MFA Students

Deyi Zeng (she/her) (b. 2003) is a Chinese visual artist from Beijing. She holds a BA in Media Arts Production from Emerson College and is pursuing an MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her work combines photography, installation, and archives to explore identity, illness, migration, and memory. One recent project traces a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner's migration to Boston, examining how healing practices adapt within diasporic communities and reframe the meaning of “home.”

Another project draws on her experience with congenital heart disease, using biological imagery and surgical symbols to question how medical intervention reshapes the body and self-perception.

Zeng’s practice offers an intimate view into the shifting boundaries of autonomy, belonging, and transformation.

Ariel Cobbert (she/her) is a visual artist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Through a photographic approach to materials and image-making, her work explores Black Southern identity, memory, and care through the use of family archives, vernacular aesthetics, and everyday ritual. Rooted in both historical research and personal narrative, Cobbert’s practice interrogates the production of images and the ways Black life has been recorded, obscured, and reclaimed through photography. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Brooks Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Essence Magazine, CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR, and The New York Times.

Personal Statement: Most of the time, I tend to observe and perceive the surroundings silently and store my feelings in mind. I believe the world today looks more like a confusing magnetic ball, where different positions, sounds, and events are mixed together, making it difficult for me to always feel accurately and distinguish between true and false in real life. I don't think it is reasonable to passively come to terms with these changes or problems, so I need to keep my mind open and turn these feelings into a form of expression, while maximizing the limit of perception by visualization in this vision-dominated era.

Personal Statement: Making has always been my way of navigating the fragile and often transient connections that define human relationships. My work explores themes of desire, ephemerality, and the emotional resonance of fleeting interactions. Through conceptual and experimental practices, I question the lifespan of an artwork, not just as an object, but as a living extension of human connection. I am often thinking about the materials themselves and how they play a part in these time-based works. These experiments are also about embracing the unknowable: the audience and meaning that my work accumulates over time, all while defying permanence and interrogating the ways we can document and experience the ephemeral.

Xuemeng Li (he/him) (b. 2000, Yueyang, China) is a young artist working primarily with photography and moving images. His recent works explore human-water relationships and internalized experiences related to dreams and Eastern philosophy. Li's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Blanc Gallery (New York, 2024), Banshan Gallery (Tokyo, 2023), Three Shadows Photography Art Center (Xiamen, 2022), and Xie Zilong Photography Museum (Changsha, 2020), among others.

Jack Lynch (they/he) is a father, Marine Corps veteran, and photographer working at the intersection of memory, material, and violence. They direct the fabrication of copper discs shaped to the geometries of improvised explosive devices, and build handmade paper from historical documents and shredded military uniforms, choosing materials already heavy with history rather than ones built to last. Their practice is shaped in part by their experience as a █████ veteran, by a military culture that demanded a strict performance of self to survive.

Lynch has come to focus on this body of work because it allows photography to function as more than representation. The photograph becomes an object that carries weight, resistance, and failure. They are no longer interested in producing discrete images alone, but in building work that is physically burdensome and cannot be encountered passively.

At SAIC, Lynch plans to scale this work into larger, viewer-implicating installations that extend their material logic into digital space, forcing viewers to navigate systems of surveillance, militarization, and memory rather than simply observe them.
He holds a BFA in Photography with minors in Printmaking and Art History, magna cum laude, and has worked in photojournalism and sports photography.

Luek Collins (he/him) (b. 2000) is a southern-Appalachian poet and artist whose work oscillates primarily between analog and digital photographic, printmade, and text-based media. His practice over the past several years has become heavily motivated by the aesthetic and poetic affordances of quietness—or the haunting atmospheres found somewhere in/outside of it—working towards an emotional equilibrium between, or disavowal of, material vacancy and imagined abundance.

He aims to address and question the narrative qualities of fleetingness, transience, and ephemerality, as well as their conceptual relations to queerness and Americanism, in the post-documentary photographic tradition, preserving a spectral, lyrical indexicality in his resulting bodies of work. He believes that difficult, nuanced truths can be communicated most effectively through the soft unveiling of banal or overlooked scenes that whisperingly proclaim, yet incisively reveal.

Luek received his BFA in Photo-Printmaking and Poetry Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022 and was recognized as an Emerging Artist by Musée Magazine in 2024.

Grace Conrad (she/her) is a fine art photographer and cinematographer based in both Chicago and New York, with a focus in large format photography, 16mm cinematography, black-and-white darkroom printing, and alternative process printing. Conrad's artistic practice is driven by a sense of curiosity and an acceptance of the inherent uncertainty that comes with large format photography and motion film.

Her work often explores the intersection of human and non-human subjects, positioning them within larger, non-human worlds. Conrad is constantly evolving her practice, diving into new chapters that allow her to explore varied subjects and circumstances. The experimentation with different photographic techniques, such as platinum palladium printing, allows her to push the boundaries of what’s possible and capture moments that feel both timeless and deeply personal.

Conrad's most recent projects, Children and Companions, is currently on view in New York City. This body of work consists of seven platinum palladium prints and delves into the connections children have with their support systems, highlighting the many different forms those connections can take. Through these images, Conrad explores the nurturing and interdependent relationships that shape childhood, while also reflecting on the universal human need for connection. 

Personal Statement: My name is Yume Nakayama (she/her), and I am a Japanese artist working across photography and ceramics. I earned a BA in Photography from Nihon University in Tokyo. In 2024, I studied at Colby Sawyer College in New Hampshire, where I received the Sheldon Ponder Prize (USD 35,000 Scholarship), the BFA Studio Art Capstone Award, and the BFA Studio Art Baccalaureate Award, graduating with a GPA of 3.9/4.0. In 2026, I began my MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

My practice explores memory, identity, and the changing meaning of photographs when they are translated into physical form. By transferring photographs onto ceramic surfaces, I investigate photography as both an image and a material object, questioning its role as a record of reality while considering how memories are preserved, transformed, and sometimes lost over time.

While my work is rooted in personal experiences—particularly family history and interpersonal relationships—I seek to expand these intimate narratives into broader social questions. I am interested in how individual memories can reflect collective experiences and reveal the ways people connect with one another through images and material.

My work has been presented in a solo exhibition at Nikon Salon in Tokyo, and I received the Dean's Award from Nihon University for my graduation project.

Ce Yeun Park (she/her) uses the camera as a tool to visually interpret social phenomena from multiple perspectives. She began by photographing people who are isolated in society as an observer, but gradually developed her practice by engaging more closely with her subjects. Her long-term photographic exploration has now evolved into a broader inquiry titled Strangers, encompassing foreigners, socially marginalized individuals, and even herself. Believing that everyone may find themselves a stranger at some point in life, she hopes her work creates a moment for viewers to reflect on what it means to be a stranger.

Personal Statement: Throughout my exploration of not so well-versed self identity, I've been drawn back to the duality of being a woman. My photography is a medley of digital, analogue, alternative processes and sculptural elements, to showcase the seemingly imaginative idea of the idealized "Girlhood". My work primarily deals with themes of womanhood, connection through environment, purity culture, identity and sexuality. As a multidisciplinary artist, I find my stills take on a painterly and sculptural approach. They often cannot last, so photographing them is my means of keeping them alive forever. I am drawn to almost "innocent" or nostalgic objects and bright colors to juxtapose my complex experiences and emotions as a woman navigating the world. The intention of my work is to find solstice in the messiness of meeting yourself over and over again. To embrace womanhood through one's "girlhood". To find connection and navigate as an artist in a world catered to men.

Jinhong Shangguan (he/him) (b. 2003, Fuzhou, China) is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. He holds a BA in Visual and Dramatic Arts and Art History from Rice University. His work draws from East Asian coming-of-age narratives in China’s eastern coastal regions during the 2000s, focusing on youthful confusion, emotional trauma, and identity formation. Through staged photography and moving image, he translates recollections of silence, desire, regret, and loss into fictional stories and cinematic tableaux. Moving from memory to script to image, his practice reinterprets the complex emotions of growing up and transforms what once felt unresolved into a space for reflection and self-discovery.