Students

Sofía Paredes Vélez, artist from Bogotá, Colombia. 
My work focuses on the construction of individual or collective spaces through the exploration of diverse materials and the creation of momentary, fleeting installations. These woven spheres intend to accentuate transitions: physical as well as emotional, and culminate in building a terrestrial place, not only for me and...

Kately Towsley makes work about the human experience. She is interested in memory, collective and individual narratives, and our connection to one another and the places we inhabit. Towsley frequently utilizes fiber, ceramics, and botanical matter in her performances and installations, allowing the concept to guide her material decisions. 

Towsley's work is a product of...

I'm an interdisciplinary artist from Toronto (Tkaronto), Canada living in Chicago. Currently, I am experimenting with fibrous textures and a chaos of colours to explore escapism, destructive calm, coping gone awry, energy and stasis, comfort, fun, and anxiety.

Cat Bowyer is an multidisciplinary artist who has been working and living in Chicago for almost 10 years. Her work utilizes a variety of materials where the body is usually included in the foundation of ideas. She holds a BA from Purdue University in Fine Art & Visual Art Education.

Lauren Stichweh (they/she) is a multidisciplinary fiber artist from northeast Georgia whose practice embarks on an exploration of identity, connection, and community. Intertwining personal experience and emotion with supplemental research, they weave (and destruct) narratives that delve into the complexities of human relationships. Their work is driven by the idea of the existence of...

Tommy Ballard is an artist, writer, and educator from the Ohio River Valley. Text/textile processes are utilized as research for topics including contemporary and manufactured material culture, ontology, art education, critical craft, commodification, mechanical reproduction, sentimentality, print media and the US Rust Belt region. 

Ballard has an MA in Art Education and BFA in Creative...

Beizar Aradini is a fiber artist whose practice centers on themes of home, displacement, collective memory, and storytelling. Her work reveals the intricacies of the immigrant experience, often shaped by the lingering impacts of imperialism and colonialism. Through intimate depictions of family, shared memory, migration, and liminal spaces, she highlights the interconnectedness of these...

Dagny Chika (they/she) is an artist, writer, and educator from the Pacific Northwest. She uses fiber processes such as knitting, book-making, sewing, quilting, and tapestry weaving to create playful, whimsical, and ethereal objects.  They engage with materiality and the moment-by-moment processes of making to explore mixed identities and vast emotional landscapes. 

Her practice is often...

Kristin Field is a textile artist, natural dyer, and gardener based in Chicago, IL. Her practice is rooted in research, sustainability, and honoring the craft of artisan natural dyeing traditions. She is interested in the intersection between art and science and inspired by the wonder found in the micro to the macro, from cicada...

I find inspiration in Nature and the human body: the dense midwestern prairie, the chartreuse of city-pond greens, the vastness of the Lake Michigan horizon, but also, in the similarities between my curved hips and the gentle bend of a sand dune’s summit; the impermanence of physical imperfections and the impermanence of a budding...

Gabriela Estrada is a Latin American, ecofeminist woman. Inhabiting her territory is the seed of her work. She built an unusual house, a nest with breathing walls, where inner life is born in conversation with the mountain that holds it. In her work she seeks to approach the earth from listening, not from imposition,...

Ellie Dale Anderson is a fiber and sculpture artist from Michigan. Through familial traditions, memories, and scientific findings she works to explore the ever vast relationship we hold with the natural world. Through walking and gathering materials to incorporate into her pieces, she creates an ecosystem of found objects and memories. By looking at...

My work references the trans body as a palimpsest, through the marks of transformation and trauma that manifest on it. It deals with the idea of transformation as a necessary and transcendent, but simultaneously painful experience by utilizing the tension between beautiful and disgusting visual elements. This conflict between attraction and repulsion also represents...

Bishal Manandhar is a visual artist who sees the value, potential, and richness in the unseen and discarded objects around us. Anything, that is overlooked in people’s lives and is treated as “waste” becomes the starting point of Manandhar’s art practice. As a Nepali immigrant, Manandhar was in shock when he moved to the...

Merryn Omotayo Alaka (b. 1997, Indianapolis, Indiana) is a Nigerian and American artist who holds a BFA in printmaking from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. Alaka's applied creative practice has been intuitively rooted in an exploration of collective memory and identity with a curiosity for how the histories of the Black diaspora are preserved...

Aidan Anne Frierson is an Artist and Educator working with memory, place, and space by way of pattern, color, and specific material relevant to her life, such as Cotton. Other fiber & materials of interest and impact include metal, clay, skin, and writing. 

Her practice, primarily rooted in Handmade Papermaking, prioritizes Cotton as the material...

Adrienne Weiss is a multidisciplinary fiber artist and educator whose practice is rooted in the understanding that corporeal awareness, research, ritual, dreams, activism, and art-making are interdependent phenomena that work together in service of personal and collective liberation. She got her B.A. in Art History and American Studies at UC Berkeley in 2005 and...

Krista Chalkley (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily within the mediums of fiber, installation, and movement to explore themes of fluidity, interconnection, embodiment, and regeneration. Their work considers gender as a spiritual practice– one that is in service of traversing the inherently queered boundaries that compose all elements of our natural and metaphysical...