Artifacts: Haida Totem Pole Print

Mitchell Van Duzer was born on December 8, 1985, in Greenville, South Carolina, USA. For the first few years of his life, he and his family lived in Sparta, New Jersey, while his mother worked for Metropolitan Life at their main headquarters in New York City. When Mitchell was 4, his mother was transferred to the MetLife branch office in Atlanta, so the family relocated to northern Georgia, first to the town of Cumming, and then to Gainesville. Throughout his childhood, Mitchell was always attracted to both visual art and writing as forms of expression; his mother would bring home printer paper from work, upon which he spent countless hours fervently scribbling and doodling. Following his graduation from high school in 2004, Mitchell's family relocated once more to Bradenton, Florida, and he began attending Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota as a computer animation major. Despite his focus on his major, it was here that he really began to hone his painting skills, under the direction of Sarasota artist Jeff Schwartz. When Mitchell was 21, he was also diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder that manifests as social awkwardness, difficulty interpreting body language and subtle verbal cues, and intense and eccentric interests. After three years, alienated from computer animation and needing a change of scenery, Mitchell moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to be closer to friends, and in 2008 he transferred to Emily Carr University of Art and Design. While there, he studied under local artists Philippe Raphanel, Ingrid Koenig, and Landon Mackenzie, and in his senior year he served as a panelist at On the edge of chaos, a joint symposium between Emily Carr University and the University of British Columbia on the relationship between neuroscience and art. He graduated from ECUAD with a BFA in Fine Art in 2010, and is now a practicing professional artist and graphic designer. In addition to his painting and graphic design work, he is also a writer, and finished writing his first novel, Even Stars Die, a few months after graduating from ECUAD. Since 2014, Mitchell has lived and worked in Bellingham, Washington. For the first decade of his artistic career, his work focused heavily on the theme of technology and the ethical questions arising from life in a 21st Century technological society.