Meet Creative Arts Faculty

Directors

Deborah Whistler

Program Director of Design Thinking and Social Innovation
Associate Professor
dwhistler@spalding.edu

Deborah Whistler received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati Ohio. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Miami University of Ohio. She has been teaching at the university level since 1997 and before graduate school worked as a graphic designer and illustrator. She considers all of her work to derive from drawing as she strives to achieve a delicate visual balance and calm in the midst of chaos. Her drawings are both two-dimensional and three-dimensional and range from steel to delicate paper cuttings. As the Program Director for Spalding Creative Arts, Deborah also teaches Drawing, Illustration and Design Thinking.

Faculty

Damian Botner

Department Coordinator, School of Liberal Arts

Damian Botner is the Department Coordinator for the School of Liberal Arts and Director of the Huff Gallery. He is a Perryville, KY native and a 2019 Spalding graduate with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Mr. Botner worked as an intern under Louisville local artists Rudy Salgado and Susanna Crum at Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio in 2018.

Aaron Lubrick

Associate Professor — Painting and Drawing
alubrick@spalding.edu

Aaron Lubrick received his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design. Lubrick lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and teaches painting and drawing at Spalding University as an associate professor while pursuing his studio practice. Lubrick exhibits his work both locally and nationally. His work often draws upon his experiences of growing up an identical twin. Another motif of Lubrick’s work connects the viewer to a timeless almost prehistoric landscape while seeking the human’s contemporary relationship to our natural world.

Matthew Walsh, MFA 2D Design

Assistant Professor — Graphic Design
mwalsh@spalding.edu

Matthew Walsh received his MFA in Fine Art and 2-D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. He has taught Typography, Graphic Design, and Illustration at schools in Portland, OR; Grand Rapids, MI; Fort Wayne, IN; and Bloomington, IL. His work contains poetry and illumination, comics, digital illustration involving video games, and portraiture; it also looks into notions of beauty and the grotesque; mythology both past and present; etymology and linguistics. He has a healthy interest in magic in addition to maintaining a healthy professional practice in design. At Spalding he teaches classes in comics and narrative drawing, lettering and visual writing, and graphic design.