Alum Kiersten Hoff’s (BFA 2024, Film) senior film, Mindframe, is to be featured in the Door County Film Festival. Hoff’s film will screen in the Student Films category and will be showing February 12 at Fish Creek’s Northern Sky Gould Theatre.
To read the full announcement, visit Door County Pulse.
Over the past 40 years, UW-Milwaukee alumni Mike Martino, Mike Sponholtz and Tom Queoff have carved blocks of snow into everything from mythical beasts to Mount Rushmore. As the members of Team USA, they’ve won awards worldwide, using their fine art degrees to sculpt in a cold and cantankerous medium.
“We’ve been carving together since 1986,” said Queoff, a Milwaukee-based sculptor who earned a master of fine arts degree in 1977. “We’re like old musicians who just keep performing together.”
With help from Martino (’78, BFA) and Sponholtz (’79, BFA), Queoff created the 6-by-12-foot bronze panther that stands in front of UWM’s Enderis Hall. The sculpture, commissioned by the UWM Alumni Association, has become a beloved campus icon since it was unveiled in 2015 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the university’s mascot.
This week Team USA competed in the Olympic Art Festival’s 2026 International Snow Sculpture Competition in San Candido, Italy, a mountain town about 25 miles from Cortina d’Ampezzo, where the mountain events will be held at the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The team was one of eight selected from more than 300 applicants worldwide. Their piece, “Zenith,” depicting three figures holding an Olympic torch and laurel wreath, earned a bronze medal.
“We’ve always treated snow as a serious artistic medium,” said Sponholtz, a Mishicot-based sculptor who works primarily in wood. Martino, a La Crosse-based artist who sculpts in wood and bronze, agrees. “We share a love for creating beautiful forms and being out in nature.”
The three friends have traveled thousands of miles to snow sculpture competitions from Canada to Japan, where they won a bronze medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics Art Festival near Nagano. Their luggage includes customized carving tools and a gridded plexiglass box containing a polyurethane scale model of their competition sculpture.
“It keeps us on the same page. An inch square on the model is a foot square in the snow,” Queoff said.
They’ve honed a system of defined roles. “I’ll be roughing in shapes on top of the block,” Sponholtz said, “and Tom will be working from the bottom. Mike will be clearing the snow. Once the form is roughed in, we all work to add the details.”
After four decades and more than 250 snow sculptures, the members of Team USA will collaborate on their final piece together Feb. 14-15 at the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, where they have created snow sculptures annually for 35 years. The museum featured a photo retrospective of their work in January, “Captured in Cold: Photographs from 35 Years of Team USA Snow Sculpture.”
“A 10-by-10 block of snow is 17 tons,” Sponholtz said. “We carve and clear all that by hand. We’re all in pretty good shape, but we don’t move like we used to. It’s a great feeling when you’re finished, but then you wake up hurting the next morning.”
Time may be catching up with the members of Team USA, but as all snow sculptors know, time is never on your side when using a material that melts.
“Snow sculpture is like performance art,” Martino said. “It’s here and gone. You have to appreciate it in the moment.”
Story by Maridel Allinder, originally published by UWM Report
Professor Kyoung Ae Cho, a fiber artist known for her meditative, nature-inspired practice, is featured in TextielPlus in a profile about her slow-art approach and material exploration. The article highlights her use of recycled and natural materials gathered and respectfully transformed into textile and mixed-media artworks.
Cho explains that her creative process begins with a collaboration with nature that informs the form, pattern, color, and texture of her pieces and that her work spans embroidery, quilting, weaving, sculpture, and installation. The profile illustrates Cho’s lifelong engagement with textiles, tracing her early interest in sewing to the depth of her contemporary art projects that merge environmental awareness with minimalist, contemplative practice.
Read the article on TextielPlus.
For Milwaukee Magazine’s Spring Arts Playbook, Lauren Warnecke spoke with acclaimed choreographer and guest artist David Roussève about his work with the UWM Dance Department and members of Milwaukee’s vogue and ballroom community on Care: Illuminating Milwaukee’s Queer and Trans Community, a community-based creative research process that culminates with a world premiere work at Winterdances.
As reported by Milwaukee Magazine, the project was shaped through workshops, conversations, and shared movement practices involving students, local performers, and community partners. The resulting choreography blends contemporary dance and vogue while foregrounding care, knowledge-sharing, and lived experience as forms of artistic research.
Read more in Milwaukee Magazine.
Winterdances: Resilience is faculty concert featuring the original choreography by dance department faculty members Ishmael Konney, Dawn Springer, and Mair Culbreth, as well as guest artist David Roussève. Winterdances: Resilience presents dance works that uplift the human connection through storytelling, joy, and resilience. Here’s a preview of the world premiere works.
Dr. Mair Culbreth
This work began with a kinesthetic investigation of vertigo—as both a bodily sensation and a condition of ambivalence. Drawing inspiration from filmmaker Catherine Yass’s Falling Away, the process explored verticality not only as a physical experience but as the unsettling sensation of slipping away from oneself, from certainty, from what is known. Vertigo, commonly understood as dizziness or disorientation, emerges here as a rift between subject and reality—an embodied manifestation of the human desire for balance amid instability.
The sensation of high places and the existential anxiety provoked by the possibility of falling became a metaphor for moments of personal and socio-cultural upheaval. Through movement research with ropes, the dancers investigate how bodies navigate risk, dependence, and trust—how we create ground for one another when stability is no longer guaranteed. Suspended between falling and holding, the work imagines new modes of orientation and relationality in times of collective uncertainty.
Engaging surrealist materials such as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, the piece approaches surrealism not as escape, but as adaptation: a reorientation toward the strange, fractured, and off-kilter realities of the present moment.
Ishmael Konney
Inspired by the 1983 expulsion of Ghanaians from Nigeria, Ghana Must Go uses this historical event as a lens to examine the broader human story of movement: forced and unforced migration, relocation, and the search for belonging. Through the metaphor of the body as a bag, the piece explores what we carry with us: memory, identity, and the invisible weight of home.
It also reflects on the human connections that emerge through migration, the encounters, relationships, and shared experiences that form as people move from place to place. In Ghana Must Go, movement becomes both burden and bridge, revealing how displacement can also create new forms of community and resilience.
Dawn Springer
The creative process for this piece explored the maturation process of discovering that the structures we exist in (perhaps familial or societal) are often not fixed but constantly shifting. During the choreographic research, I looked for symbols from other times and places that encapsulated those ideas. That included stories from the paternal side of my family history, Irish poetry, Catholic imagery and culture, and 80s-90s pop music.
The title references Irish poet Thomas Moore’s 17th century poem, The Harp that Once Through Tara’s Halls, written while Ireland was under English rule. Considering similar themes of cultural inheritance and loss, Harps That Once reflects on what resonates after structures and ideals fracture — what remains and what is built when the illusion of permanence fades.
David Roussève
Roussève partnered with UWM Dance and community partners Diverse & Resilient and local dancers to create his work “CARE,” which serves as the final stage of Roussève’s dance and community-engaged research project, Care: Illuminating Milwaukee’s Queer and Trans Communities. Roussève’s piece features three local ballroom dancers who collaborated with him on the crucial vogue and ballroom section of the work. Richard Buda Brasfield, Jacques Infiniti Hall, and DaCosta Martín worked closely with Roussève to bring the authenticity and artistry of vogue to Roussève’s contemporary work.
Winterdances: Resilience runs from February 5 – 8 at UWM’s Mainstage Theatre. Visit the PSOA Events calendar for more information and to purchase tickets.
Story by Payton Murphy ’27 (BFA Film)
Alums Evelyn Patricia Terry (BFA 1970, Art; MS 1973, Art) and lecturer and alum Yinan Wang (BFA 2017, Film) were named among five recipients of the 2026 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists. Terry was selected in the Established Artist category, and Wang was selected in the Emerging Artist category.
Established in honor of artist Mary L. Nohl following her death in 2001, the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists provides unrestricted funds for Milwaukee-area artists to create new work or complete work in progress. FVANG Associate Professor Mike Gibisser was also named a finalist in the Emerging Artist category.
Evelyn Patricia Terry is a full-time professional artist and the City of Milwaukee’s 2014 Artist of the Year. Her multidisciplinary practice includes printmaking, collage, mixed media, book arts, and works on paper. Her work has been exhibited locally, regionally, and internationally and is held in more than 500 public, private, and corporate collections.
Her recent site-specific commissioned installation at ThriveOn King, America’s Favor, America: Guests Who Came to Dinner and Stayed (2024), features a 16-foot table with recycled wood–turned legs, globally sourced ethnic dolls, a George Ray McCormick Sr. sculpture, and plates adorned with raw-food replicas. Together, these elements encourage healthy choices, thoughtful reflection, and a deeper understanding of America’s beginnings—how and why we are here.
She has exhibited locally, regionally, and internationally in Spain, Germany, Japan, and Russia, and has created public art projects for her neighborhood and for Mitchell International Airport.
As a recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in the Established Artist category, Terry will receive a $20,000 fellowship along with an additional $5,000 stipend to support her practice.
Yinan Wang 王一男 is a filmmaker born and raised in Beijing and now based in Milwaukee. Working across personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms, his practice explores how memory, language, humor, ritual, and food shape our sense of home—following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing.
His recent work, 甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet, reconstructs both personal and collective memories of a local Chinese restaurant through cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, quietly probing how images form—and deform—cultural identity.
His work has been shared across festivals, community programs, classrooms, and international venues. A 2022 Flaherty Fellow and 2020 University Film and Video Fellow, he has received the Cream City Cinema Jury Award and the Sikay Tang Critical Lens Award, and his practice has been supported by the Brico Forward Fund, the Harry L. Friedberg Award, and the Robert A. Nelson Scholarship.
As an Emerging Artist fellow, Wang will receive a $10,000 award, along with an additional $5,000 to support future work.
The panel of jurors included Anthony Graham, Senior Curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; Mia Lopez, Curator of Latinx Art at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas; and Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs, The Bronx Museum, New York.
All of the 2026 fellows are based in Milwaukee. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in professional development activities and studio visits, and in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the summer of 2027. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.
Story by Payton Murphy ’27 (BFA Film)
What happens when artists create with artificial intelligence while also interrogating it? A new Milwaukee exhibit explores that question through sculptures, prints, interactive pieces and poetry, all born from creative collaboration with AI.
Nathaniel Stern teamed up with Sasha Stiles, who has a concurrent solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC to develop the exhibit “Generation to Generation: Conversing with Kindred Technologies.” Stern has degrees in both mechanical engineering and design and is a UWM professor of both mechanical engineering and visual art & design.
The exhibit invites viewers to consider the relationship and the “always-evolving dialogue” between humans and the tools we invent.
“Overall, we should neither approach with blind optimism nor crippling fear around new technologies,” Stern said. “We’re trying to nuance the conversations from a space of real understanding and use.”
The answer is both, he said. The exhibit highlights human–technology interaction while also grappling with real concerns – like the environmental cost of running large AI systems.
To reduce energy consumption, the artists used AI selectively and with small datasets. For example, they trained their own diffusion model on photos of letters to create a stylized alphabet. Because the model was given minimal data, the results resemble rough, childlike handwriting – an intentional artifact that underscores the trade-offs between creativity, technology, and resource use.
This environmental tension shows up thematically as well. “We’re balancing matters of technology vs. the environment,” Stern said, noting that pieces like the Mother Computer in the installation, Weighing, hint at “Mother Earth.”
Not everything in the show was computer-driven. Some components rely on decidedly “old school” methods as a nod to technologies of the past. For Weighing, for instance, letters were cast at MetCovery Foundry in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, using recovered industrial waste metal. It continues the conversation around human and technology’s evolving side by side.
Another question Stern is often asked to debunk: “Is this just artwork stitched together from other people’s creations?”
The creative process, he said, is intentional and transparent with manipulation of the AI tools in nonstandard ways, to invite strategic possibilities. Viewers can decide.
In the piece The E-Waste Land, AI is used only to extend Stern’s own experimental imagery, and all training data comes from owned sources. For this, he used Adobe Firefly’s stable diffusion –feeding in fragments of his abstract images and prompting the system to complete them.
Stiles, meanwhile, works with a large language model that she has fine-tuned on her own contemporary poetry. She treats AI as “a sounding board” – asking it for multiple sentence variations and iterating those until the results emerge in a way she is happy with.
Both artists began incorporating AI into their practices long before the current buzz. For example, Stern custom-built the motion-tracking algorithm used in the interactive installation Still Moving, predating today’s body-tracking tools such as MediaPipe.
The exhibit runs Feb. 12-20 at the Kenilworth Square East Gallery. This research was funded by UWM’s Office of Research. The Milwaukee exhibit was funded by Center for 21st Century Studies and the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center.
Story by Laura Otto
Our Lives magazine published a story on the multi-year community-based creative research project led by the Department of Dance that culminated in the world premiere of CARE during Winterdances: Resilience. The article highlights choreographer, writer, director, and filmmaker David Roussève’s collaboration with Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ organization Diverse & Resilient and local participants through the CARE: Illuminating Milwaukee’s Queer and Trans Communities Project, which engaged community members and UWM students in interviews, workshops, and choreography beginning in 2024, centering themes of resilience, care, and joy within Milwaukee’s queer and trans communities.
Read the story at Our Lives magazine.
Assistant Professor Alex Wier and Associate Professor Jennifer Clippert (BFA 1999, Music Performance) are performers on “Voiceless Mass,” an album that made it onto Bandcamp’s Best of 2025 list in the Best of Contemporary Classical Music category. Released in April 2025 by New World Records, the album can be traced to a collaboration that began with a site-specific commission and subsequent world premiere of the Voiceless Mass in 2021.
That premiere went on to play a pivotal role in Chacon’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Music, with video from the Present Music performance submitted as part of his winning entry. Following the Pulitzer recognition, Present Music recorded Voiceless Mass along with two additional Chacon works, resulting in the album earning national attention. The Bandcamp feature highlights the recording’s striking instrumental textures, including a distinctive glass cadenza performed by Wier.
Jay Mollerskov (MM 2006, Music Composition & Theory) has been named ArtRoot’s writer-in-residence for the first half of 2026. While studying at the Peck School of the Arts, Mollerskov was influenced by former music department faculty Hal Rammel, Steve Nelson-Raney, and the late Dr. Yehuda Yannay.
In ArtRoot’s January 10 announcement, Mollerskov reflects on his background as a musician, his creative interests across multiple art forms, and what he hopes to explore during the residency. He also describes how his perspective shifted after watching Don’t Look Back, a documentary following Bob Dylan.
“I came away from the documentary with a personal realization,” Mollerskov explained. “While I had spent decades as a musician with a hand in many/most of the other arts, I couldn’t name almost any poets newer than Kerouac or Ginsberg (from whom we are a half-century removed) aside from a few local friends! This was something I needed to remedy!”
That realization prompted Mollerskov to more deeply engage with contemporary poetry and return to writing, a focus that will inform his work as ArtRoot’s writer-in-residence.
To read Mollerskov’s full statement, ArtRoot.
As a kid growing up in southern California, Pavonis Giron dreamed of being an illustrator for the likes of Pixar and Nickelodeon. “I was trying to put together the skills I needed to work at those studios one day… drawing characters, doing background color studies, working on draftsmanship,” Giron said.
Yet it wasn’t long before the allure of Hollywood wore off and Giron found a calling in children’s book publishing. Those efforts bloomed into a three-book deal in the children’s category. Giron’s debut, “A Rainbow in Brown,” was published in 2024.
“Reading has always been a favorite pastime, and illustration even more so,” said Giron, who uses they/them pronouns. “My dad was involved in the fine art scene around Pasadena, and that exposed me to the gallery work of an enormous variety of other artists.”
During the pandemic and just prior to enrolling in UW-Milwaukee in 2021, Giron said, they had more creative time on their hands. “I was able to pin down some ideas, which resulted in one fairly well-realized manuscript and a second rough outline for another concept, both with accompanying sample illustrations,” they said.
They sent these concepts to several agents, while taking part in events on social media that helped link authors with agencies and publishers. It was one of these events that brought them into contact with their agent, Jessica Saint Jean. “We hit it off… she brought my work to a number of editors,” Giron said.
One of Giron’s concepts hit home with Holt Macmillan. It was “A Rainbow in Brown,” a story about appreciating the color brown in all its forms. The book was published in 2024.
“I’ve had people reach out to tell me how meaningful it is,” says Giron. “There really is nothing better than hearing that this has made a positive impact for someone.”
Amid the publishing deal, Giron began contemplating finishing their bachelor’s degree. “When visiting a friend in Milwaukee, I got really excited by the scene here from the Milwaukee Art Museum to UW-Milwaukee’s Arts Center Gallery. It seemed like a city where contemporary art really flourished,” they said. Giron enrolled in UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts to study sculpture.
Giron’s well-rounded assortment of art classes widened their horizons to larger concepts in artmaking. In metalsmithing, for example, instructors like Glenn Williams and Erica A. Meier piqued their interest in how material lends meaning to one’s work. And in fibers classes, professor Kyoung Ae Cho taught them hands-on sewing skills and introduced them to the Midwest tradition of basket-making.
“It wasn’t only about learning; it was about getting room to fail… experiencing hang-ups as a group,” Giron said. “The frustrations felt by my peers and myself through the artistic process informed some of my storytelling in the books.”
Giron’s frustrations — and successes — influenced their second book, “Angel Draws a Dinosaur,” which comes out this summer. “The book is very informed by seeing myself and other artists around me having to problem-solve, especially in a school environment with deadlines,” they said. “Ultimately, it’s about having to think on your feet and ask for help.”
Giron continues to show work both regionally and nationally with a studio space at Var Gallery in the Walker’s Point neighborhood and will start grad school at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan this fall. Whether it’s in a book or gallery, Giron is even more steadfast in their pursuit to make audiences appreciate the colorful world we live in.
Story by Kelly Aiglon | Explore more in Make New Waves
Kyle Thomas Hanneken (BFA 2018, Music Composition & Technology) has spent the past seven years developing Hellenika, a large-scale musical set in the Golden Age of ancient Greece that centers on the life and teachings of the philosopher Sokrates. Drawing on extensive historical research, the work explores questions of truth, justice, rhetoric, and the civic life of Athens itself.
In a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article by Jim Higgins, Hanneken describes how his fascination with Sokrates began shortly after graduating from UW–Milwaukee and how his training in music composition, theory, and performance shaped the ambitious scope of the project. Hellenika will be presented in public readings January 30–31 at the Marcus Performing Arts Center, offering audiences an early look at the work as it continues its path toward a full production.
Read the full article on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
UWM alum Michael Cotey (BFA Theatre, 2008) is the founder of ENOUGH! Plays to End Gun Violence, a nationwide initiative that invites teen writers to create ten-minute plays confronting the issue of gun violence. Cotey conceived the project after the 2018 Parkland shooting and further developed it following the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.
Every other year, a selection committee chooses several of these submitted plays for a nationwide reading, giving youth a platform to express their perspectives and spark critical community conversations. In 2025, readings took place in 31 states and 70 communities all on the same day.
A Marquette Wire article by Kaylynn Wright highlights Cotey’s motivation to center youth voices, noting that many young people today experience the threat of gun violence far differently than older generations.
“Their reality being young people did not match my reality,” Cotey said. “I maybe had an active shooter drill at some point, but the threat of being shot in school was not ubiquitous with me growing up as a teenager, as a kid.”
To read the full article, visit the Marquette Wire.
Gillian Waldo (MFA 2024, Cinematic Arts) has been named a recipient of a 2026 Creative Capital Award.
Creative Capital, the nonprofit organization dedicated to championing artistic freedom of expression by supporting individual artists across the United States, announced that it will award $2.9 million in grants to 109 artists residing in all 50 states and territories. Creative Capital Awards support the creation of risk-taking, groundbreaking new works by providing the awarded artist up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, plus professional development services and community-building opportunities.
The artists receiving the 2026 Creative Capital Award and the inaugural 2026 State of the Art Prize were selected from a pool of 4,546 applications from all 50 states and regions in the United States via a democratic, national open call.
Learn more on the Creative Capital Awards website.
Recent Peck School of the Arts theatre graduate Ethan Hightire (BFA 2025, Acting) is stepping into the Milwaukee professional theater scene with roles in two major productions this season.
In a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel feature by Jim Higgins, Hightire reflects on his path to the stage and his performances with Renaissance Theaterworks and Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.
Hightire appears in Renaissance Theaterworks’ production of Hansol Jung’s Cardboard Piano, where he plays two characters whose stories span the play’s two acts. This spring, he will also perform as Joseph Asagai in Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.
Hightire describes Cardboard Piano as an opportunity to challenge himself and audiences alike. “Theatre can be a mirror to examine yourself, including uncomfortable truths,” he said.
The article also highlights the mentorship Hightire received while studying at UW-Milwaukee, including guidance from Sheri Williams Pannell, associate professor of theatre, and Raeleen McMillion, teaching faculty in voice, speech, and dialects. Pannell praised Hightire’s curiosity and dedication to the craft, qualities she says will serve him throughout his career.
To read the full article, visit Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.