UCLA Arts Announces New Faculty Appointments
UCLA Arts welcomes new faculty members, effective July 1, 2025: Troy Montes Michie and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung in the Department of Art, Sahej Rahal in the Department of Design Media Arts, and Rebekah J. Kowal in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Photo of Troy Montes Michie by Hao Nguyen.
Troy Montes Michie
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, along the U.S.–Mexico border, Michie is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice spans painting, collage, and installation. His work explores the entangled themes of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. He employs collage as both a conceptual framework and a material practice. Through the assemblage of textiles, garments, archival images, and found media, he questions systems of representation, challenges historical erasures, and critiques the visual consumption of marginalized bodies.
“As an artist and educator, I am honored to join the UCLA Department of Art,” Michie said. “I look forward to supporting students in their growth and being part of a community of faculty and staff deeply committed to dialogue, experimentation, and critical engagement.”
In his most recent solo exhibition, Black on the Face of the Moon at Company Gallery, New York, Michie reimagined the family album by drawing on the tradition of scrapbooking to examine how memory and history are constructed and preserved. By collaging personal artifacts with found photographs and seminal artworks, he disrupts dominant narratives and amplifies voices often excluded from institutional archives.
Other recent solo exhibitions include Rock of Eye at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, and Dishwater Holds No Images at Company Gallery. His work has also been featured in major group exhibitions across the globe. His work has also been featured in major group exhibitions at the New Museum, The Shed, Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Los Angeles, The Momentary, Frist Art Museum, and internationally at Kunsthal KAdE (Netherlands), The MAC Belfast (Ireland), and the Ulster Museum (Northern Ireland). He was a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Michie has received awards and residencies from institutions including Recess Art, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Philbrook Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, RISD Museum, Ulster Museum (Northern Ireland), and the Zabludowicz Collection (London).
Michie earned his B.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and an M.F.A. in Painting/Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.
Photo of Molly Zuckerman-Hartung by Fox Hysen.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer who grew up in Olympia, Washington, and participated in Riot Grrrl during her formative years. She attended The Evergreen State College in the 1990s, where she was introduced to holistic, structural ideas about aesthetics and politics. She later received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
“As a teaching artist for almost twenty years, I’m honored to be joining the faculty and students at UCLA, whose commitment to experimentation and ethical pedagogy I admire so much,” Zuckerman-Hartung said. “I am especially looking forward to supporting and learning from colleagues and students in a public institution at this moment.”
She makes painting-objects that explore affect, critical theory, and psychoanalytic ideas through drawing, cutting, folding, pouring, and materials. She has published essays on artists including Michelle Grabner, Dala Nasser, and Munro Galloway, as well as a recent contribution to the 50 Paintings exhibition catalogue for the Milwaukee Art Museum. She has also participated in roundtables on Howardena Pindell and Albert Oehlen, and took part in a 2015 symposium with Lauren Berlant and William Pope.L titled Painting and its Humors at the University of Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany, and more. In 2021, she presented a mid-career survey exhibition titled Comic Relief at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, which was accompanied by a monograph. Her work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
She is a frequent guest lecturer at institutions such as the University of Georgia, NYU, Hunter College (CUNY), Ohio University, Cranbrook Academy of Art, the University of Alabama, the SAIC Low-Residency Program, and Cornell College. As associate professor, Zuckerman-Hartung will be advising graduates and teaching the advanced painting course titled “Borderlands, Undercommons, and Concrete Utopias: Critical Theories of Space in the Lives of People and Painting.”
Photo of Sahej Rahal by Nihar Desai.
Sahej Rahal
Born in Mumbai, India, Rahal is a storyteller who weaves counter-mythologies that question narrations of the present. This myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI simulation programs. Drawing upon folklore prophecies, archeological conspiracies, hidden histories, and occult manuscripts, he renders scenarios where the fictive and the real begin to converse, at the borderlines of myth and memory.
“Although my engagement with emerging technologies and media have been self-driven, the work of both current and former faculty and alumni of the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, and the critical dialogue they have nurtured, have served as an invaluable foundation in my education,” Rahal said. “I am eager to join and contribute to this ongoing conversation with the broader community at UCLA.”
Rahal’s artistic practice has been featured in institutional exhibitions internationally, including the upcoming Munch Triennial, The Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Manifesta 14, the Gwangju Biennale, the Liverpool Biennial, the Kochi Biennale, the Vancouver Biennale, Transmediale, MACRO Museum Rome, Kadist SF, ACCA Melbourne, CCA Glasgow, and the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai.
He is the recipient of Cove Park’s Henry Moore Fellowship, Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship, Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation Installation Art Grant, Digital Earth Fellowship, the first Human-Machine Fellowship from Junge Akademie ADK, Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellowship 2024, and the 2025 “Enter the Hyper-Scientific” artist-in-residence program organized by EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Rahal is a self-taught video game programmer. His multiplayer video game Distributed Mind Test has been featured at the 2024 Biennial of Moving Images at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Fondazione Spazio Vitale in Verona, and at FACT Liverpool.
Photo of Rebekah J. Kowal by Alex Bush.
Rebekah J. Kowal
Kowal’s U.S.-based research investigates how individual and collective bodies are entangled with/in global power relations. Her work draws on sources and methods in critical dance, cultural, and performance studies in dialogue with scholarly inquiry in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Increasingly she queries the significance of dance and choreographic practices occurring outside of traditional theatrical settings including in museums, festivals, parades, and, most recently, in places and archives no one thinks to look for dance. Her current research examines how the war, and how its various logistical and tactical apparatuses, spread American dance practices and notions about dancing bodies around the world.
“I am thrilled to be beginning a new chapter of my life and career at UCLA where I will have an opportunity to grow as a scholar, teacher, and artist and work with colleagues and students who will encourage me to stretch and my work to deepen and expand,” Kowal said.
She comes to UCLA from The University of Iowa, where she most recently taught courses in dance history and theory and served as Chair of the Department of Dance, Collegiate Scholar, and as a faculty fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office.
Kowal has published widely in dance and performance studies, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The University of Iowa. Her book-length projects include How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Wesleyan U.P., 2010), winner of the 2012 Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress of Research on Dance (CORD); Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America (Oxford U.P., 2020), finalist for the 2021 Outstanding Book Award by the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and shortlisted for the 2023 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research by the Dance Studies Association (DSA), and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2017), co-edited with Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin, which received an honorable mention for the 2018 Sally Banes Biennial Publication Prize by the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).
In the professional field, she serves as Executive Co-Editor of Dance Research Journal, or DRJ, and Vice Chair of the DRJ Editorial Board, and formerly on the Boards of Directors of the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD), the Dance Studies Association (DSA), and the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS). She is a coach for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD).
Kowal holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University in American Studies, a Certificate of Movement Analysis (C.M.A.) from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City, and a B.A. from Barnard College/Columbia University with Honors in English and a minor in Dance.
Header image: From left to right, Troy Montes Michie, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Sahej Rahal, and Rebekah J. Kowal.
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