Renee Lai
Painter
Renee Lai is an artist who works in painting and drawing. Lai graduated with her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. She holds an undergraduate degree in English and Studio Art with honors from Dartmouth College, and she also studied painting at the New York Studio School. Lai’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she has work in the permanent collection of Dartmouth College. She most recently was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center.
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Moyo Oyelola
Multidisciplinary artist
Moyo Oyelola is a photographer, multimedia artist and activist. He creates intimate, real interactions with his subjects and communities and synthesizes that into deep, universal activations expressed in multimedia, photography, environmental installations and public arts projects. Born in Nigeria, Moyo moved to Austin when he was seven. Having grown up as the “product of two worlds” has shaped his thinking and work, reflecting perspectives of pan-African and modern western worlds. Moyo’s work has been featured in brand films, advertising, editorial, music videos, environmental installations, personal projects, and an evolving number of public arts projects.
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Manik Raj Nakra
Mixed media
The paintings, drawings, and installations of Manik Raj Nakra take on the possibility of addressing the ancient world as his own. A world of teeming jungles where four headed leopards perch on old world ruins and silver teethed monkeys pray for our salvation. Nakra’s work applies a contemporary lens onto Indian iconography, colonial anachronisms, artifacts from early civilizations, and ceremonial folklore to explore themes such as egoism, lust, and self-sabotage. These themes, handled with wild colors, pattern, and stark compositions, illuminate the historically rooted, but contemporarily relevant narratives on power, beauty, paranoia, devotion, and revelation.
Inspired by the 1922 film, Nosferatu, one series Nakra has been focused on "Vampire Paintings” which recast jungle cats as vampires in a fable of the artist’s own making. Here we find passionate relevance between violence and lust. This series alludes to the overwhelming power of romantic influence and humanity’s fascination with immortality and the fragility of flesh.
His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Texas and San Francisco, a member of the 2019 Crit Group program with The Contemporary in Austin, TX, and a client list that includes Converse, Facebook, The LINE Hotel, Urban Outfitters amongst others.
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Alie Jackson
Multimedia
Alie Jackson is a multimedia artist born and raised in Austin, TX. She received her BFA from Stephen F. Austin in 2010 for design and photography. Her work examines how the digital landscape is shaping the perception and behavior of ourselves, others, and objects around us through augmented reality, installation, video, animation, and painting. Her most recent work experiments with augmented reality and questions how people interact and interpret work when it's attached to their face or viewed in an uncontrolled environment.
Jackson is also an accomplished Art Director, Animator, and Official Snapchat Lens Creator. She is a Sr. Instructor at the Austin School of Film teaching Intro to Augmented Reality, Video Art and Intro to Design courses.
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Saul Jerome San Juan
Painting
Saul Jerome E. San Juan, born in the Philippines, moved to the USA at age fourteen. After studying art as an undergraduate at Loyola in Chicago, San Juan came to Austin in 2007 to complete a graduate degree in architecture at the University of Texas. San Juan enjoys engaging others, especially school-age children, through participatory art-making, volunteering in endeavors such as the Dell Children’s Medical Center Art of Giving and the Austin Police Department Summer Youth Leadership Program. These community endeavors have inspired San Juan to pursue official Texas teaching certification beginning in January 2020, intending to begin teaching art in a school full time by fall 2020. As both a classroom educator and an artist with an active art practice, San Juan hopes to contribute holistically to our society today and tomorrow the sublime empathy that art has the potential to inspire in people of all ages and diverse backgrounds.
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Natalia Rocafuerte
Multimedia
Natalia Rocafuerte is a xicanx experimental video artist exploring dreams as narratives of self through installations, films, albums and print. Her current project is creating animations and videos of dreams from Mexican Americans/ Xicanx/ Mexican immigrants. Rocafuerte has exhibited at the 2018 Young Latinx Artists at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, TX as well as being featured in Remezcla for "Top 40 Latinx Texas Artists to Know in 2020". Rocafuerte has hosted various workshops for young and older artists through The Contemporary Austin, Ballroom Marfa, and Civic Arts-Austin. Natalia is interested in the phenomenology of dreams, video aesthetics, experimental mediums, rasquachismo and waking life. She grew up on both sides of the Rio Grande Border in Tamaulipas and Texas and became a naturalized USA citizen in 2019.
Current Master of Fine Arts Candidate at University of Michigan - Ann Arbor & Rackham Fellow.
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Brooke Burnside
Mixed media, clay
Brooke Burnside was born and raised in Nassau, Bahamas. She earned her BA in Film from Vassar College, her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and just graduated from the Masters of Architecture program at the University of Texas at Austin. Through drawing and collage, Burnside's work explores geography, position, memory, and the transgressive potential in abstract documentation.
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Chelsea Hernandez
Film
Chelsea Hernandez is a Mexican-American filmmaker based in Austin, Texas, recently named as one of Texas Monthly’s 10 Filmmakers on the Rise. She is an 8-time Lone Star Emmy winning director, producer, and editor. Chelsea started her career in media at the ripe age of nine, hosting and co-producing a local children’s educational TV program with her mother.
She studied film at Adelphi University and Brooklyn College in New York City where she gained internships at Steeplechase Films, home of documentary filmmaker Ric Burns (American Masters: Andy Warhol, Eugene O’Neill) and Jon Alpert’s (Cuba and the Cameraman, The Latin Explosion) Downtown Community Television (DCTV). She is a fellow of Firelight Media Doc Lab and Tribeca/A+E Edit Storylab and All Access.
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Adrian Armstrong
Mixed Media, Drawing
Adrian Armstrong is a multidisciplinary creative from Omaha, NE now living and working out of Austin, TX. Armstrong received his BFA from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2014. He is also the co-founder of Brown State of Mind, an Austin based organization dedicated to pursuing the interests of creatives of color and their ideas.
Through portrait and figurative practices, Armstrong’s work explores identity and what it means to be a black person living in modern America. His work touches on topics such as depression within the black community, systematic oppression, and police brutality; but on the other side of the spectrum explores fashion, love, success, and growth.
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Steef Crombach
Mixed Media, Textile
Steef Crombach was born in Maastricht in the South of the Netherlands. Crombach earned her BFA from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague in 2014. Her graduation work ‘Wat een zonde’ won the KABK Talent Invest Prize, with which she started doing research into American patterns, objects, colloquialisms, and concrete cultural manifestations in Austin in 2015.
Since that time she has been visiting Austin for extended periods of time to curate, teach, exhibit, and research. In March 2018 Crombach officially relocated to Austin. She organized and curated the nine-artist exhibition “Expedition Batikback” at Co-Lab Projects. Her work “Piet” was selected by the King of the Netherlands to be on exhibition at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam and she is a recipient of the renowned Contribution Young Talent grant from the Mondriaan Fund in the Netherlands.
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