Nathan Young

Adjunct Instructor

Nathan Young (born 1975, Tahlequah, OK) is an artist and scholar working in an expanded practice that incorporates sound, video, documentary, animation, installation, socially engaged art, experimental music and art history. Nathan’s work often draws upon the spiritual and the political to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime. Nathan co-founded the artist collective Postcommodity and holds an MFA in Music / Sound from Bard College’s Milton-Avery School of the Arts. Young is a PhD. Candidate in the University of Oklahoma’s innovative Native American Art History Doctoral program where his scholarship is focused on Indigenous Sonic Agency. Nathan’s work has been supported by Creative Capital, The Tulsa Artist Fellowship, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Pew Foundation, and the Carnegie Mellon Foundation as well as the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Institute. Young is an enrolled member of The Delaware Tribe of Indians and is also a direct descendent of the Pawnee Nation and Kiowa Tribe. Young formerly served as an elected member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians Tribal Council.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.