexico. His art often addresses themes of identity, culture, history, and activism, particularly focusing on issues affecting Indigenous communities in the United States. His work is included in the ongoing exhibition “Exploding Native Inevitable” at Sheldon Museum of Art, and his visit is sponsored by Sheldon Museum of Art.

April 17: Amanda Macuiba
Amanda Macuiba’s work is concerned with landscape, communities, and development practices throughout the U.S. Here solo exhibition “Watershed” is on view at the Great Plains Art Museum from April 4- September 20, 2025, where she is the Elizabeth Rubendall Artist-in-Residence from April 8-19. 

April 24: Norman Akers
Norman Akers explores issues of identity, culture (including Osage mythos), place, and dynamics of personal and cultural transformation. He is associate professor of visual art at the University of Kansas. His work is included in the ongoing exhibition “Exploding Native Inevitable” at Sheldon Museum of Art, and his visit is sponsored by Sheldon Museum of Art.