Category: First Year MFA

Jessica Fuquay

Half length black and white photograph of a woman with glasses looking at the camera

Jessica Fuquay’s multidisciplinary work explores the role of mass media, performance, and other dominant cultural forms in the construction of political subjectivity. Her practice, often drawing from her perspective as a first-generation Colombian-American, is concerned with conflict, power, and systems of domination that reproduce and designate otherness.

Petra Floyd

Black and white photograph of a woman holding a circular saw and smiling at the camera

Petra Floyd uses drawing, sculpture, writing, printmaking, and performance to meditate on Blackness in the United States and other sites of the African diaspora, focusing on reinvention through inherited and appropriated material culture and performance.

Marianne Hoffmeister Castro

black and white half length photograph of a woman

Marianne Hoffmeister’s work focuses on the role and value of narrative and fiction in the construction of knowledge. Through drawing, video and installation, she plays with narrative hybrids, shared cultural imagery or alternative stories that shift linguistic and cultural boundaries that function as unintended, accidental phenomena between the lines of fiction, the mundane and the poetic.

Matthew McGaughey

Black and white headshot of a man with shaggy hair

Matthew McGaughey’s work explores heteronormative masculinities and their hegemonic tendencies through the lens of personal history, media tropes, and dominant cultural practices. Using performance, video, narrative structures, and sound, his work creates scenarios of bifurcation and reconnection in order to reveal the unconscious social forces that inform dominant identities.

Lena Chen

Woman on a bed looking at the camera with her feed on the head of man laying facedown

Lena Chen is a multidisciplinary artist and activist exploring women’s labor, spirituality, sexuality, and trauma. Experimenting with her own autobiography and identity, she works in collaboration with lovers, muses, and strangers to construct intensely intimate encounters, participatory rituals, and one-to-one performances.

Georgia Saxelby

black and white photograph of a woman in front of a wall with many pieces of paper taped to it.

Georgia Saxelby is an interactive installation artist whose participatory practice investigates the relationship between ritual, gender and architecture. Through collective actions, reimagined rituals, and the constructing of new architectures, Saxelby invites her audience to perform a symbolic task in order to undergo an emotional and social transformation.