Lesley Duffield
pronouns: he/him/his
b. Garden City, Michigan 1981
Lesley ‘Les’ Duffield is an artist and educator teaching courses in digital art and time-based media in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.
His multimedia research practice works in playful layers that collect, archive, and perform in the irreverent traditions punk/DIY, fluxus and dada. Strategies include creative misuse, tinkering, clowning, and parody as counterpoints to weightier questions relating to memory, loss, grief, technology, the family, power, value, mastery, and the role of the expert in non-human systems. He has held artist residencies at the University of Utah Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities, the Icelandic Textiles Centre, and the Santa Fe Art Institute.
Taking a prismatic approach to teaching creative technologies, Duffield models creative life in a constant state of flux– actively demonstrating how cycles of skill-building, atrophy, and creative re-emergence are germane to all artistic practices. His students are relational co-operators with digital processes, each cultivating their own relationships to methods and concepts as they build and grow through their projects.
Currently, Les teaches foundations of 4D/time, 3D computer animation, sound art + design, and the BFA senior studio capstone which serves both Creative Technologies and Studio Art majors. He is also the founding Chair of the Creative Technologies BFA program, serving from 2017-2024.
Les holds an MFA in Digital Art from Indiana University, Bloomington and a BA in Rhetoric and Communication Studies from Indiana University, Indianapolis.