Jacob D Pinholster

Jacob D Pinholster

Professor, Theatre

Personal profile

Professional Information

Professor Jacob (Jake) Pinholster began his term as dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts in September 2024. Prior to joining Illinois, Pinholster served as executive dean for enterprise design in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University and the founding director of the ASU Media and Immersive eXperience Center—an emerging media technologies and practices facility in the center of downtown Mesa, Arizona. In addition, he advised graduate programs in interdisciplinary digital media and performance, extended reality technologies and immersive experience design.

As an educator and administrator, Pinholster has engaged in several long-term initiatives that fuse technology, interdisciplinarity and curricular innovation, and he has been an invited speaker on these topics at the National Association of Schools of Theatre, the Leadership Institute of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and Live Design International (LDI). As a designer, his efforts have centered on projection and media design and technology for performance.

His professional media/projection design credits include the “Pee Wee Herman Show,” “Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking,” “Current Nobody,” “Hoover,” “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” “Heddatron,” and many other productions at off-Broadway, regional, and academic venues.

Pinholster earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Production and a Master of Fine Arts in Scenic and Lighting Design from the University of Florida.