Lee Kuruganti Wins Hugo Base Design Contest

(Denvention 3 Press Release) Lee Kuruganti has won Denvention 3’s competition to design the 2008 Hugo Award statue base.

Lee Kuruganti is a professional, digital artist based in Colorado. Her fantastic art has been published by Baen, Static Movement Online, Withersin, Spacesuits and Sixguns, the Lorelei Signal and Sorcerous Signals. She created the poster for the recent film Extinction. Kuruganti reports that “One of my favorite moments was being selected as an artist for an international mural project for Olympic Games Seoul.”

Kuruganti was a semi-finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard Illustrators of the Future Contest. She’s also done several solo shows, and has exhibited in many galleries.

Click to read the rest of Denvention 3’s press release

Kuruganti graduated from Metropolitan State College of Denver with a B.A. in English and a minor in Fine Art. She’s long been interested in the science fiction field. In high school, she refused to rewrite her class paper on favorite author because the teacher said that the author she chose was not a real writer. Rather than rewrite the paper, Kuruganti took an F…on a paper about the “unreal author,” Philip Jose Farmer.

For more samples of Kuraganti’s art, visit her Web site at:
http://solarnrg.deviantart.com/

Lee Kuruganti’s winning Hugo base design will be unveiled at Denvention’s Hugo Awards Ceremony on Saturday, August 9 in the Wells Fargo Theater of the Colorado Convention Center. The ceremony will start at 7:30pm.

For the last few years, Worldcons have held an open competition for the design of its Hugo bases. Denvention 3 solicited artists and designers to design a base worthy of the Hugo Award. The design competition instructed the designers to incorporate an aspect relating to the Denver region or Colorado, and the convention’s theme, “A Mile Closer to the Stars.” Devention’s competition ran last fall through the end of the year.

As winner of the competition, Kuruganti will receive a free, full attending membership for Denvention 3 and will introduce this year’s Hugo base design at the Hugo Awards Ceremony.

Photo of Lee Kuruganti:
http://withersin.com/withersin004006.jpg

More of Lee’s art:
http://www.denvention.org/images/leekurugantisample.jpg

“Worldcon,” “World Science Fiction Convention,” “Hugos,” and “Hugo Awards” are service marks of the World Science Fiction Society, an unincorporated literary association.