Chicago, IL - Columbia College Chicago undergraduate and graduate commencement ceremonies will be held at 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Sunday, June 5 at the UIC Pavilion, 525 S. Racine.
This year, Columbia College will award 1981 undergraduate and approximately 100 graduate diplomas. Three distinguished individuals whose lives and work embody the college's ideals and spirit will deliver commencement remarks, announced Columbia's president, Dr. Warrick L. Carter.
Morning ceremonies include the undergraduate and graduate divisions in the School of Fine and Performing Arts and the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
During the morning ceremonies Columbia will award honorary degrees to:
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· Bill Viola, video artist, Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa
Afternoon ceremonies include graduate and undergraduate divisions of the School of Media Arts. The college will award an honorary degree to:
· Alan Kay, computer innovator, Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa
Mark Heister describes his approach to fashion and design as high-styled and no nonsense with a down-to-earth sensibility about style. This Chicago-based designer is described as having the eye of an architect and the hand of a sculpture which he uses to design unmistakably modern clothes to glorify the female form. Heister creates wonderfully sculptural clothes using signature design elements such as draping, knotting, tying and wrapping fabric. He is on the Apparel Industry Foundations Board of Directors and is a Hope B., McCormick Costume Committee member. He is the first living designer to be honored by the Chicago Historical Society with a retrospective. Heister runs Mark Heister Design Inc, with a showroom and design studio in the Chicago Apparel Center - his clothes are carried in fine specialty shops across the country and have been publicized nationally in publications such as Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar.
Alan Kay, Ph.D. is a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, theatrical designer, and amateur classical pipe organist, who is best known for the ideas of personal computing, the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. One of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, (PARC) he led one of the several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, Desktop Publishing, the Ethernet, Laser printing, and network "client-servers." He was awarded the Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering, was accorded the Turing award from the Association for Computing Machinery, and was declared a Kyoto Prize Laureate in advanced technology by the Inamori Foundation.
Bill Viola is recognized internationally as one of the leading artists working in video and sound installation. His works can be seen in the collections of major museums and galleries throughout the world. For the last 25 years he has used innovative multi-media technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge. In his work, Viola has integrated many disciplines and philosophies to present a broad view of the relevance of contemporary art to the modern world. Viola has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award.
Columbia College Chicago, an urban institution committed to open access, opportunity and excellence in higher education, provides innovative degree programs in the visual, performing, media and communication arts to more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Founded in 1890 as a communications school for women, Columbia College Chicago was revisioned in 1963 as a liberal arts college with a "hands-on minds-on" approach to arts and media education and a progressive social agenda. Under the current leadership of President Warrick L. Carter, Ph.D. Columbia is aggressively pursuing this mission. Through the diversity of its students and graduates, the school brings a rich vision and multiplicity of voices to American culture. For further information visit www.colum.edu.