Artful Deceptions is an ongoing research project and collaboration between professor of architecture Leslie Van Duzer and illusion designer—magician—professor of education Eric Van Duzer. Their collaboration began with the publication of Eric Van Duzer's Seven Basic Secrets of Illusion Design and Leslie Van Duzer's Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas, both explorations of artful deception in their respective fields of magic and architecture. The focus of their collective research has shifted away from an early interest in the physical mechanics behind illusions in architecture and stage magic to an interest in the psychological and physiological underpinnings of misperception. Artful Deceptions convened a workshop in Minnesota with an interdisciplinary group of eleven artists and academics to discuss the art and science of deception.

Eric Van Duzer is associate professor at Humboldt State University in California. For over forty years he has been involved in the design, construction, and performance of magic. He is the author of the book Seven Basic Secrets of Illusion Design, and articles in magic trade publications and scholarly education journals. As a faculty member in the School of Education, his scholarship has three elements. His research on policy, school structure, and systems leads to, and is related to, his scholarship on technological tools for teaching and learning. His third area of scholarship involves the psychology of wonder and misperception as it relates to techniques employed by professional illusionists. This work is related to education through research in discrepant events and their effect on student engagement in middle-school science. He is currently designing and performing educational magic for rural elementary-school students.

Leslie Van Duzer, professor and director of the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia, has held visiting positions at over a dozen universities in North America and Europe. She has coauthored/coedited four books: the two award-winning building monographs Villa Müller: A Work of Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe: The Krefeld Villas, Festschrift Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision, and most recently, the first major survey of Loos's Czech oeuvre in 25 years, Adolf Loos: Works in the Czech Lands.