May 17 #ArtistHotline Guest Chat: Post-Graduation Plans for Artists

Undergraduate and graduate students: what’s next?

As part of May’s all-day Twitter chat, we’re hosting a “Post-Graduation Plans for Artists” Guest Chat on Wednesday, May 17, from 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST. The Guest Chat panel will consist of Claire Donato, a writer, artist, and curator, Linda Essig, Director of Arizona State University’s Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship, and Bill Kartalopoulos, a comics critic, educator, curator, and editor.

This Guest Chat was designed with undergraduate or graduate arts students of all disciplines in mind, but is also intended to provide valuable career advice for artists in general. Whether you’re a visual or performing artist, writer, or filmmaker, we hope you’ll participate in this Guest Chat and throughout the day.

Here are a few topics we may delve into during the “Post-Graduation Plans for Artists” Guest Chat:

• Concrete steps for networking and building a community;
• Strategies for getting a project off the ground;
• Balancing your artistic practice with the need to sustain yourself;
• Building an exhibition or publication history;
• and more!

What questions do you have as you prepare for the next stage of your arts career? Tweet your thoughts, queries, and concerns using the hashtag #ArtistHotline in all related tweets. We look forward to hearing from you via Twitter during the Guest Chat and all day for #ArtistHotline, which takes place from 9:30 AM – 5:30 PM EST on the third Wednesday of each month.

Guest Chat Bios

Claire Donato is the author of Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), a not-novel novel, and The Second Body (Poor Claudia, 2016), a full-length poetry collection. Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, The Elephants, Fanzine, and HTMLGIANT. Her vegan language art sculptures, Material Studies, viewable here, were recently screened at MoMA PS1 and Knockdown Center. Currently, she is writing a novel about love, death, evil, vegetarian cooking, and the cloud called Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. She currently lives in Brooklyn and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Writing and Architecture Writing Programs at Pratt Institute. 

Find Donato tweeting @clairedonato.

Linda Essig is the director of enterprise and entrepreneurship programs in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she has helped over three dozen student teams develop arts-based enterprises. She also teaches professional development workshops and consults on becoming an entrepreneurial artist through Creative Infrastructure LLC. She is the author of The Arizona Arts Entrepreneur Toolkit, among other books and articles. Her artistic practice is primarily in theatrical lighting design. 

Find Essig tweeting @LindaInPhoenix. 

Bill Kartalopoulos is a comics critic, educator, curator, and editor. He is the Series Editor for the #1 New York Times bestselling Best American Comics series, published annually by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He currently teaches classes about comics and graphic novels at Parsons School of Design at The New School and comics history in the MFA Visual Narrative program at School of Visual Arts (SVA). He is the programming director for the MoCCA Arts Festival and has organized many other comics events in the United States. He is currently writing a book about comics, to be published by Princeton University Press. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Find Kartalopoulos tweeting @bkny.

Inspired by the NYFA Source Hotline, #ArtistHotline is dedicated to creating an ongoing online conversation around the professional side of artistic practice. #ArtistHotline occurs on the third Wednesday of each month on Twitter. Our goal is to help artists discover the resources needed, online and off, to develop sustainable careers. 

This initiative is supported by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.

Images, from top: Kate Gilmore (Fellow in Performance Art/Multidisciplinary Work ‘05, Interdisciplinary Work ‘12); courtesy Claire Donato, Linda Essig, and Bill Kartalopoulos.