2015-present
Visual Artist, Dawn Hunter's artwork about Santiago Ramón y Cajal has been well received and garnered recognition in the neuroscience community. She has been awarded fellowships and grants supporting this series, most notably a Senior Research Fellowship through the Fulbright Foundation, Washington, DC. She has exhibited this series in group and solo exhibitions at leading medical research institutions like the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, and the Instituto Cajal, Madrid, Spain. She has participated in collaborative symposiums held in honor of Cajal, that were facilitated by the NIH and the Instituto Cajal. While a Fulbright España Senior Research Scholar at the Instituto Cajal, she was invited to be a presenter at the 17th National Congress of the Spanish Society of Neuroscience, Alicante, Spain. She has written articles about her perceptions of Cajal's drawings for the National Library of Medicine's Circulating Now. News of her research has been featured in professional magazines in the field, like, The Scientist, Scientific American® and The Consilience Journal. In 2021, Dawn's artistic works about Cajal was featured in a solo exhibition at the College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas.
2005-2015
By 2014, Dawn Hunter's research in her Spectacle Spectacular series culminated in many solo exhibitions at leading academic institutions in the United States, including Delaware Contemporary Art Center, Brown University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Whittier College, and Ithaca College. Her most famous work from this series, Art Department, was featured in the Day Job exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York, NY. The painting was also featured on the cover of the prestigious literary journal Crazy Horse of the College of Charleston. Her artwork and research direction took an unexpected turn when she freelanced as a medical illustrator for the new edition of the textbook, Human Neuroanatomy, published by Wiley-Blackwell Publishing in 2017 by Dr. James R. Augustine, University of South Carolina School of Medicine. While creating illustrations for this textbook, she researched the history of brain anatomy illustration. She was particularly struck and inspired by Santiago Ramón y Cajal's drawings because they possess artistic merit and a particular type of observation.
Education
Dawn Hunter, artist, pursued her undergraduate studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, Parsons School of Design, and the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art & Music. As a Regents Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of California, Davis, where she studied with Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest, and Irit Rogoff. Dawn has participated in numerous solo and multiple artist exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Additionally, she has also received many awards and grants for her artwork, markedly a Starr Foundation Fellowship, enabling her to be the first American woman to serve as Artist-in-Residence at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art in the School of Visual Art and Design at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC.
