Joseph S. Lewis III

Joseph S. Lewis III, a nationally known artist, arts administrator, educator, and author, is a professor in the Department of Art and served as dean of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts from 2010 to 2014. He came to the University of California, Irvine from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University in New York, where he was dean and a tenured professor of art for more than five years.

Prior to Alfred, Lewis was dean of the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City for three years. Before that, he was chair of the art department at California State University, Northridge, for six years and a tenured professor teaching visual arts. From 1991 to 1995, he was on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts while also administering a public art program for the City of Los Angeles. His additional teaching experiences include Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Currently, Lewis is president of the Noah Purifoy Foundation in Joshua Tree, California, and serves on the boards of Project Hope Alliance, whose mission is to end the cycle of homelessness one child at a time, and California Lawyers for the Arts. He has also served on numerous art school evaluation panels, was a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, the College Art Association, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. He is a past member of the board of directors and a past president of the National Council of Art Administrators.

As a visual and performing artist, Lewis has exhibited his work nationally and internationally and participated in residencies including Anderson Ranch in Colorado, Cité des Arts in Paris, and the Darkroom Projects in Milan, Italy. He was also a co-founding director of Fashion Moda, an early alternative space in the South Bronx, New York.

Lewis is the recipient of many awards, commissions, and fellowships, including an Award of Excellence from Communication Arts, several National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Most recently, he was named Deutsche Bank Fellow in Photography by the New York Foundation for the Arts.

He received his B.A. in art from Hamilton College in New York and his M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he was a Ford Fellow and a Philip Morris Fellow. He was also a postgraduate student at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom.

In addition to his administrative and artistic work, Lewis has written for Art in America, LA Weekly, and Artforum, was a contributing editor for Artspace, and a correspondent for Contemporanea, an international arts magazine. His essays on the confluence of art, technology, and society have been published in anthologies and peer-reviewed journals.