Since graduating from Full Sail nearly six years ago, Digital Arts & Design Advisory Board member Kim Alpert has accumulated a long list of artistic credits. The Chicago-based creative director has done everything from analog video processing for the legendary Leo Burnett Ad Agency and VJing for the Blue Man Group in Chicago to curating and exhibiting at outdoor music and art festivals.

Kim admits she loves to be involved and in the middle of everything, which is clear from her resume. It’s also helped her rise to the top quickly at Sparkfactor, a boutique design and ad agency she began working at three years ago. Kim first worked for Sparkfactor as a freelancer, doing motion graphics, database architecture and a little bit of producing. “It was great,” she says. “They kept renewing my contract.” Eventually, Sparkfactor hired her on full-time and soon she was doing the jobs of head video engineer, motion graphics artist, and interactive producer. A short year later, Sparkfactor’s creative director left, and Kim was promoted to that position.

“The people here and everything that I’m doing are everything I dreamed of but didn’t think possible,” she says. “It’s been an incredible ride. It allows me to be involved in the art community [and] do exhibitions and shows.”

So even though Kim has a career with a very responsible title, the VJ/visual artist/sculptor/event planner is still out there, energizing the Chicago art community. Her most recent artistic foray was a video and sculpture exhibition called re: edit, an installation that consisted of six custom-made LCD screens set in a glass china cabinet that was also partially designed to look like flesh covered with hair. Participants could watch a series of three videos called Shave 1, 2 and 3 on a big screen or on the small LCD screens – and then actually “shave” part of the cabinet. She says the exhibition has to do with her changing views of femininity and womanhood, and with how society views body hair in relation to gender.

“It was very well-received – more than I thought it would be,” Kim says. “A lot of people stayed and watched for the entire hour, and there were a lot of conversations about shaving between the generations [there].”

Kim was also asked to participate in Chicago’s SOFA expo (the International Expositions of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art) in 2007 – one of the largest exhibitions in the world.

“As a teen growing up in Chicago, I remember going there,” says Kiim, whose piece was part of an exhibit of artistically designed cookie jars. Her wooden jar had an LCD displaying a looping video of a hand stealing cookies from the jar. The booth was located near Salvador Dalí sculpture pieces and Dale Chihuly glass works.

“It was such an incredible humbling experience of thanks and awe that my art was being exhibited there,” she says.

As if all that's not enough, Kim is also active with Chicago artists group, MFchicago, with whom she worked to help produce “Looptopia.”

At Looptopia 2007, a now-yearly dusk-to-dawn music, art, architecture and culture festival, Kim exhibited a piece called “Commute” – a 40-foot projection on the exterior of a building. She was also the film and video curator for the yearly art festival, “Around the Coyote,” which she worked with since 2003 when she was the youngest curator the festival had ever had.

Kim says her dream is to have her art in the Getty or the Guggenheim by the time she’s 30, and at this rate, that’s certainly not a pipe dream. Beyond the evidence of her talent and work ethic, her success could be explained in part by her philosophy: “I tend to be very involved!” she laughs. “I have trouble passing up opportunities.”