Dennis Congdon holds a BFA in painting from RISD and an MFA from Yale. He is a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He taught painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tyler School of Art and has been on the full-time faculty in the RISD Painting department since 1984 and a full professor since 1998. In 2003 he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and in 2010 RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. He was a visiting artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome through June and July of 2009. Since 2014 he has facilitated the Vikram and Geetanjali Kirloskar Visiting Scholar in Painting, made possible by the generous Kirloskar Endowment established in 2013. Each year, an advisory group invites and hosts a visiting artist(s) from India and South Asia for lectures, workshops, critiques and dialogues with Painting graduate students.

Congdon’s work is exhibited widely. Recent shows have included a solo exhibition at New York’s CUE Gallery, Ignis Fatuus at Smith College, The Machine in the Garden and Mediated Nature at Oberlin College, Sign Language at the RISD Museum and Is, was, will be at the Mona Bismark Foundation in Paris.