Instructor, Design & Art History
Manol Gueorguiev is an artist, designer, and pedagogue working at the intersection of performance, installation, and the writing of history. His practice explores ways that objects, bodies, and spaces can communicate where language is absent, slips, misleads, or falters. Recent projects include Skins, a short play about armed resistance adapted into a performance with a wearable sculptural set. His 2019 exhibition Looters: Itinerant Images of West African Architecture gathered a hidden and unreliable archive of West African architecture in the margins of maps, prints, and photographs (1668-1911), using light projections on fabric sculptures to undermine European versions of imperial encounters.
Manol earned degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago, worked as an interior designer for Ligne Roset, and taught studio art, art history and design for eight years at Chicago-area colleges and universities. His video editing appears in documentaries on the Dunhuang Caves (Smart Museum of Art) and Parnaíba Basin paleontology (Chicago Field Museum), among others, and he has worked in graphic design for organizations including the arts activism group Feel Tank Chicago. Manol’s writing and design work have recently appeared in ALL-OVER | Magazin für Kunst und Ästhetik (Basel/Vienna) and the Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History (Stockholm). In his free time Manol is a master coffee roaster and amateur beekeeper.
