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 her recent work has been recognized in international print exhibitions in Japan.

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, and she has been on the faculty of the University of Iowa for many years.

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 and 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. Her recent prints favor spare, single-element compositions 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 produced the related Travel Diaries 2022 solo exhibition at Gallery White in Vadodara, India. She was awarded a 2023/24 IFPDA Foundation Grant and a 2023/24 Iowa Arts Council Art Project Grant, and was selected as a 2024 MI-LAB International Artist in Residence — the residency programme run by the Center for the Science of Human Endeavor at Kawaguchi-ko, Japan, that has trained a generation of international mokuhanga artists. She subsequently received the Pressing Matters Prize at the 2025 Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition (AIMPE) for her print A Gift.

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).

Jung is represented by Moberg Gallery in Des Moines and shows regularly with Olson-Larson Galleries, and her work is held in numerous public and private collections. Within the contemporary U.S. printmaking community she occupies 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.