2022 GNSI Juried Members' Exhibition

GNSI'S 2022 ANNUAL MEMBERS' EXHIBITION

In addition to the submission categories from previous years, the 2022 Members’ Exhibition has a special juror, Hayley Gillespie, PhD, evaluating a new category, Broader Visual SciComm.

The Broader Visual SciComm category recognized works that still utilize many of the same tools that traditional science illustration employs: a deep understanding of the science at hand, a keen awareness of how people process visual information, highly refined visual arts skills, and a desire to educate and inform on a particular topic. But Broader Visual SciComm allows for more concept-driven work that attempts to evoke reactions in viewers using tricks more often employed in fine art: surprise, disgust, awe, fear, and humor. Rather than being purely descriptive or educational, it is often wrapped up with a call to action or designed to elicit an emotion. Our hope is that the addition of this new category, Broader Visual SciComm, will make the exhibition more inclusive of the diverse interests and specialties of our membership.

Meet Our 2022 Jurors

Still Image, Sculpture, and Multimedia Jurors

Ivan Gromicho

Ivan Gromicho is a specialist in visual science communication, currently working as a full-time scientific illustrator for the Research Communication team in the Office of the Vice President for Research at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Ivan creates bespoke illustrations for the team’s outreach communication publications, KAUST Insight and KAUST Discovery, as well as illustrations upon faculty request. His work is published in digital and print formats in books, magazines, and peer-reviewed journals, including Cell Press, Nature, PNAS, Elsevier, and Wiley.

Since childhood, Ivan has been fascinated by nature. He spent every opportunity on adventures with friends in the outdoors-inventing quests, crawling under bushes, and climbing cliffs. Ivan would arrive home with a backpack full of bones, fossils, and rocks. His mother, much to her displeasure, would sometimes find dead lizards in the freezer waiting to be “studied”.

In 2012, Ivan completed the MS degree in Scientific Illustration from the University of Évora, Portugal and worked as a freelancer for a few years before joining Kaust in 2014.

Gretchen Kai Halpert

Gretchen Kai Halpert is owner of the Scientific Illustration Distance Program (SIDP). She has taught through the SIDP since 2014; through Natural Science Illustration Program at RISD/CE for fourteen years prior, and she co-directed Art and Medicine at Brown University for six years. Halpert has curated exhibitions and has critiqued artwork extensively. Her science background includes a degree in botany and 25 years working full-time as a cell and molecular biologist while freelancing as a scientific illustrator.

 Halpert is past-president of the GNSI and a regular contributor to GNSI conferences.

For more information on Halpert’s Scientific Illustration Distance Program, visit: www.gretchenhalpert-distanceprogram.com.

Tyler Keillor

Tyler Keillor is a paleoartist and fossil preparator at the University of Chicago Fossil Laboratory. Since 1999, he has also worked on a variety of prehistoric projects for other museums, universities, and researchers around the world. Tyler’s work typically involves preparing, molding and casting fossils for research, restoring damaged skulls and bones, and creating sculptures of extinct creatures as they may have looked in life, both traditionally and digitally. Tyler’s reconstructions have been awarded the Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize in 2008 and 2012, presented by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Broader Visual SciComm Juror

Hayley Gillespie, PhD

Hayley Gillespie, PhD is the former founder/director of Art Science Gallery in Austin, Texas and exhibit director at the Austin Nature & Science Center. She is also a trained biologist and practicing artist who enjoys outdoor activities and working on her urban micro-farm in her free time