Rate My Professor Susan Zurbrigg

Susan D. Zurbrigg is a Professor of Art and area head of the Painting and Drawing area in the James Madison University School of Art, Design and Art History, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2000. She recently served as Assistant Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, directing efforts in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, Zurbrigg holds a B.A. in Painting from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and an M.F.A. in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her artistic practice features vibrant, gestural oil painting abstractions that serve as visual representations of liminal spaces, signifying her interracial African American identity. Her works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally, and throughout the United States.

Zurbrigg is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts and academia. She received the inaugural CVPA Beck Faculty Fellowship in recognition of her creative scholarship for 2020-2021, established by alumni Phillip and Christina Updike. Additionally, she was awarded the JMU Office of the President’s Diversity Enhancement Award in 2015 for her outstanding contributions to diversity. She has chaired the College Art Association’s Committee on Diversity Practices, served on its Task Force for Advocacy, and previously directed graduate studies in SADAH. As a member of the JMU African, African American, and Diaspora Studies faculty and the CVPA Diversity Council, she contributes to JMU’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leadership. In the community, Zurbrigg leads the Harrisonburg Changing the Narrative: Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation project, funded by the Virginia Humanities and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, aimed at redressing the cultural erasure of African Americans in the Shenandoah Valley. She co-curated the exhibition Exuberance: Dialogues in African American Abstract Painting at JMU’s Duke Hall Gallery in 2021. She is a board member of the Northeast Neighborhood Association, an advisory board member for the Historic Dallard-Newman House—a site planned to become a Museum of African American History in Harrisonburg—and co-founder and co-facilitator of the Harrisonburg-Rockingham chapter of Coming to the Table, a national organization focused on racial healing.