Alums

Shuyuan Zhou (she/her) (b. 2001) is a Chinese visual artist and poet. Her artistic passion lies mainly in the impact of patriarchal society and generational trauma on self-identity in China. In terms of her work, she tries to combine photographic images with diverse mediums such as installation art, experimental video, and poetry.

Zhou received her BFA in Media and Arts from Duke Kunshan University and her BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Duke University.

Lili Xie is an artist who works in photography, performance, and short films. In her most recent work she uses models and studio photography to explore identity. Lili is full of vague, skeptical cognition and uncertainty of herself, which gives her imagination as well. Actually, she expresses her different images through others’ bodies. The process of shooting is also a process of self-recognition. Her curiosity about the outside world comes from her curiosity about herself. They become her other skin in the images.

Personal Statement: I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. I was four when I first visited the United States. Year after year, I’d visit. I fell for the long winding highways, the green front lawns, the textbook houses, suburbs and cul-de-sacs, yellow school buses, SUVs, strip malls, fast food joints, megastores, and supermarkets. I fell in love with America, with the dream. In my brief time living in the US as a Brazilian, I came to find assimilation wouldn't be possible for me. I would always be othered, even when trying my best to hide my identity. Yet, my feelings of love and admiration for America remained. My work focuses on trying to reconstruct the American mythos and placing myself as archetypes key to its existence. I hope to use my work to highlight and platform Brazilian artists both in academia and in the art world.

Personal Statement: I collect insects and small objects as if they were memories, words, and images. These encounters serve as a medium to observe death and fertility, marked by the unchanging evidence of periodic death and the acknowledgment of the fecundity that surrounds us.

My exploration taps into the intimate realm, guided by observation and typically expressed through photography and installation.

The methodology is rooted in pseudo-scientific processes, leading to visual taxonomic proposals that are pictorial and abstract. The outcome, often influenced by alchemical processes or my exploratory approach, eludes my control. The images oscillate between hyperfocus and distortion, high definition and obscurity, exploring death, its relationship with human observation, and the experience of time.

In my work, stillness is not just a theme but a witness to history. In Chile, memories of trauma drift through windows with the slightest breeze, carrying a persistent viciousness. This compels me to create images that remain static and suspended. Living in the aftermath of dictatorship, my generation navigates and reshapes our experiences of pain, creating a space for the emergence of fragility.

This focus on life and death is a recalibration of self, serving not just me but, hopefully, my generation in finding our voice by reshaping pre-verbal experiences. Is it merely light? Perhaps it is something that must be discerned from the smallest occurrences, from the tiniest objects and beings encountered.

Haru Andersen (she/her) (b. 1998) uses photography as a tool to document and further her understanding of the society we live in today, especially in urban areas stemming from her interest in urban sociology. Majoring in media, culture, and communication as an undergraduate at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, Haru’s interest in media as a tool of expression eventually landed her in the direction of photography. Haru’s interest in sociology, philosophy, and religion are all vital aspects to her work as she finds meaningful subjects to capture within cities that align with her interests. 

Lauren Bertelson (she/her) (b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines domesticity, labor, gender, and the multigenerational transfer of these concepts through self-portraiture, installation, craft, and sculptural practices. In 2022, she received a SOURCE Grant to develop her ongoing body of work, Like Mother, Like Daughter, which centers itself around the generational obligations and rewards stemming from traditions and norms of domesticity. Bertelson holds a BFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University. 

Personal Statement: In my journey as a photographer, I draw inspiration from intimate moments that resonate deeply with personal and universal truths. Initially drawn to the vulnerability of nudity, influenced by my upbringing surrounded by my parents' intimate portraits, my work has evolved beyond the physical form. Documenting significant life experiences has become central to my artistic exploration. My portfolio explores themes ranging from milestones in sobriety to the complexities of infertility, and fundamental aspects of human existence such as desire, self-acceptance, and mortality.

Through projects like A Design for Living, I challenge conventional narratives of alcoholism, celebrating freedom and growth in sobriety. Similarly, 1 in 10 sheds light on the emotional landscape of infertility, drawing from my own journey with polycystic ovarian syndrome. This series aims to amplify voices and make space for understanding.

My art extends beyond traditional subjects, exploring sexuality and mortality through unexpected lenses like vegetable erotica and portraits of deceased birds. These themes challenge perceptions, solidifying my belief in art's power to provoke dialogue and reshape perspectives.

I am most looking forward to working with a new group of artists so that we may push and inspire each other during our time here. I believe an artist is a culmination of many influences and I cannot be the kind of creator I am without a wonderful community beside me. 

Personal Statement: When you step into northeastern China and explore the land that once prospered due to industrial development, you may find some traces of Texas or the Ruhr area of Germany. I grew up in this place where enthusiasm and solemnity intersect. After graduating from high school, I was admitted to the China Academy of Art and moved to a completely different southern city.

In the past two years, I have gradually started to create photographic works "seriously." My photographic creation process is more like an examination of myself, linking the personal to the world, which constantly makes me ponder how "I" was formed and why "I" have become this way. At the same time, I am also working on installation art with themes of the universe and the future, and I draw inspiration from them to design visual materials such as posters, videos, and models.

Zhang Yudie (ida) (she/her/hers) was born in 2001. Her artistic endeavors revolve primarily around photography and installations. In her creations, she delves into shared human experiences and cognitive processes, exploring language, memory, sensory encounters, and the collective emotions associated with "kitsch." However, her work consciously avoids being limited to an anthropocentric viewpoint; instead, it embraces a self-reflective nature, contemplating issues on a larger scale.

Yudie focuses on the interaction between humans and the material world. She explores how the physical body acts as an intermediary that allows humans to gain sensory experiences and how objects reveal the construction of metaphysical concepts and cognition.

Tanya Shah (she/her) (b. Mumbai, 1997) is a Los Angeles-based visual artist. Shah received her Bachelor of the Arts from Dartmouth College in Computer Science and Studio Art with High Honors, and her IB Diploma from the German Swiss International School of Hong Kong. Her work has been nationally exhibited in venues such as the Jaffe-Friede Gallery in New Hampshire and Praxis Gallery in Minnesota, and internationally exhibited in London. She has worked as a teaching assistant at the International Center of Photography in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, as a studio assistant to Letha Wilson amongst other artists, and as a gallery assistant in both Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

Berkley Reddick (she/her) is an emerging artist, working primarily in analogue photography and mixed media installations. She often focuses her work on the idea of the unseen, engaging with individuals, communities, and locations generally overlooked by the public. In these ways she can honestly document the unconventional locations and unique people she experiences life with. Her work stands as a documentation of time: an unapologetic collection of moments representing strong bonds, formed through artistic collaboration and shared experiences.   

Personal Statement: The quest for meaning is meaning in itself.

Hugo Amarales is a visual artist and photographer based in Southern California. As a Mexican American his works revolve around the interactions of navigating both his cultures. A second-generation Mexican American, he explores the nuances between having to assimilate to American culture while still maintaining his Mexican heritage. He works primarily with photography, both digital and analog. He gets his influence from Mexican folk art, Mexican traditions, post-modern and contemporary art to create work that is relative to his experiences.  

Personal Statement: I am inspired and fascinated with the imperfection of creation; my works are a carrier of stories of the past but also lean toward the future. I emphasize the importance of time in the creation. Time here also represents the moment beyond creation as it may contain the past and possibilities to the future. I understand it as a delay of experience and consciousness. This kind of delay changes the process of creation or communication separated from communication, daily symbols, and representations with its spiritual quality.

James Baroz's (he/him) photographic practice begins to explore the relationships with his close inner circle, as it permits an intimate perspective into their lives and anxieties as young adults coming of age. 

He is interested in the diaristic constellation of friends, lovers, and self-portraits, alongside landscapes and domestic still life that rely on the artist's own experience of nostalgia. 

James also interrogates his own performance of masculinity through an on-going series of self-portraits which utilize mirrors to visualize the interior self and physical body.

Raised on the Chehalis Reservation in Washington State, Selena Kearney uses photography as a tool to be of service to her community and as a vehicle for artistic expression. Her work includes portraiture and documentary practice, as well as constructed conceptual works. Selena creates images that are rooted in a sense of place and culture. She holds a Certificate of Fine Art Photography from The Photographic Center Northwest and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Evergreen State College.

Mark Wang is a Chinese conceptual artist based in Toronto, working with photography, sculpture, and video. His projects explore intimacy and philosophical questions and examine the art forms through multidimensional images and material manipulation.

Personal Statement: It’s undeniable that having productive political conversations is becoming more and more difficult in the United States’ increasingly tumultuous political climate. Citizens are being constantly bombarded with information from the media, while also being too busy to contend with all the information needed to make informed decisions or engage in nuanced dialogues.

As viral moments and contentious topics weave in and out of our media environment, the performative nature of politics is a constant. Because of this, my work seeks to encourage meaningful conversations and critical thinking around the nature of these performances, where thoughtful responses can be favored over polarizing and instantaneous reactions. Political Theatres tackles some of the complexities of communication in politics, using theatricality to present political plots in a different, yet not unbefitting context, ultimately using the concept of the theater as a metaphor in order to shine a light on the inner workings of the political world, the ever-influential media, and the effects they have on US citizens.

Lizzie Moo was born in Northern California in 1995. As a child, California State University Long Beach’s art department was her playground while her single mother was obtaining her BFA and MFA in drawing and painting, influencing Moo to choose a career as an artist. Her medium of choice is photography, which piqued her interest due to its novelty and potential for exploration. Lately, however, she has found herself drawn to new mediums. Moo finds that each art discipline influences and has conversations with each other.

Lizzie Moo started a student-run magazine that features student artists who are producing bodies of artwork outside of the classroom, titled SNAP9! Moo has shown her work at Muzeo in Anaheim and has frequently shown her work at the Warehouse of Contemporary Art (WOCA) as well as at the Yoshida Student Gallery at Orange Coast College.

Tzuen Wu (they/them) makes installations, photographs, and videos, that explore seeing and being seen. How the power dynamic works and flows, and the potential social structure behind them. Usually started with things happened around them, for example identity crisis, family history, and environment. They also like to play with different materials, from analog dark room to electronics and VR.

Nour Ballout (they,them) (b. 1993, Beirut) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. They received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wayne State University and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).  Nour’s work as a visual artist and curator is rooted in a social practice exploring structures of naturalization as they manifest within bodies, built environments, and communities. Photographic self-portraiture, collaboration, and space making intersect in the interpretation and dissemination of their experience coming home to their body and the world as a trans-masculine queer immigrant. By reconsidering the right to look; they renegotiate the contract between photographer, sitter and viewer, here the paradoxes of representation, access, and privacy collide. Nour is the founder of Habibi House, a neighborhood-based community art space and social engagement residency in Detroit, as well as the annual Book + Print Fest at The Arab American National Museum (AANM). They are the recipient of the 2019 Knight Arts Challenge Award, the 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Gilda Award, and the 2019 Applebaum Photography Fellowship. Nour has exhibited their work across the United States and participated in several artist residencies including the Ghana Think Tank in Detroit and Flux Factory in New York.

Justice Apple’s (she/her) work explores themes of feminine fragility, power, vulnerability, and resilience as it relates to identity, subjectivity, and the body as form. Obsessed with visual documentation as a child, she often draws upon extensive personal archival images, camcorder recordings, journal entries, and more to reimagine and reclaim critical moments of sexual breakthrough and breakdown. The work currently manifests itself in photography, mixed media, and collage as she questions the notion of aesthetic beauty as it relates to healing and emancipation.

My most recent work is born from my phenomenological experiences encountered in places I live. The act of photographing becomes a ritual act of celebration and documentation that sits between fiction and non-fiction. 

Eugene is a fine (art) photographer, an idealist with no dream. My work focuses on people who are disenfranchised under certain social contexts. Using interdisciplinary mediums like photography, writing, and sculpture, to narrate the connection between human beings, objects, and space, to comprehend individual/collective complex experiences. Documenting my subjects by standing on the opposite side of mainstream and Capitalism gives me the opportunity to see the structural inequality in the society. I also put myself into my work as a subject. My purpose is, on one hand, to find out the agencies and different possibilities of my subjects who are suffering from structural inequality through my participant observation. On the other hand, I will translate, reproduce, and empower the different scenes of each life through my perspective and understanding."

Chelsea Tan (she/her) is a Singaporean artist who uses photography, film, installation, and fibre arts as mediums to navigate through the complex themes of trauma, desire, intimacy, and loss. Recently, she is exploring the intersectionality of memory, childhood trauma, and desire.

Linye Jiang 江麟冶 b.1988  is a photo artist based in Chicago whose research focuses on human complexity, queerness, and questioning the social concept of normality. She explores her subject together through photographic portraits, still lives, and landscapes. She makes photo sculptures and installations, videos and performances using the images she creates.

Clara Emery (she/her) makes large format photographs and experimental short films that explore dreams, paranoias, and superstitions occupying psychological and spiritual threshold spaces. Through looking at different ritual traditions as well as her own uncanny dreams and experiences, Emery constructs scenes of these threshold happenings. She works between the United States and Taiwan, drawing on the experiences and landscapes of both places. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2019 with a degree in Photography, and is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kat Bawden is an artist who explores memory and the self through photographs, video installations, and handmade books. With a background in social science and public health, Kat draws influence from psychology, neuroscience, and dreams.

I always find myself fascinated by the process of how people create stories about themselves and tell their stories to others and to the whole world. The topics of my works seem very different: some are like ethnographies of unknown places, some are like discussions about politics and history, and some are like documentaries of subcultures. But in fact, they all share the same idea: how people carefully weave a web of narratives about themselves with words, images, facts, imagination and all sorts of different things. This complex web of narratives will reveal themselves to others while also holding them safely above the abyss of history. I use the same approach to create my own work: by mixing truth and fiction, I hope to bring my audience into these stories in a humorous and ironic way, and as they begin to think about what is truth and what is fiction, they will find that fiction is just as important as truth.

I currently live and work in Wuhan, China. My early work was about my father and my gender identity, and then my art practice was interrupted by the pandemic. In the past two years, due to the disaster in the societies and my confusion about it, I forced myself to know more about the non-artistic parts and re-constructing my cognition of the world. This process has reshaped my thinking and pursuit of life. Art practice for me is a way that helps me experience and understands the self and the world. It's an expensive basic need of living. I can't tell much and I'm trying to immerse myself in actions this year.

Robert Croll​ (he/him) ​​​(b. 1993) ​is a multimedia artist whose​ practice combines image, text, and sound to examine the construction​ ​and subversion of ​meaning.​ Through ​a process of subtractive editing​, he shifts his photographs​​ away from ​straightforward representation and toward the abstraction of memory.​ Croll received his BA in 2016 from Amherst College, where he researched the unstable relationship between architecture and photography. He has since worked extensively in literary translation, a background that informs his layered approach to ​narrative and reference.

Susan (she/her) is an artist who uses photography to offer a deeper understanding of the relationship between people and their circumstances. Working in the documentary style, she continually challenges her approach to socially conscious art and pushes to broaden her boundaries around how images can inspire thought, feeling, and action when paired with the life experiences of the viewer. She approaches her practice through the “art of visiting,” sitting comfortably in your present environment while acknowledging those around you. This way of forming relationships, from her early days in family portraiture to her current work, enables Susan to achieve a familiarity in her images that appeals to the viewers’ humanity.

Susan is a 2020 Merit Award recipient from the National Council on Aging. She is the recipient of the NC Arts and Science Council Cultural Arts Grant, the Foundation for the Carolinas Grant, and exhibit sponsorship from Gulf Coast Community Foundation. She has exhibited at The Levine Museum of the New South in conjunction with The Light Factory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and most recently at Art Center Sarasota with her work, A Place in the Sun, highlighting the discrepancies in affordable housing and its effect on the working poor.

Susan is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Bachelor of Arts degrees in journalism and speech communications. She was raised in rural North Carolina and has had the privilege of living in six cities, including Mumbai, India and Sydney, Australia. It is the uniqueness in each of us and the connection between us that is her inspiration.

Satchel Lee’s photographic practice is motivated by the idea of ‘Personal Mythology’. Using her own past experiences, memories, and dreams as inspiration, the making of photographs becomes a way for her to exercise and process emotional tensions. Lee received her BFA in Film and Television from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

I am Che Pai from Taiwan. My artwork starts with the vibration of the senses in the body. Interacting with objects and motion, I brew the sensuous into a state of tranquility. Not until this very state is reached do I trigger the shutter. The photographs serve as the medium through which my inner state resonates with the outer world; the results of this mutual engagement are my images with vibrant musicality. My artistic creation comes from studies in both western and Taiwanese literature, the work experience of writing screenplays on the White Terror, and eight-year training in a body theater of Tai-chi. Through these voyages of self-discovery, I increasingly get to know my creative potential in my photographic images as the platform where literature, cinema, and body training come together. The sensuous shapes the photographic approach, and the images become rhythmic works composed of not only the objects my camera records but also what happens on the other side: the experience of my body in a dynamic relationship with the scenes. Playing with photographic materials, I experiment with performance, bookmaking, and installation as ways of perceiving images.

Sayera Anwar (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Pakistani artist. She completed her Bachelor in Fine Arts from The Beaconhouse National University in 2019. In her artistic practice, she explores her family history, conflates the historical event with the present situation, and inspects the impact of 'boundaries' on different generations. She received her Master of Fines Arts in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was granted the prestigious New Artist Society Merit Scholarship.

At this point, my work explores memory; the temporary, impermanent nature of spaces; and the family album as both an object and a form of narrative. I’m finding that my work emotionally centers on stillness, desolation and loneliness. The line from the Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen keeps echoing with me over and over, “The beauty of sadness is feeling the pain.”

My relationship with photography was built on a number of touch points growing up; my dad loaning me his old Argus for a school trip; finding my grandmother’s Brownie in a closet, still loaded with film; or getting competitive with a friend school who was taking a class in it (“Oh, I can go better than that.”).  Once those influences were ingrained, the formal education began.

The artistic journey started in a more traditional form of the medium, studying under a protégé of Aaron Siskind. But I turned to interdisciplinary work, specifically writing, when I hit a point with a project (a piece about AIDS fairly early in the epidemic) where I felt that I needed the viewer to understand aspects of the story that could not be captured in an image alone.

Sam Tripodi’s (she/her) multi-disciplinary practice - utilizing photography, sculpture, and painting - explores the world as a paradox, where preconceived notions of meaning are questioned. She focuses on our ability to reframe ideas to challenge what we think we understand, using distorted materials that suggest an altered understanding of ecological trauma, personal history, and her own impending doom.

Christian K. Lee (he/him) is an artist living and working in his hometown of Chicago.

His experience as a documentarian drives his desire to utilize Art as an investigative tool. Christian’s goal is to create imagery that reflects the world in which he currently lives.

His introduction to photography began photographing the Ferguson Unrest; those experiences allowed him to see the power of photography and what can happen when one focuses their lens onto a community or a group of people.