Andrew Hobden is our newest staff member at Pollack Library. Andrew was born in London, UK and lived in Manchester before his family emigrated to the US in the mid-70s. He received his BA in English Literature from Wheaton College, IL in 1995. He returned to the UK in 2005, living in Swansea (Abertawe in Welsh), Wales, where he received a Masters in Fine Art and Photography awarded with distinction from the University of Wales Trinity St. David in Swansea in 2014. He is currently working on a practice-based PhD through UWTSD, quizzing photographic phenomenology and materiality by rethinking the matter of the photograph through the embodied, perceptual acts of the taking of it, engaging conceptually with neuroscientist and consciousness theorist, Alva Noë’s reconceptualization of visual perception and with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau Ponty and François Laruelle’s concept of “photo-fiction.” Andrew has acquired years of public-facing, book-related, employment experience working for academic bookshops and libraries (such as the University of Chicago Bookshop, New York University Bookstores, Swansea University Bookshop, University of Wales Trinity Saint David Libraries, and, most recently, Wake County Public Libraries in and around Raleigh, NC). He derives personal satisfaction from providing exemplary bookstore and library service, believing in the transformative power of reading, learning, and researching. He is an active, exhibiting artist, having works, environs, or objects shown at the Bath Fringe Festival, the Mission Gallery in Swansea, and the Volcano Theatre also in Swansea. He was a finalist in 2009 for Aesthetica Magazine's International Creative Works Competition, and in 2012 a detail of one photograph from his Dichotomy Bowls series became the cover art for the Aesthetica Creative Writing 2013 annual. Since returning to the US in 2017, Andrew devised and installed a diverse range of public engaging art-objects and installations for Wake County Public Libraries to enrich patron experience, including an “infinite elevator shaft” of books and a paper lantern installation at Oberlin Regional Library, and for Cary Regional Library’s reopening after closure due to the pandemic, he devised and installed a screen of seagulls in flight, creating a functional, interactive, eye-catching installation at the main circulation desk.