DISTINGUISHED EDUCATOR AWARD｜Liu Shiming Art Foundation Announces the Inaugural Distinguished Educator Award Recipients:Natalie Hunter and Dana Lok
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The Distinguished Educator Award is given to adjunct professors in the US and Canada with at least five years of experience teaching studio arts to college or graduate students
Top: Photo of Dana Lok by Joel Jares.
Button: Natalie Hunter, Portrait photographed by Samuel Engleking courtesy of The Bentway.
New York, NY, October 20, 2025 — Liu Shiming Art Foundation (LSAF) is proud to announce the inaugural recipients of the Liu Shiming Distinguished Educator Award. The Educator Award is a new initiative designed to highlight the critical and often under-appreciated role of studio art adjunct professors, who typically balance teaching responsibilities with independent studio work. This year’s recipients are Natalie Hunter, who specializes in teaching sculpture at the University of Waterloo, and Dana Lok, who teaches at Columbia University and focuses on painting and drawing.
For 15 years, Liu Shiming served as the equivalent of an adjunct staff member of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing where he had once been a student. There, he developed a deep appreciation for his students and their artistic integrity. The Liu Shiuming Art Foundation has created this award in recognition of Liu Shiming’s dedication to education to support exceptional professors, deepening their broader commitment to the academic process. The award comes alongside the scholarships provided by the Foundation in support of students studying art and art history at undergraduate and graduate institutions around the world. Additionally, in 2023, LSAF inaugurated the Liu Shiming Artist Grants program, which provides emerging artists with $5,000 unrestricted grants. The program is now entering its third year.
“In honor of Liu Shiming’s dedication to his career as an educator, we are thrilled to use this award to provide support to adjunct professors like Natalie Hunter and Dana Lok who give critical guidance and assistance to young artists in formative stages of their careers,” said Puiking Hui, Executive Director of the Liu Shiming Art Foundation. “Adjunct professors, especially in the arts and humanities, are grossly underrecognized and undersupported. We hope our Educator Award can begin to rectify that habitual oversight and honor their important work.”
Of her teaching philosophy, Natalie Hunter said, “In all of my classes I emphasize that process is just as important as the final outcome of an assignment and fundamental to the learning process.” Dana Lok remarked, “The most ambitious artworks arise when a student reaches new insight into their creative motivations, in all their complexities and problems. Those are the artworks I aim to help each student achieve, and that process begins with a question and an open ear.”
Both recipients of the Distinguished Educator Award will be given $10,000 in unrestricted funds. In addition to the awarded sum, LSAF will host both recipients at their 2026 gala, which will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Liu Shiming’s birth.
The recipients were selected by a committee of:
Adrian Parr: Dean, College of Design, University of Oregon
Joseph Peragine: Director, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia
Pete Pinell: Former Chair, Dept. of Art and Art History, University of Nebraska in Lincoln
Joseph Ugorentz: Former Chief Academic Officer, Macaulay Honors College, CUNY
Dolores Zinny: Director, Rinehart School of Sculpture, MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art)
About Natalie Hunter
Natalie Hunter is a visual artist and educator from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She works across photography, installation, sculpture, and the moving image, and is mostly known for her multilayered and experiential photo-based installations on transparent film. Her studio practice engages with the poetics of time, memory, temporality, chance, perception, the archive, and the senses - with an emphasis on embodied experience, perception, materiality, personal memory, and identity. She has taught courses as a sessional instructor in photography, digital imaging, expanded media, contemporary art, and studio fundamentals since 2012. Natalie Hunter is the recipient of many Canada Council for the Arts Research and Creation Grants, and Ontario Arts Council Visual Artists Creation Project Grants. She has shown her work in public art galleries and artist-run-centres across Canada and abroad, including: Rodman Hall Arts Centre, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Smokestack Gallery, Hamilton Supercrawl, Hamilton Winterfest, Workers Arts and Heritage Centre, University of Waterloo Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Windsor, Thames Art Gallery, Mississauga Living Arts Centre, Centre 3 for Artistic and Social Practice, Factory Media Centre, Hamilton Artists Inc., Niagara Artists Centre, Latcham Art Centre, Museum London, Propeller Art Gallery, John B. Aird Gallery, Gallery TPW, G44, Lonsdale Gallery, University of Manitoba School of Arts Gallery, The Reach Gallery Museum, Capture Photography Festival, Contact Photography Festival, The Bentway, Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery, Art Fair Hamilton, and Cambridge Galleries, among others. Her work has been featured in Hamilton Arts and Letters, Femme Art Review, The Gathered Gallery, Other Peoples Pixels, Canadian Journal of Culture Studies, BlackFlash Magazine, and PhotoEd Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo where she is a sessional instructor, and received an Excellence in Online Teaching Award in 2017.
About Dana Lok
Dana Lok is an artist and educator who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She teaches at Columbia University and has taught classes at Tyler School of Art, Pratt Institute, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Lok has also served as a visiting artist at Boston University, University of Chicago, and the New York Crit Club. Her work as a teacher emphasizes careful listening and precise questions that aim to boost students’ insight into their own values and creative intentions. As an artist, Lok’s paintings and drawings explore themes of knowledge, language and representation, and bring light, weight and texture to abstract ideas. Her recent solo exhibitions include “As Syllable from Sound” at Miguel Abreu, NYC (2024), “Closer to the Metal” at Clima, Milan (2023), “Part and Parse” at Miguel Abreu, NYC (2022), and "One Second Per Second" at Page, NYC (2020). Her work was included in recent group exhibitions at Candice Madey, NYC, Francois Ghebaly, NYC, High Art, Arles, France, Sikkema Jenkins, NYC, and Andrew Kreps, NYC. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Frieze, and Cura Magazine. Lok received her MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2018, she was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant.
About The Liu Shiming Art Foundation
Established in 2021, the Liu Shiming Art Foundation supports contemporary art worldwide while elevating and preserving the art of renowned Chinese artist Liu Shiming (1926-2010). Based in New York, the Foundation curates contemporary art exhibitions and provides scholarships, grants, and exchange opportunities to cultivate and grow a global arts discourse that recognizes common humanity, as Liu Shiming did as a teacher, through his art and life. lsmartfund.org.
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