Personal Statement

Sanda Iliescu's professional work spans the fields of architecture and art. After receiving her Masters of Architecture degree from Princeton University, she practiced architecture in New Jersey and taught architectural design at Princeton and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She concentrates her recent professional work in fine arts. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Italy. She has taught drawing and painting at Princeton and the State University of New York. Currently her work is represented by Vagabond Gallery in New York (http://www.vagabondgallery.net/). Among her professional awards are The Rome Prize and The Distinguished Artist Award of the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. In 2004, she has been awarded the All University Teaching Award by the University of Virginia. At UVA Professor Iliescu teaches design studios as well as painting and drawing courses. Through her teaching, she seeks to deepen the dialogue between the School of Architecture, the Art Department and the broader university arts community. In response to a rash of sexist and racial graffiti on campus in 2005, she designed the public art project, 271 Words, in which 271 local citizens and students painted the words of Lincoln?s Gettysburg Address on a public bridge in Charlottesville (http://www.arch.virginia.edu/spotlight/271words/). Professor Iliescu's course Lessons in Making (Architecture 102) introduces many liberal arts students to aesthetic and ethical issues in art and design (http://www.arch.virginia.edu/arch102/). Her upper level seminars Drawing & Collage (Architecture 557) and Painting and Public Art (Architecture 558) explore theoretical and practical relationships of ethics and aesthetics. With Dean Karen Van Lengen and Professor Robin Dripps Iliescu organized the 2002 Ethics-Aesthetics Symposium at the School of Architecture (www.virginia.edu/arch/ethics-aesthetics-2002). Iliescu?s edited volume: The Hand and the Soul: aesthetics and ethics in art and architecture will be published by the University of Virginia Press in the Spring of 2009. Her recent essay "The Garden as Collage" has appeared in the Summer/Fall 2007 issue of the international quarterly Studies in the History of Gardens and Landscape Design. In addition to developing her artwork, Professor Iliescu is currently working on a book manuscript About Drawing: Meditations on How and Why We Draw.