When Samuel — or Sammy — Hoi, president of Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), was awarded the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship with a cohort of poets, musicians and multimedia artists, he realized something about his work.
“I think it gave me a kind of epiphany that actually art and design education has been my medium in a metaphoric way,” he says.
Hoi began to understand that his decades of work as a leader in art and design education have allowed him to flex both his creativity and problem-solving skills to create something beautiful in the arena of higher education.
Hoi’s own education is a mosaic in itself. He received his undergraduate degrees in psychology and French from Columbia University, graduating summa cum laude. He then returned to Columbia for law school, but he quickly realized that a legal career was not a good fit. However, instead of leaving law school, he was determined to see it to the end.
“In a traditional Asian American family, you’re brought up to finish what you start,” he says. “So I went to law school, and I told myself I would finish the law school journey.”
After passing the New York Bar Exam, he pivoted and applied to Parsons School of Design for an associate degree in illustration, a passion he had cultivated since his mother enrolled him in pencil drawing and Chinese ink brush painting classes as a boy growing up in Hong Kong.
“Even though I continued with art classes throughout high school and college and even when I was in law school, that was never really something I thought to do,”
