Anita Elizabeth Jung

Anita Elizabeth Jung is an American printmaker and Professor in the School of Art, Art History, and Design at the University of Iowa, where she teaches intaglio, relief, mokuhanga, natural dyes, and silkscreen — an unusually broad print-medium portfolio that places her among the few contemporary U.S. printmaking faculty actively teaching Japanese woodblock alongside the Western tradition. Her own studio practice has, over the past decade, increasingly incorporated mokuhanga and plant-based pigments, and she is one of a small group of American printmakers whose recent work has been recognized in the Japanese international print biennials.

Jung holds a B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from Arizona State University and an M.F.A. in Graphic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been on the faculty of the University of Iowa for many years and was a featured printmaker in the Grant Wood Art Colony's Printmaking Fellowship programme.

Her mature work is built around the idea of transformative beauty found within discarded materials. She combines computerized image-making with deeply tactile analog methods, including the crafting of pigment from plant-based dyes and inks, and works at the seam between digital design and traditional carving / printing. Her studio output explores silence, edges, and the space between existence and nothingness — with the printed sheet treated as a physical residue of these meditations rather than as a representational image. The vocabulary of her recent work includes single-element compositions — Drift, Smoke, Sticks, Pottu, Raj, Slow Rise, Pink Icicle, Black Rain, Constellation, Split, White Clouds — and indeterminate atmospheric forms in which mokuhanga and silkscreen are layered.

Her recent recognition has been substantial and concentrated. She received a 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award and Fellowship, which took her to India for an extended teaching and studio period (and which produced the related Travel Diaries 2022 solo exhibition at Gallery White in Vadodara, India). She was awarded a 2023/24 IFPDA Foundation Grant, a 2023/24 Iowa Arts Council Art Project Grant, and selected as a 2024 MI-LAB International Artist in Residence — the residency programme run by the Center for the Science of Human Endeavor in Kawaguchi-ko, Japan, that has trained a generation of international mokuhanga artists. The MI-LAB residency has been a defining stop on the contemporary mokuhanga circuit and Jung's selection placed her alongside other prize-winning international artists of the moment. She subsequently received the Pressing Matters Prize at the 2025 AIMPE (Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition).

Her recent exhibition record reflects the same internationalization. Solo exhibitions include Hybridity at Olson-Larson Galleries in Des Moines (2024); Peregrinations: New Work at the Hudson River Gallery in Coralville, Iowa (2023); and Travel Diaries at Gallery White in Vadodara, India (2022). Group exhibitions include the IPEP Decade Show at the Bihar Museum in Patna, India (2023), The Disappearing Birds of North America: 389 Birds on the Verge of Extinction (2023), and Thinking of Place iii, an international touring exhibition (2021-23). She has been featured in over fifty solo exhibitions across her career.

Jung is represented in the U.S. by Moberg Gallery in Des Moines and Olson-Larson Galleries, and her work is in the permanent collections of multiple American university art museums and printmaking centres. Within the contemporary U.S. printmaking community she sits in an increasingly central position: a faculty member who has integrated mokuhanga into her teaching, a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, an MI-LAB resident, and an AIMPE prize winner — an unusually complete record of trans-Pacific printmaking exchange in one career.