Ellen McMahon came to the University of Arizona in 1980 to study scientific illustration (MS in Biology, 1983). In 1990 after several years of professional experience as an illustrator and graphic designer, she was hired as an Assistant Professor in the School of Art (SoA). She was promoted to full professor in 2011 and appointed as the inaugural associate dean for research in the College of Fine Arts (CFA) in 2019.
TEACHING
McMahon’s course development include: “Typography,” “Critical Issues in Design,” “Art, Design and Environment,” “Contemporary Art: Concepts and Issues” and “Ecologies of Engagement: Collaborations and Partnerships.” Additionally she co-developed and taught “Art Research in the Unruly World: Questions, Forms & Methods” in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program, Social Cultural and Critical Theory and has co-taught design seminars with faculty in School of Architecture. She has served on several hundred MFA committees in the School of Art, as well as several PhD committees in Art and Visual Culture Education and Applied Intercultural Arts Research.
She received seven awards for her teaching and mentoring between 1997 and 2023 and was selected to serve as an inaugural Innovative Teaching Fellow at Biosphere 2 in 2021.
INTERDISCIPLINARY LEADERSHIP
McMahon’s interest in the role of all forms of representation to create and carry meaning fuels her sense of purpose and commitment to work critically and creatively toward positive change and to prepare and inspire her students to do the same.
To that end McMahon has developed and facilitated dozens of projects that support individual creative endeavors in interdisciplinary collaborations addressing climate change and social and environmental justice, providing practical experience for students, and creating significant bonds with, and long-term benefits, to the community.
For over 20 years she has worked with the Center for the Study of Deserts and Oceans (CEDO) in Puerto Peñasco, Sonora, Mexico, taking hundreds of students across the border to work on art and design projects in support of CEDO’s environmental conservation and social justice efforts. CEDO sponsored McMahon’s Fulbright in 2007 and she has presented this work in several venues across campus and at national and international art and science meetings including, Alliance of Arts Across Research Universities (A2RU) conferences and as a delegate to the World Design Congress (ICOGRADA) in Havana, Cuba.
In 2010 McMahon initiated and directed a three-year collaboration to demonstrate the power of art, design and humanities research to address critical regional water issues. Funded by the U of A’s first round of interdisciplinary faculty research grants, the project involved a co-taught art, design and architecture studio/seminar, an exhibition and reading, and a public event in the Rillito river bed attended by over 5,000 people. The project resulted in the publication, Groundwater: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River, a book containing the work of 29 contributors, with writing by faculty in several fields and visual art by students. The first volume in the series “Beyond Boundaries” published by Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, the edition sold out, is housed in over 40 permanent collections world-wide, won international book design awards and Best of Show in the annual University and College Designs Association annual competition.
McMahon’s most outstanding achievement as a professor is her record of connecting people across disciplines. Her mentorship of students resulted in the first CFA students to be accepted into programs such as the Carson Fellows and Liverman Scholars programs. She has introduced individuals and organizations across campus and in the community with shared interests for potential synergistic partnerships, many of which have been leveraged into interdisciplinary projects and grant proposals.
To increase the presence of art across campus, McMahon has curated student work into exhibitions for the Tree Ring building and created a gallery in the School of Natural Resources and Environment for post-MFA art students.
She has advocated for the importance and value of creative inquiry in word and deed across campus in numerous instances and situations, serving on numerous committees and review panels including: the Arizona Governor’s Arts Awards, the Haury Program (Seed Grants and Public Art), The Tucson-Pima Arts Foundation, Confluencenter, and the VP for Research Environmental Landscape Review Committee. She was appointed and served as the sole representative for the Arts in the research pillar of the U of A Strategic Plan In 2020.
McMahon is one of the founding executive members of the Art, Environment and Humanities Network (AEHN) created in 2012 and since that time she has worked on the development of four proposals for infrastructural support for interdisciplinary research inclusive of the arts and humanities.
Largely because of her outstanding record of devising and directing interdisciplinary collaborative projects which integrate art, design, humanities, social and environmental sciences, Dean Shultz appointed McMahon as the first Associate Dean for Research (ADR) in the College of Fine Arts 2019.
ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH
In her role as Associate Dean for Research (ADR) McMahon has led the mission to integrate the arts into the University’s research ecosystem by advocating for the arts as a critical means of knowing. This has been achieved through capacity-building within the college and the broader division of Arizona Arts and in collaboration with research institutes and centers, cooperative extension units, and colleges across campus.
Programming that McMahon has initiated and directed include: Research Conversation in the Arts, Research Fridays, and the Practice as Research in the Arts Workshop Series. Her central initiative to support meta-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary arts research projects has received over $400,000.00 from the Arizona Institute of Resilience (AIR) and the U of A central research office (ORP) Programming includes: The Integrative Arts Research Fellowship and two grant programs (Arts|Humanities|Resilience and Arts Research+Resilience). 2019- 2025 Office of Arts Research Report, Integrative Arts Research (IAR) Fellowship
The grant supported projects involved Interdisciplinary teams including PIs from: five colleges (Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture; Fine Arts; Humanities; Science; and Social & Behavioral Sciences), nine departments and schools (Art; Astronomy; Creative Writing; East Asian Studies; Ecology and Environmental Biology; English; Pharmacology; Plant Sciences; Public & Applied Humanities, and Theater Film and Television) and four research centers, institutes, and cooperative extension sites (Biosphere 2; the Center for Creative Photography; the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, and the Santa Rita Experimental Range.)
Funded projects have brought measurable benefits to partners across the state including: Arizona Theatre Company, Borderlands Restoration Network, El Pueblo Neighborhood Center, Empire Ranch, Frank de la Cruz Library, Feng Feng Yeh (Chinese Chorizo Project), Gertie and the T.O. Boyz, Patagonia Opera House, Sunnyside School District, Sunnyside Foundation, Sunnyside Neighborhood Association and Las Aguas, Teatro Dignidad, The Loft Cinema, Tohono O’odham Community College, Tucson Symphony Orchestra, and Watershed Management Group Living Lab.
SELECTED BIO - ART
Ellen McMahon’s practice in visual art and writing addresses a diversity of topics, including the cultural construction, and firsthand experience, of motherhood, the effects of climate change on regional water and forest ecosystems, and the emergence of knowledge at the intersection of memory, time, and place. The conceptual underpinnings of McMahon’s work—the paradoxical and complicated relationship between lived
experience and cultural constructions and expectations—have remained constant throughout her career regardless of subject matter or medium.
Her solo exhibitions include “Redressing the Mother” at AIR Gallery in New York City, “Maternal Matters” at Cal State San Marcos, and “In Nature | Of Nature | Perceptions of Place” at the University of Wyoming. In 2023 her work was featured in the 2-person exhibition, “Again with the Real,” at Etherton Gallery, and the 4-person exhibition,“ Ecotone,” at Ironwood Gallery, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson.
The nine-piece collage series, “Lost Language of a Desert Sea,” exhibited at the Etherton Gallery was acquired by the University Museum of Art for their permanent collection.
McMahon’s handmade artist books (No New Work, Alice’s Idea, A is for Autonomy) are in over 20 permanent collections. Ground|Water: The Art, Design and Science of a Dry River, a limited edition book about regional water, which she art directed and co-edited, received national and international design awards and is in over 40 public collections.
In 2003 McMahon’s sculptural work was published (with Louise Bourgeois, Kara Walker, Marcel Duchamp, and René Magritte, among many others) in BOOBS: Fe:male Bodies in Pictorial History, edited by Kothe, Juliet, von Stosch, Natanja, DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin.
McMahon’s writing includes personal essays about motherhood, op-eds about design and the environment (Huffington Post, 2014, Pacific Standard, 2014) and technical papers about scientific illustration (ECHOSPERE, 2019). Her personal essays are published in Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood (Seven Stories Press, 2002), The Oldest We’ve Ever Been: Seven True Stories of Midlife Transition (University of Arizona Press, 2008), The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (Demeter Press, 2010) and in The Nature of Desert Nature (University of Arizona Press, 2020). McMahon’s design work is featured in Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design (MIT Press, 2002) and Graphic Design: Sustainable Principles and Practices (Bloomsbury, 2016).