A long road
By Katie Feehan
Mark Sniadecki, BFA ’15 Integrated New Media Studies, has had a long and winding journey while living his passion for art and media. From achieving a BA in English from IU Bloomington ’01, to seeing a need for drastic change in his corporate career and finding his way to the Integrated New Media Studies (INMS) program, graduating with a BFA degree followed by his MFA from Bloomington ’18. Sniadecki has now landed a full-time instructor position teaching digital art at the University of Alabama. After graduating high school in 1997, Sniadecki considered art school, but didn’t feel confident in his abilities at the time. Instead of pursuing a fine arts degree, he completed a BA in English at IU Bloomington, with the intentions of becoming a writer in fiction. “When I received my degree in May 2001, I still had no clear plan, and moved back to South Bend with my then partner, now spouse, Laura Borlik,” Sniadecki recalls. “The economy was a mess and there weren’t many jobs available, so I took what I could get.” From that point he found himself working in an office job that offered no outlet for his passion of artistic development or creativity. “For about seven years my day job was a nightmare of cubicle walls, spreadsheets, and increasing stress from a fast-growing corporate machine,” Sniadecki said. “I became a Senior Billing Analyst. Meanwhile I was making my first experimental forays into digital art in evenings and on weekends, and realized that I needed to drastically change my life or be miserable for the rest of it.” Faced with the choice of continuing in a career that made him miserable or starting over in a new direction towards what he was passionate about—art—the decision to go back to school became clear for him.
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“Laura and I talked, and I finally quit the office job, took on a couple of parttime retail positions, and went back to school. IU South Bend was located literally right up the street from our house, so it was incredibly convenient to take classes, and a few credits carried over from my Bloomington days, which meant I could focus on art courses. However, everything changed when I took my first summer session course, which was also my first digital media course, taught by Professor Eric Souther. That class changed my entire trajectory,” Sniadecki explains. During his time at IUSB, Sniadecki cofounded a digital arts student club with fellow-student Sky Santiago, called Arts Codec. The club put on several day shows in the hallways of Northside Hall, setting up projections and television monitors and filling them with student artwork. Along with that, Sniadecki worked part-time in IU South Bend’s Media Services department, which gave him valuable experience producing and editing media. He also became a counselor during the first residential summer arts camp at IU South Bend for high school students. While working in the summer arts camp he assisted Eric Souther in the classroom and credits this experience as being another stepping-stone on his path to becoming a teacher. Searching for a grad school program seemed daunting, but the process worked out for Sniadecki. “My family is deeply important to me, so it also kept me in the region, which was another plus. Laura and I relocated to Bloomington.” Sniadecki explained. After completing his MFA degree, Sniadecki became very fortunate in his job search when a former professor (Rachel Lin Weaver, now at Virginia Tech) alerted him to a teaching position opening up at the University of Alabama, and wrote him a letter of recommendation.
In May 2018, Sniadecki graduated from IU with his MFA, and by August 2018 he and Laura had relocated to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “It was (and still is) difficult to be so far away from family and northern Indiana in general, but the experience I’ve had here is invaluable. My student teaching at IU was a fine starting point but handling four class sections each semester at UA has challenged me in every way, and I’m a better instructor for it.” Although Sniadecki’s involvement as a teacher slowed his personal art practice, he still tries to make art regularly. Soon he will be developing a more ambitious new piece based on biomorphic 3-D models. As a teacher, former BFA student, and fellow artist, Sniadecki has a few words of advice to incoming freshman as they begin their own paths and artistic endeavors. “My advice to incoming freshmen is to connect with your professors when you can. I think when we are younger, just out of high school, we tend to see professors as these distant, incomprehensible people or intimidating authority figures,” Sniadecki reflects on his experience at IU South Bend. “Certainly, some compose themselves that way in the classroom, but I think many really long for that genuine connection and discussion with their students. Universities, especially, are places for us to exchange ideas and learn from each other, and that should go both ways.”
