In the Spotlight Johnstown native appointed dean at United Kingdom university

Jan. 14—A Johnstown native has taken her childhood love of art and turned it into a lifelong career.

After moving to Plymouth, England, four years ago, Stephanie Owens was appointed dean of arts, design and media at Arts University Plymouth in September.

Owens said she became interested in art as a child.

"I was always drawing as a child and very tuned into the world around me," she said.

"I was also very comfortable to be alone with my thoughts and observations from an early age, which may have something to do with my being the firstborn of three children.

"Even in primary school, my drawings were selected to be featured in hallway exhibitions, and I was among a group in second grade to be taken to downtown Johnstown to draw portraits of older people at a retirement home, and was selected to be interviewed for television about my work."

Noticing Owens' interest was growing, her mother enrolled her in classes at the Community Arts Center of Cambria County, 1217 Menoher Blvd. in Westmont.

"I still remember the still lives set up for us to draw in pencil and watercolor and how much I was enthralled by the process of observational drawing," Owens said.

After graduating from Greater Johnstown High School in 1986, Owens went on to study at Syracuse University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

After graduation, Owens moved to New York City in 1994, where she began her career in art and technology.

She remained in New York State until she moved to Plymouth in 2019 to accept a position as the head of the School of Arts + Media at Arts University Plymouth, what was then called Plymouth College of Art.

"My relocation came long after living in many other cities and working in various art and design schools," she said.

"I lived and made art in NYC from 1994 to 2008, where I was teaching digital media in the masters of fine arts design and technology program at Parsons School of Design.

"I relocated to Ithaca in upstate New York to teach digital media at Cornell University, and while there, spent a summer teaching at the University of Venice in Italy.

"I have spent the majority of my professional life as a professor, teaching studio courses and seminars on emerging technologies and art, focusing on reality computing, network technologies, mobile media, interactive media, location-aware media, visual theory and contemporary art.

"In my last six years at Cornell, I was director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, a cross-campus organization with a mission to raise the visibility of the arts in the university's public image.

"As a significant research institution, the visual arts were challenged to find ways to highlight the ways in which creative practice and practitioners could contribute to research and its impact. I addressed this by creating and developing Cornell's first art biennial exhibition and conference, which was a platform for collaborations between contemporary artists and research scientists."

Owens noted that this is important to how she ended up in Plymouth, away from her family and at a small, independent art college.

"My instinct as a person and as an artist/scholar is always trained on the horizon. I am most energized by being able to start something new, particularly if it is to bring others along through a shared idea or to accomplish a shared goal," she said.

"After nine years as a visiting assistant professor at Cornell in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, I was ready for a new challenge. I was contacted by a colleague who I had met in Venice years earlier, that Plymouth College of Art was conducting a search for the head of school for their new School of Arts + Media, and I thought it might be a good opportunity."

In her new position, Owens plans to focus on the university's future.

"My focus as dean will be firmly on the future — our future as a creative institution, the careers that our students aspire to create for themselves, and the sustainability of the world that they'll be graduating into," she said.

"Arts University Plymouth has over 165 years of collective expertise in material practices through our nationally recognized degree courses, and in particular our expertise in glass, textiles, ceramics and metals. I want to build on this heritage by establishing a space where students and researchers can now explore these traditional practices with an eye on sustainability and regeneration, sending graduates into the world who are prepared to work creatively without contributing to the degradation of the natural environment."