Tara Marie Mortensen, Ph.D.
Tara Marie Mortensen is a graphic design enthusiast and award-winning researcher of all things vis comm. In 2019, she was named the Visual Communication Educator of the Year by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She teaches each of the graphics-related courses in the sequence and consistently guides her students to win major regional and national awards. In addition, she created a conceptual course called Signs of the Times: Looking Closer at Visuals in the Media, which explores the deeper meanings of mediated photographs, videos, type, color, illustrations, memes and other visuals.