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Nic Umbs Headshot

Nic Umbs

  • Lecturer, Photography & Imaging

Education

  • BS, Biological Sciences, UW-Milwaukee, 2018
  • MFA, Studio Art (Photography), UW-Milwaukee, 2021

Biography

Nic Umbs is an image-maker and educator raised and based near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His artistic research employs photographic processes and material inquiry to examine how humans relate to their environment, to one another, and to the idea of family. His work spans digital and analog photography, alternative and historical photographic processes, video, and sculptural installation. Umbs approaches image-making as a way to study memory, connection, and the ethics of attention. His work often integrates scientific and mathematical methods, using photography as an expressive and analytical tool.

Umbs studied at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, earning a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences in 2018. He returned to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art in 2021. This interdisciplinary background informs his research-driven practice, focusing on process-based image construction, experimental darkroom techniques, and hybrid analog–digital systems. His projects often explore family archives, inherited objects, liminal spaces, and nonhuman subjects. Through photography and sculpture, he examines how meaning and value are constructed in relation to life, death, and place.

Building on his thesis project, Memento Vitae, Umbs’ practice includes technical explorations of capture and print methods. He often works with an heirloom 1917 Kodak Brownie camera adapted for digital capture, hand-applied emulsions, and 3D mapping. Through this work, he investigates how photographic materiality can preserve, distort, or reanimate memory, particularly in relation to personal and familial history.

His ongoing series En Route investigates transitional and overlooked spaces throughout southeastern Wisconsin. This work exists in dialogue with the New Topographics movement. It reflects on routine movement, time scarcity, and the quiet significance of in-between places as records of daily life.

Umbs is also an active teacher, having taught undergraduate photography both locally and internationally. He has served as the interim area head of Photography at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and has developed curriculum in analog photography and digital imaging. His work has been exhibited and screened nationally and internationally.

Links

Recent & Selected Works

Black and white photo of the side of a house with a large tree in the foreground and a man walking in the background.
Legacy – 4, Archival Pigment Print From Scanned 120 Film, Wooden Frame, 2020
Image of silos and a control room on gravel at night in the middle of a rural area
Mile 6.6 of 7.6 (1.1 mile detour), Archival Pigment Print, 2023
Sculpture of a modern camera leading into an aperture box where an antique camera lens emerges.
An Apparatus for Photographing Through Time, Wood, Metal, Kodak No.2 Folding Autographic Camera, 2020
Field plow with no rider in an empty field with trees in the distance
Mile 4.5 of 6.3 (en route), Archival Pigment Print, 2024
A recently dead sparrow laying surrounded by bright pink flowers
A Sparrows Final Resting Place, Archival Pigment Print, 2023
Black and white image of a woman partially obscured by her garden's plants
Mother, Archival Inkjet Print From Scanned 120 Film, Wooden Frame, 2019

Memento Vitae (film), 2021