The University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design is pleased to announce the appointment of three tenure-track faculty members. Amanda Lee and Leila Weefur joined the Division of Art, and Akshaya Tankha joined the Division of Art History. Each has been appointed as an assistant professor and will begin teaching in Autumn 2025. 

We are excited to welcome these new faculty members whose innovative scholarship, creative practices, and dedication to teaching will enrich the School and inspire our students and broader UW community for years to come.

Amanda Lee

Assistant Professor in Painting + Drawing + Printmaking

Amanda Lee is a multidisciplinary artist specializing in printmaking, book arts, and photography. Her images and installations evoke a sense of poetic minimalism, inspired by sacred texts, transcendentalist paintings, and manuscripts. She creates art that investigates the intersection of Indigenous knowledge systems with print media and book art theory. Lee earned an MFA at Indiana University, Bloomington, and was the recipient of the inaugural Virginia A. Myers Visiting Assistant Professorship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa. Lee was an artist in residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Willapa Bay AIR. She has presented work internationally with several solo exhibitions at SG Gallery in Venice, Italy. An avid teacher, Lee previously held faculty positions at University of Minnesota, Utah State University, the University of Georgia, and University of Arkansas. She has been a visiting artist and taught workshops at Kent State University, Loyola Marymount University, the University of Alberta, and Penland School of Crafts. Lee has received several awards, including an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant. Lee is currently working on a public art commission for Seattle Public Utilities in partnership with the Office of Arts & Culture and is the curator of the 2025 Cimarron National Works on Paper at Oklahoma State University Museum of Art.

Leila Weefur

Assistant Professor in Photo/Media + New Genres

Leila Weefur is a Liberian-American artist, writer, and curator whose work engages with film, architecture, and the archive to examine systems of belonging. Their research, across disciplines, explores environmental geographies, transnationalism, religion, and queer worldmaking. Weefur received an MFA from Mills College and BFA in Film and Media Studies from California State University, Los Angeles and Howard University. Weefur has worked internationally with institutions including The Walker Art Center, Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, ICASF, CCA’s Wattis Institute, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and The Kitchen. Weefur was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency with the Bemis Center for the Arts. Weefur’s writing has been published in SEEN by BlackStar Productions, Sming Sming Books, Baest Journal, and more. Weefur is a founding member of the curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic.

Akshaya Tankha

Assistant Professor in Art History: South Asian Art History

Akshaya Tankha is a historian of modern and contemporary art in South Asia. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonizing approaches and ethnographic methods in his research, he tracks how religious, ritual, and secular understandings of the image, space, and time animate works of art, photography, museums, and monuments in India. Tankha’s research has been published, among other places, in 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and the art magazine, Marg. In his current book project, tentatively titled “Nagaland and the Art of Indigenous Presence in Postcolonial South Asia,” Tankha explores what critical resources such as ideas regarding the sentience of material and space in the work of artists, cultural practitioners, and curators in the Indian state of Nagaland tell us about the contemporaneity of art outside metropolitan contexts of practice and the political significance of the aesthetic in the Indigenously inhabited and politically contested borderlands of South Asia. Tankha received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2020.