Ileana is a professor at
California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She has a degree in
Architecture and Urban Planning from the Ion Mincu Institute in Bucharest,
Romania, and a Master of Art in Industrial Design and a PhD in Decision Theory
and Problem Solving from UCLA.
With a strong artistic and
cultural background, Ileana has always been interested in art. In parallel with
her manufacturing engineering profession, her passion for art has been
demonstrated in many ways. She is an art collector and promoter. She has
donated art to CSUN and other non-profit institutions. She has organized and
curated art exhibitions and events, made numerous presentations, and written
articles on various art topics.
In 2011 Ileana started an art
gallery, I.C. ART, to represent the American heterogeneous artist Jerry W.
McDaniel. The gallery was originally located in Palm Springs, California, from
2011-2015. The gallery was then moved to Los Angeles, with Ileana transforming
her residence into a house-gallery (which can be visited by appointment only).
She has another gallery in Paris. Every year Ileana spends a few months
traveling — mostly in Europe, but also in Asia, Australia and New Zealand —
attending and organizing or participating in art events and art fairs and
acting as an art agent.
Ileana is an educator who
teaches, among other courses, computer aided design. She’s also a journalist
who has published over 60 articles, the author of three books, a skilled event
planner, and a very charismatic public speaker. In addition to representing
Jerry W. McDaniel with her I.C. ART gallery, she collaborates with him on the
computer side of the art (digital experiments, advertisement material,
animations, and videos). For more advanced computer work she and Mr. McDaniel have
collaborated with a gifted young designer from Romania, Bogdan Alexandru
Ungureanu. For videos she has collaborated with Ben Todica, a journalist,
author of two books, and movie-maker from Melbourne, Australia, and with Doina
Spilca, an expert in YouTube design, from Bucharest, Romania.
Ileana is currently working on
Volume II of her collected articles and on a book about the art of Jerry W.
McDaniel called “My Illustrator’s Era”. On the latter project she is
collaborating with a former student of Mr. McDaniel’s, Elizabeth A. Sheehan, a
cultural anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the City University of New York.
