Designer, educator, gardener. Creating environments where people, animals, and plants thrive.

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Full Bio

Kim Beckmann has practiced as a graphic designer for over a decade and an exhibiting artist for two decades. She has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. and internationally in Korea, Greece, and Bulgaria. She has won numerous awards for her work in design and art.

Since 2006 her artwork has focused on reflections, refractions, and inflections. It uses dynamic juxtapositions of nodes, paths, edges and narratives to explore relationships between space, memory, and territory in rural and urban spaces. She uses drawing as a medium to capture the transient nature of place and one's fleeting and shifting perceptions of it.

In 2012 Kim Beckmann was selected by Dean Wade Hobgood to represent the Peck School of the Arts to attend the Symposium for Entrepreneurship Educators at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In spring of that year launched her sabbatical and research focus on design entrepreneurship pedagogy. While placemaking is still at the heart of her practice, she now focuses her energy on pedagogy for innovation and creating a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with her colleagues in business, engineering, art, architecture, and information studies. She is dedicated to creating new career opportunities and jobs for her students and the City of Milwaukee.

Kim Beckmann is currently an Associate Professor in Design and Visual Communication at the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has served as the Area Head for the Design and Visual Communication Program (2009-2011, 2014 to present, and as Associate Chair for the Department of Art and Design (fall 2011).

Specialties: Gardening, Landscaping, Design Entrepreneurship Pedagogy, Teaching, Product Innovation, Design Process, Typography, Environmental Graphic Design, Publication Design, Printmaking, Art Installation, Drawing.