Grant Category:	Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher
Field of Specialization:	Art
Name:	Mrs. Tanya H. Gill
Official Address and Designation:	Instructor School of the Art Institute of Chicago Contemporary Practices Department Chicago, Illinois
Indian Host Institution:	Sanskriti Pratishthan New Delhi
Duration of Grant & Start Date :	9 months September 2011

Brief Bio:

Tanya Hastings Gill graduated with B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She completed her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has mastered the age-old art of paper cutting in a contemporary context. She utilizes reflective color, shadows and open installation to engage the space with her hand cut paper creations. She has been a fellow at McDowell Artists Colony, an Artist in Residence at The Ragdale Foundation, an Affiliate at Headlands Center for the Arts and a recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from the Marin Arts Council. In addition to working as a professional artist for the past fifteen years, Tanya Gill is an art instructor. She has taught at California State University, Sacramento, California; Randolph-Macon in Ashland, Virginia; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Gill develops travel workshops to Northern India for International students and artists. In January 2010 she coordinated a travel course "Interwined" ran by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in New Delhi. Currently she is preparing a workshop in Jaipur, India, for professional visual artists to take place in 2012. Her on-going relationship with northern India has greatly influenced her own work, leading her to further explore ideas of the temporal and to examine her mental constructs. As a Fulbright – Nehru fellow Tanya Gill's research focuses on the intersection of Indian contemporary art and handicrafts. Through her research she is hoping to reveal India's unique history and perspective on the subject. She will disseminate her findings through a publicly accessible archive designed for scholars and students that she will create and also through her own artistic practice and teaching. Research has always been an important element of her practice and she believes artist-conducted research is invaluable to discourse.