The Department of Visual Arts hosts Rich Zim, who is about to celebrate 40 years of professional stop motion animation, for an artist talk and claymation workshop. His notable credits include Gumby, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, Coraline, and The SpongeBob Movie. He is currently the CEO and president of Zim animation, where he has been making psychedelic oozing dripping clay animation sequences in his own studio for projects such as Smiling friends, Rick and Morty, Middlemost Post and many other TV shows and movies.

View Full Event Details and Register for Rich Zim artist talk and workshop, Thursday, October 30, 2025

Jayme McLellan is a curator, gallery director, artist, and educator. Over the past two decades, she has curated 150 solo, group, and thematic exhibitions of contemporary artists. In this presentation by the Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA), she will share stories about successes and failures in her efforts to help artists carve out their own sustainable paths.

View Full Event Details and Register for Jayme McLellan: Fostering Sustainability in a Career in the Arts, Tuesday, November 4, 2025

SPARK VII: Industrial Afterglow, a collaboration between UMBC and Towson University, brings together over twenty artists working across sculpture, installation, sound, photography, video, textiles, and ecological documentation to explore what lingers in the wake of industrial and technological systems. 

View Full Event Details and Register for SPARK: Industrial Afterglow, Thursday, November 6, 2025

The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts presents a talk by visual artist Eric Millikin. An assistant professor of visual arts, Millikin was awarded the 2024 CIRCA-IMET Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, during which he worked on Mecha/Magical Marine Materials, an ongoing series of wearable electronic and robotic sculptures based on marine biology for performances with live-coded ambient sound and spiraling video projections. The work is based in part on the work of IMET Assistant Professor Allison Tracy as well as on Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of sea-faring science and the supernatural, including depictions of necromancers creating mechanical sea monsters.

View Full Event Details and Register for Eric Millikin: Mecha/Magical Marine Materials, Wednesday, November 12, 2025