Honorary Degree Recipients

Bruce Glavovic has worked as a policy advisor, consultant planner, and academic in New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA. He is internationally recognized for critical applied scholarship on adapting to climate change. Glavovic received the New Zealand Planning Institute’s Distinguished Service Award and the Individual Research Award from Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences (2022) and was listed in Stanford University’s World’s Top Two Percent Scientists (2023).

Chef Nephi Craig has 24 years of culinary experience in America and around the world in London, Germany, Brazil, and Japan. He is an enrolled member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe and half Navajo. Chef Craig is also the founder of the Native American Culinary Association or NACA, an organization/network that is dedicated to the research, refinement, and development of Native American Cuisine.

View Webinar: "Nephi Craig: Landscape is Destiny"

Margarita De Orellana holds a PhD in History from the University of Paris, Sorbonne. In 1977 she founded in France the Latin American Feminist Magazine, Herejías. In 1988, together with Alberto Ruy- Sánchez, de Orellana founded the cultural project Artes de México. Mainly a publishing house, Artes de México has published more than 400 books and pamphlets exploring the multiple Mexican histories and cultures that comprise modern Mexico.

Alberto Ruy-Sánchez is a Mexican writer (PhD in Paris University), author of 30 books of poetry, novels and essays translated in 12 languages and awarded in France, Saint Petersburg, Spain and Mexico. He is co-editor, with Margarita De Orellana, of the magazine and publishing houseArtes de México.

Melvin Edwards is a pioneer in the history of contemporary African American art and sculpture. In 1970 he became the first African American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Mel Edwards received an honorary doctorate from IDSVA in 2022.

Webinar: The Question of Africanness Part 2 with Mel Edwards and Curlee Holton.

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Carmen Boullosa (born September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Boullosa has published eighteen novels and several poems.

Giuliana Bruno of Harvard University is internationally known for her interdisciplinary research on visual arts, architecture and media. Her book Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (Verso, 2002) won the Kraszna-Krausz prize in Culture and History for best Moving Image Book in the world. Bruno is also the author of Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 1993), winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies book award, and Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (MIT, 2007), and has contributed to numerous monographs on contemporary art, published by the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Her latest book, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (University of Chicago Press, 2014), revisits the impact of surface and materiality in contemporary art and visual culture.

Long known as a leading Master Printmaker, Professor Holton has exhibited his work throughout the world, and his paintings, drawings, and prints are held major museums and collections in the U.S. and abroad. His most recent solo exhibition, Journey: The Artistry of Curlee Raven Holton, was held at the University of Maryland University College.

One of Italy's greatest philosophers, Gianni Vattimo is the author of Art's Claim to Truth, Of Reality: The Purposes of Philosophy, and Farewell to Truth, to name but a few of his many publications. He served as a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014.

As a couple Carl Lawrence Decker and Carol Scribner have devoted their lives to the worldwide advancement of art and knowledge.

Leading Maine painter, printmaker, and installation artist Alison Hildreth shows at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, Maine. Her works are collected in the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Wellesley College, Smith College, and the Boston Public Library.

A photo conceptual artist who has exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad. His work is in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The High Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

HOWARD CAYGILL is a philosopher and cultural historian who was educated at Bristol, Sussex and Oxford Universities in the UK. Most recently serving on the faculties of Goldsmiths, Kingston and Paris VIII, Howard Caygill is the author of several acclaimed books including A Kant Dictionary, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance and most recently Kafka: In Light of the Accident. He is currently working on the philosophy and aesthetics of the anthropocene and the role of philosophy in curating and interpreting the art produced by inmates of mental hospitals during the first half of the Twentieth Century. He lives between Athens and Barton-on-Sea on the coast of England.

Painter, Professor of Art, Former Dean, Hartford Art School, represented in Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA.

American artist, feminist, founding member of the Heresies Collective. Represented in Brooklyn Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator, photographic historian, and author. She is University Professor and Chair of Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She received her PhD from George Mason University and her MFA from Pratt Institute.

Ted Coons is Professor of Psychology, Cognition & Perception at the Center for Neural Science at New York University (NYU), arriving there in 1965. He is a pioneer in the field of neuroscience and a major contributor to early studies in neuroaesthetics. As an undergraduate, he studied music composition and theory at Colorado College (B.A., 1951) and then—after a stint in the Air Force—again at Yale University (toward an M.A.).  There, however, he became interested in what impact the temporal form of a composition has on the feelings of an audience. He soon switched his career goals and ultimately received his Ph.D. in what is now known as systems neuroscience.

Ewa Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Founder and Director of Humanities Institute, SUNY Buffalo, and author of An Ethics of Dissensus.

Probably best known for his contribution to the development of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University. A world leading Renaissance scholar, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his recently published, The Swerve: How the World Become Modern.

World-renowned artist, architect and filmmaker. His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA in Chicago, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, the Tate in London, the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and dozens of other institutions and private collections worldwide.

Late curator and critic Holly Block was former Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Among her many innovations and achievements at the Bronx Museum, she guided its management of smARTpower, an international fellowship program for U.S. artists supported by the U.S. Department of State. She is the author of Art Cuba: The New Generation, and the co-commissioner of the United States Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennial, featuring artist Sarah Sze.

Susan Stewart is Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows, Princeton University. A leading American poet and philosopher, her recent books include The Poet’s Freedom and The Open Studio.

Mildred founded the Pace Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston in 1960 while still in college. Since then, Ms. Glimcher has curated exhibitions and written books and articles about “Happenings,” Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, Lucas Samaras, and art in post-war Paris, among other subjects. Ms. Glimcher has a BA in art history from Wellesley College and an MA/ABD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She was the editor of Adventures in Art: 40 Years at Pace, a monumental work documenting all the exhibitions at the Pace Gallery from 1960 to 2000.

Paul Armstrong is former Dean of the College, Brown University, where he is currently Professor of English. Books include Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Cornell UP, 2005) and How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art (Johns Hopkins 2013) and Stories of the Brain: The Neuroscience of Narrative (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020).

John Rajchman is a philosopher and a professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has taught for the last 25 years. During this period he has taken part in many new critical debates as the art world became increasingly globalized, mediatized and digitalized. His books, writings, and catalogue essays in philosophy, art and architecture have been translated into many languages, and he has taught and lectured in many countries. He received his BA from Yale, and his PhD in philosophy from Columbia University.

Julie Mehretu is one of the world’s preeminent contemporary artists. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005.

Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in physiology in 2003. He is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. His most recent book is The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain.

David Driskell (1931-2020) was a founding member of the IDSVA Visiting Faculty. His inaugural IDSVA lecture was delivered at Spannocchia Castle, Tuscany, in June 2009. His final IDSVA lecture was delivered at Spannocchia Castle in June 2019. The David C. Driskell Fellowship was established in 2010. Dr. Driskell’s message of peace and understanding has inspired countless individuals around the world. In January 2013, David was awarded an IDSVA Honorary Doctorate in recognition of his life service as an artist-philosopher and a world-leading spiritual philanthropist.