Cathey Billian

Cathey earned her MFA with high honors from Pratt Institute on a full fellowship where she recently retired as a full professor. She created Wild America, a series of college accredited initiatives partnering with national parks, and has taught interdisciplinary environmental design studios at Cooper Union and the Masters Program in Exhibition Planning and Design at the University of the Arts.

A select list of Commissions and major installations includes Future Antiquities at the Whitney Museum Sculpture Court-NYC; Cross Cut/Piedra Lumbre for the Forest Service Wild and Scenic Rivers & Ghost Ranch Museum, NM; Time’s Lie for the Fields Sculpture Park - Art Omi-NY; YIELD for the Madison Museum-Yellowstone National Park; BiPlanar Arrival; a permanent commission of light and native geology for the Phoenix, AZ airport; High Passage for the Arch at Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Mapping Place for Acadia National Park, Maine; and Framing Time, a pathway, entry and gallery installation for the Contemporary American Theater Festival, West Virginia.

Permanent collections that own her work include the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Park Service, Norton Simon Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank, and Vice-President Al Gore. She has received awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, four NY State Council on the Arts Project Grants, from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation , the New Jersey State Arts Council, the New York/NJ Port Authority, the Experimental Glass Workshop, NY, and six Residencies from the National Park Service.

Professional activities in addition to teaching include her inclusion on the Advisory Board of the Public Art Review where she has also served as a guest editor for their issue “Nature Trails." She chaired the panel “Interpreting Wild America” for the College Art Association’s Millennium meetings in NYC and was the Artistic Director of a traveling exhibition “kNOwing LIMITS, ”collaborative Digital prints by visual artists and nature writers exhibited at 7 National Parks including Grand Canyon and Acadia. She has served as juror for the NJ and CT State Arts Councils, the National Association of Interpretation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.