Anita Jung

Anita Jung is an American printmaker and professor whose work occupies a distinctive space at the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary experimentation. Based in Iowa City, she serves as Professor of Printmaking at the University of Iowa's School of Art, Art History, and Design, where she teaches intaglio, relief, mokuhanga, natural dyes, and silkscreen.

Jung earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing from Arizona State University before completing her MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her academic training in painting informs the layered, painterly quality that distinguishes her prints from more conventionally graphic approaches to the medium. Over the course of her career, she has developed a practice centered on what she describes as the transformative beauty found within discarded materials -- working with remnants from CNC projects, repurposed surfaces, and everyday ephemera to create open-ended, awkward abstractions that resist easy categorization.

Her creative process is guided by intuitive methods of seeking and foraging, both for physical materials and for visual possibilities within them. She deliberately engages with computerized technologies while offsetting them through tactile analog methods, including crafting her own pigments from plant-based dyes and inks. This tension between the digital and the handmade runs throughout her practice, producing work that feels simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Found surfaces become hybrid printing plates, their pre-existing marks and textures contributing to layered introspections that accumulate meaning through repeated impression.

Jung's engagement with mokuhanga -- traditional Japanese water-based woodblock printing -- represents a significant thread in her practice. In 2024, she participated in the MI-LAB International Artist in Residence program's Advanced Program D in Echizen, Japan, deepening her understanding of Japanese papermaking and printing traditions. That same year, she received the Pressing Matters Prize at the 2025 Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition for her work 'A Gift,' a piece combining water-based woodcut, screenprint, and walnut dye.

Her international reach is substantial. Jung has participated in over one hundred group exhibitions in the past decade, with many traveling throughout the United States and abroad, including shows in India, Japan, and across Europe. She has contributed to more than twenty national and international portfolio exchanges, and her work resides in numerous private and public collections. A Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award in 2022 took her to India, while grants from the Iowa Art Council and the IFPDA Foundation in 2023-24 supported ongoing projects in natural dyes and printmaking.

Notable recent exhibitions include Hybridity at Olson-Larson Galleries in Des Moines (2024), the IPEP Decade Show at Bihar Museum in Patna, India (2023), The Disappearing Birds of North America: 389 Birds on the Verge of Extinction (2023), and Peregrinations: New Work at Hudson River Gallery in Coralville (2023). Her gallery representation includes Moberg Gallery in Des Moines and Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in Kansas City.