Lowry Burgess

Former Fellows

Distinguished Fellow at the STUDIO, Lowry Burgess is an internationally renowned environmental artist and a Professor of Art and former Dean of the College of Fine Art at Carnegie Mellon University.  He has founded and administrated many departments, programs and institutions during his 45 years as an educator in the arts. He has created curricula in the arts and humanities in the US and Europe while serving for twelve years on the National Humanities Faculty.  Burgess created the first official art payload to be taken into outer space by NASA and his other artworks are in museums in the US and in Europe. He has awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kellogg Foundation. Burgess is the author of the Toronto Manifesto, which calls for the valuing of cultural artifacts and their importance to human identity and existence and was written as a response to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan.