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Our Artistic Directors

In February 2021, the Board of Directors named Jordan Sokol the Deane Keller Chair and Artistic Director of the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts and Amaya Gurpide the Co-Artistic Director and Director of Drawing. Their appointments bring a fresh and enthusiastic new energy to the Academy, and a progressive vision for its future. Both Jordan and Amaya are working artists, with a wealth of experience in arts administration and education. Their engagement with the changing landscape of figurative and representational art in the twenty-first century, and appreciation of how the academic traditions of the past can invigorate and inspire the present, inform their vision for the Academy’s curriculum and programming. “The inherited accumulation of knowledge and ritual that we call ‘tradition’,” states Jordan, “is historically not a stagnant concept. Art history is a story of innovation and experimentation – a kind of enduring search for personal or universal reconciliations.” Pushing the boundaries of figuration, Jordan’s and Amaya’s classes are built on the reconceptualization of academic or foundational principles, the introduction of critical dialogue and debate, and the exploration of what more can be said through human and depictive forms.