Steve McGuire has been a faculty member in the School of Art & Art History at the University of Iowa since 1988. He completed an MA in Sculpture in 1983 and a PhD in 1990, focusing his doctoral research on metaphor in the work of Paul Ricœur and its relevance to philosophical approaches to artmaking.

His teaching is grounded in purposeful exploration—an approach that supports learning across skills, concepts, and tools, including welding, modeling, design, fabrication, materials, and aesthetics. In 2010, he founded the University of Iowa’s handmade bicycle curriculum, teaching Fabrication & Design: Hand-Built Bicycle I, II, and III. The program brings together art and engineering majors and has exhibited annually at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show and Bespoked International.

McGuire is committed to the revitalization of the handmade and to the enduring value of craftsmanship. He believes that making things is fundamental to how we engage with the world. An adventurer as well as a designer and builder of bicycles, he sees the bicycle as an elegant instrument for exploring landscape. For him, wilderness travel is a knowledge process, and the principle of “design, build, ride” guides his creative practice: designing a bicycle for a specific terrain, building it, and then riding it through that landscape.

His current projects include Þórs víðernisþverun (Thor's Wilderness Traverse) and the new course, The Iowa Idea at Great Heights: Iceland Solar Eclipse High-Altitude Ballooning Project.