alumni directory

Scott Cressman

Visual Communications

Assistant Professor, Communication Design, Alberta University of the Arts · Dip · Class of 1992

cressman.ca/

Scott Cressman is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Alberta University of the Arts, where he has taught for over 15 years in addition to 15 years teaching at Mount Royal University in the Public Relations degree program. His teaching and research sit at the intersection of design thinking, strategic communication, and neurodiversity in creative education. He is the founder of Neurocreative, a research and education initiative dedicated to reframing neurodivergent thinking as a source of creative strength, and the author of the forthcoming Designed to Diverge: ADHD and the Art + Design Student (2027).

Beyond the classroom, Scott leads Expericent Strategies, a consultancy focused on brand strategy, corporate communications, and creative direction. His client work spans 34 years across healthcare, energy, education, technology, justice, and the non-profit sector. He is a graduate of AUArts (then ACAD, 1992), where he received the Board of Governors Award for Academic Excellence.

Scott's long-duration photography projects — including seven years at the same mountain lake above Canmore, AB and eight years documenting snowfields in the upper Kananaskis — have shaped a creative philosophy built around returning to the same questions in nature until they reveal what they actually are across time and natural processes. He is currently completing The Mirror Blinked, a philosophical exploration of existence, consciousness, and artificial intelligence, and where the universe's 13.8-billion-year evolution is leading to something far more complex.

Granum House The first time I stood inside this house, the prairie beyond the windows felt like it was pressing inside, slowly crushing it. A chance to witness entropy in action. Inside, everything was stopping. It had been stopping for decades at the pace that abandoned buildings stop — not all at once, but season by season, each winter claiming a little more. A building is an argument against weather. This house had been making that argument for a long time and was now, clearly, losing. But losing slowly.

Bombay Beach – Someday My Prince Will Comes - Scott Cressman

Bombay Beach – Someday My Prince Will Comes Once a popular resort destination, Bombay Beach, CA declined when rising salinity destroyed the Salton Sea's ecosystem — a community that hosted celebrities and weekend dreamers now surrendered to salt, heat and silence. This Disney beachball is what entropy looks like up close. Not the dramatic entropy of explosions or collapse, but the slow kind — the kind that works on colour, air pressure, the molecular bonds of rubber left too long under a desert sun. The kind that works on communities too

The Spaces Between. Along the east coast of the Bonavista Peninsula, the land, sea and people exist in a state of constant, unhurried negotiation — icebergs drifting south in spring, pack ice fracturing at the shore, puffins threading the grey air, old doors nailed shut against weather that is relentlessly shaping truth. The Spaces Between is a long-duration reflection on what lives in the intervals — between sea and land, between the built and the abandoned, between the people who stayed and the ones who left.

A Sense of Place Rundle Lake, Canmore, Alberta. Forty-seven mornings across seven years. Always before dawn, always at the same small lake above Canmore, AB, in every season and every weather condition. This project was never about finding the perfect morning. It was about returning often enough that the place revealed what it actually was — not as a dramatic landscape but as a living, changing presence whose character only becomes legible through accumulated attention.

Scott Cressman's Work

Granum House The first time I stood inside this house, the prairie beyond the windows felt like it was pressing inside, slowly crushing it. A chance to witness entropy in action. Inside, everything was stopping. It had been stopping for decades at the pace that abandoned buildings stop — not all at once, but season by season, each winter claiming a little more.

A building is an argument against weather. This house had been making that argument for a long time and was now, clearly, losing. But losing slowly.

Scott Cressman's Work

Bombay Beach – Someday My Prince Will Comes Once a popular resort destination, Bombay Beach, CA declined when rising salinity destroyed the Salton Sea's ecosystem — a community that hosted celebrities and weekend dreamers now surrendered to salt, heat and silence.

This Disney beachball is what entropy looks like up close. Not the dramatic entropy of explosions or collapse, but the slow kind — the kind that works on colour, air pressure, the molecular bonds of rubber left too long under a desert sun. The kind that works on communities too

Scott Cressman's Work

The Spaces Between. Along the east coast of the Bonavista Peninsula, the land, sea and people exist in a state of constant, unhurried negotiation — icebergs drifting south in spring, pack ice fracturing at the shore, puffins threading the grey air, old doors nailed shut against weather that is relentlessly shaping truth.

The Spaces Between is a long-duration reflection on what lives in the intervals — between sea and land, between the built and the abandoned, between the people who stayed and the ones who left.

Scott Cressman's Work

A Sense of Place Rundle Lake, Canmore, Alberta.
Forty-seven mornings across seven years. Always before dawn, always at the same small lake above Canmore, AB, in every season and every weather condition.

This project was never about finding the perfect morning. It was about returning often enough that the place revealed what it actually was — not as a dramatic landscape but as a living, changing presence whose character only becomes legible through accumulated attention.