Artist Bios
Erin Coleman Serrano is an artist and graphic designer in Salt Lake City, Utah. She received her MFA from Northern Illinois University in sculpture. Her work appropriates traditional women’s work such as stitching or crafting domestic objects and utilizes abject materials such as salt and hair to explore the connection of lived bodily experience with the emotional self. She unites fine art and graphic design by incorporating text with printmaking, designing typefaces, and incorporating fiber arts into her designs. She is an Associate Professor of Communication, teaching graphic design at Westminster College. She exhibits nationally and recently held solo exhibits, Lacrimae Rerum, Bountiful Davis Art Center; and In the Distance Between Here and My Heart, downtown Salt Lake Public Library.
Céline Downen pieces together community voices with elements of her natural and domestic surroundings to create a sense of place. Trained as a photographer, Céline also explores mediums such as printmaking, book arts, textiles, and sculpture. Downen graduated with a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 1996. In 2016, she completed an MFA in Community-Based Art Education at the University of Utah. In 2017, Downen was UMOCA’s first Educator-in-Residence and she was the artist of the 2018–19 UMOCA Art Truck installation, Salt, Sage, and the Aspen Grove. Her most recent work, The Quotidian Details, was exhibited at Finch Lane Gallery in the summer of 2019. Downen has taught various workshops in the community and is on the Utah Division of Arts and Museums Art Teaching Rooster.
Annelise Duque is a Filipino-American artist who explores cultural identity, heritage, and belonging in her photographs. Her work borrows from the aesthetics of mid-century home magazines and uses the symbol of the garden to seek for connection and healing. She received her BFA from Brigham Young University in 2019 and in 2020 will begin a residency at UMOCA. Her work has been exhibited nationally, online, and in print.
Lindsay Frei’s striking subjects inhabit moments of vulnerability. Bold brushstrokes and exuberant palettes extol vibrant, unapologetic femininity that simultaneously embraces and undermines conventional Western concepts of beauty. Lindsay’s work has been exhibited nationally since 2000 and featured in publications such as Salt Lake Magazine, Southwest Art Magazine, Sacramento Magazine and Poets and Artists. She received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Utah. Lindsay encourages creative expression and exploration in her community and provides art education for children and individuals facing illness. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Huntsman Cancer Institute, and an Adjunct Art Instructor at the University of Utah.
Jamie Harper works across media including performative photography and sculpture. Her work focuses on personal evolution and interaction to explore ephemeral ideas that build to a greater good. She spends her time elevating materials and combining surprising aesthetics to create not only lasting work but experiences that may change in her viewers' minds over time. She received her BFA from Weber State University and lives in Ogden, Utah.
Rachel Henriksen was born in Provo, Utah and is currently a senior BFA candidate in Brigham Young University's Studio Art program. Henriksen recently received an honorable mention for her work in the Bountiful Davis Art Center 45th Annual Statewide Art Competition and most recently had a solo show of her work at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. Henriksen is currently preparing work for her thesis show at Brigham Young University’s Gallery 303.
Stephanie Leitch is a sculptor and installation artist whose work engages site, systems, and architecture. She received her BFA with an emphasis in Intermedia Sculpture from the University of Utah and currently lives and works in Salt Lake City. She has exhibited throughout the West and has curated exhibitions for nontraditional
venues.
Kylie Millward is presently in her final semester as an MFA Candidate in Painting and Drawing at the University of Utah’s Department of Art and Art History. After having graduated from the University of Kansas with a BFA in Illustration in 2013, Kylie worked as a freelance illustrator, an art teacher to children in public schools and community-based art centers and seasonally fights wildfire.
Lis Pardoe lives, works, and teaches in Salt Lake City, Utah. She grew up along the Wasatch Front, fostering her creativity through various forms. It wasn't until high school that she discovered her passion for painting and drawing. With an interest in psychology, the outdoors, and the human figure, Pardoe sought out a way to realistically portray these in her work. In 2010, she was awarded a summer scholarship to begin a rigorous apprenticeship at the Hein Atelier of Traditional Art, which she graduated in 2015. Pardoe won the Springville Museum of Art’s “Artist’s Choice Award” (2016), was featured in Buzzfeed’s “What Art Collectors Are Shopping For” (2017), and was a finalist in the 14th International ARC Salon (2019). She currently is represented by Meyer Gallery in Park City, UT.
Wren Ross is a work-on-paper artist whose dreamlike and sometimes bizarre narratives inhabit a space that is both severe and sensitive. With a personal practice centered on empathetic engagement and intuitive mark-making, her body of work is firstly concerned with the ritual of noticing, and celebrates the mundane, the simple and the overlooked. Born and raised in Utah, Wren graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. Influenced by myth, allegory and the mark-making traditions of prehistoric peoples, her work seeks to create a space for introspection and dialogue in an ever-shifting political, social and environmental climate. Wren's work includes traditional materials, namely water-based drawing and painting tools, as well as materials found in the natural world, such as herbs, minerals, earth, and salt.
Denae Shanidiin, Diné and Korean artist, is born to the Diné (Navajo) Nation. She is Honágháahnii, One-Walks-Around Clan, born to the Korean race on her Father’s side. Kinłichíi’nii, the Red House People is her Maternal Grandfather’s Clan and the Bilagáana, White People, is her Paternal Grandfather’s Clan. Shanidiin’s work responds to her own identity as an Indigenous woman and artist. She is the director of MMIWhoismissing, a campaign for missing and murdered Indigenous People. Shanidiin’s projects reveal the importance of Indigenous spirituality and sovereignty. Her work brings awareness to many contemporary First Nation issues including the fight to protect Bears Ears, Climate Justice, and Missing and Murdered Indigenous People.
Fazilat Soukhakian is an Iranian artist and photographer who is currently an assistant professor of photography at the department of Art and Design at Utah State University. She considers herself a visual storyteller who observes and records her concerns regarding social and political issues that surround her as a means for social change and justice. Her work has been shown throughout national and international exhibitions and she has received a multitude of awards and recognition.
Marcela Torres brings performance, objects, workshops, organizing, and sound installations into an experiential interrogation of social structures. To demonstrate how we are interpellated by governmental, racial, and socio-economic dynamics, which cause disenfranchised ways of living. Torres received their MFA in Performance form School of the Art Institute Chicago. Torres has performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago & Three Walls Gallery (Chicago, IL) Performances is Alive (Miami, FL), Fringe Festival (Detroit, MI), Itinerant Festival (NYC, NY), Virtual International Exchange (Boston, MA), Experimental Actions (Houston, TX) Time Based Arts (Portland, Oregon). Torres has exhibited work at the Flatlands Gallery (Houston TX), Fosdick Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, Green Gallery at Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), Tropical Contemporary (Eugene, OR), Petzel Gallery (NYC, NY). In 2020 Torres will be performing at The Momentary in Bentonville, AK, and have a residency at Recess in Brooklyn, NYC and Bemis Residency in Omaha, Nebraska.
Mary Toscano lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and received a BFA in Printmaking and Photography from the University of Utah in 2007. Toscano makes drawings, prints, paper sculptures, textiles, books, and installations. Her work is quiet, introspective, and subtly subversive. Based mostly in drawing, her pieces are narrative, touching on subjects like loneliness, fear, and the futility of looking for meaning or purpose. Toscano seeks out unusual ways and places to display her work and likes to come up with methods to get viewers to interact and sometimes dismantle her installations.
Jaclyn Wright is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She received her BA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and her MFA from Indiana University. Her work combines traditional analog photographic techniques with contemporary digital methods and fabrication processes. Through this hybridized approach she draws connections between historical conceptions of photography’s material connection to reality and contemporary notions of its representational infidelity. Wright has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published widely. Her work has been included in
the collections at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection in Chicago, IL. Recent and upcoming exhibitions of her work include Sabine Street Studios (Houston), SFO Museum (San Francisco), Houston Center for Photography (Houston), Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City), RE: Art Show (NYC). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.