Geo Rutherford is a Wisconsin-based artist known for her work on the Great Lakes. Her “Spooky Lakes” TikTok series, launched in 2020, gained viral popularity. With over 1.8 million followers, she’s praised by educators and parents for inspiring kids to explore science, history, and the environment.
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator who’s practice fuses personal narratives with historical research to address broader structural inequalities based on gender and class. Ballard teaches at UWM and is a recipient of the 2025 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists.
Ceci Tejeda’s family roots are from Michoacán, Mexico, which is why she has Purepecha blood in her veins. Ever since she was a young girl, she’s admired her culture. She creates Alebrijes made of “cartoneria,” a unique and traditional papier-mâché technique from Mexico City. Tejeda also creates large-sized pieces that support various social justice movements and activism using the same method.
Dan Grzeca is a Chicago-based artist and printmaker known for thousands of illustrations, hand-silkscreened prints and posters for bands like The Black Keys, Iron and Wine, Built to Spill, Ween and The Decemberists. His studio and shop is called Ground Up Press.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator, and Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in major museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago and Walker Art Center. She co-runs The Suburban (Milwaukee) and The Poor Farm (Little Wolf, WI), and is a 2025 Mary L. Nohl Fellow.
Xuan Ye blends art, music, and technology through improvisation and computation to create software, installations, and performances that explore dissonance and meaning. Their work has appeared at MOCA Toronto, Venice Architecture Biennale, UCCA Shanghai, MUTEK Montreal, and more.
Wes Larsen is an assistant professor of design at UWM. His work spans graphic art, performance, writing and publishing, focusing on obfuscation and irreverence to explore meaning. He uses diverse print and media methods and previously ran the indie design studio Tocco in Fort Worth, Texas.
Linda Fleming, born 1945 in Pittsburgh, is a renowned sculptor and educator. Location is vital to her work which comes from three studios: a geodesic dome at Libre artist community in Colorado, Wall Spring in Nevada’s Smoke Creek Desert, and The Brewery in Benicia, CA, where she creates most of her large-scale sculptures.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography explores the studio as a performative space, focusing on intimate, creative exchanges. His work has been shown at the Studio Museum Harlem, MoMA, and MCA Chicago. He won the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and lives in Los Angeles.
Camila Rosa (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn-based Brazilian illustrator and artist known for vibrant art exploring feminism, social justice, and Latin women’s representation. Using bright colors and strong narratives, she challenges stereotypes and promotes inclusivity and equality.
J Taran Diamond is a Baltimore-based metalsmith and educator. She has completed residencies at Arrowmont and Baltimore Jewelry Center, where she’s a Teaching Fellow. Outside of the studio, Diamond is an advocate for Black people in the fields of craft and academia and works to help achieve equity and accessibility within those fields.
Oaxaca-based printmakers Conhg Lopez and Enrique Gijon exhibit nationally and internationally. Gijon directs Taller de Artes Plásticas Rufino Tamayo, while Lopez works from a studio at Milwaukee’s House of RAD.
South Carolina-based painter Todd McDonald has exhibited widely, including in Denmark’s Velux International Painting Exhibition, Redux Contemporary, and the Gardiner Art Gallery. He is Associate Professor and Head of Painting at Clemson University.
Rory King is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary designer, creative director, writer, and educator. He’s collaborated with artists, architects, curators, designers, musicians and brands like Sony Music, Vox Media, and 2×4, and taught design at Pratt Institute and Wayne State University.
Steve Teeple (aka Teeps) is a Los Angeles-based digital artist specializing in 3D character development and printing, digital sculpting and art, visual development, and illustration. He’s worked across games, fashion, music, TV, and film, collaborating with artists like The Weekend and Billie Eilish. He graduated from UWM in Interdisciplinary Arts & Technology.
Monika Plioplyte is a Chicago-based artist born in Lithuania. Her work draws on Baltic folklore, female archetypes, personal rituals, and the uncanny. She collages paper, photographs, and other materials into narrative structures that explore the past, the transmission of information, gender, and states of "in-betweenness" as they relate to her immigrant experience.
Born in West Texas, Kill Joy explores global mythology and ancient symbols through printmaking, murals, bookmaking, and puppetry. Based in Houston, she has created community murals worldwide.
Tomiko Jones is an Associate Professor at UW-Madison whose photography and multidisciplinary installations explore social, cultural, and geopolitical transitions – considering the twin crises of too much and too little amid climate change. Narratives unfold in sculptural video installations and fictional photographs.
Cynthia Brinich-Langlois explores altered topographies, cartographic systems of ordering space, and metaphorical interpretations of ecological systems through prints, books, and video. She’s exhibited widely and held residencies at Elsewhere and Ucross. She teaches Printmaking & Book Arts at UWM.
MFA candidates Corrigan Eckert and Jack Lehtinen explore philosophical questions facing the human race and their connection to the world around them. Eckert focuses on place-based art’s role in community and land stewardship, while Lehtinen critiques AI by contrasting machine-made works with hands-on print and papermaking.