Participating Artists
Alex Adkinson
MFA Candidate 2022
Florida State University
Alex Adkinson is an interdisciplinary artist from the upper-Midwest, presently a Studio Art MFA candidate at FSU. He works through various industrial and digital processes such as welding or video. He often employs improvisation and abstraction in his practice as a means of opening happenstance possibilities in materials. His research revolves around communication, ecology, and socio-politics.
Julie Baroody
Art Faculty
Tallahassee Community College
Raindrops on a slick surface, reticulate surface of partially melted silver, paint splatter that looks like the galaxy, texture of a seashell, leaves on trees, pores on the skin, fur on my dog…I like to find and make patterns. Pattern recognition is key to human survival. Patterns can be man-made or manifestations of chance. Patterns enable us to make predictions. Patterns embody the ultimate connection between memory and perception. Patterns are beautiful, comforting, and full of meaning.
As an artist I work in a wide variety of traditional media: sterling silver, found objects, paint, ink, pencil, photography, all separate and all combined, etc…really anything. I make jewelry and wall pieces. Two veins running parallel.
I make art and I teach art. Those veins run parallel too – the teaching and the making of art. I love showing eager students the secrets I know. I see my students find their own voice – that helps me to more deeply discover my own. I can’t really imagine making art without also having an outlet of teaching art.
I am an artist/educator based in Quincy, Florida. I have been an artist since 1985 in various iterations. I have been teaching art at the college level since 1997.
Tra Bouscaren
Assistant Professor of Critical Practices Florida State University
Tra Bouscaren is an interactive installation artist and researcher. Currently he serves as Co-Director of the Expanded Cinema Lab, and as an Assistant Professor of Critical Art Practices at Florida State University. Bouscaren’s work has been featured at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, The National Museum of Art in Addis Abada, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Seoul, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Victor I Fils Gallery in Madrid, The Wrong Biennale, Fort Mason Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Greenleaf Gallery in Los Angeles, San Diego Art Institute, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, and Lincoln Center in New York. His “Night Blooms” is open now at the Mattress Factory Museum of Installation Art in Pittsburgh, alongside permanent installation by Yayoi Kusama and James Turrell.
Michelle Castro
MFA candidate 2022
Florida State University
Michelle Castro is a ceramic artist who creates socially engaging installations. She was born and raised in Panama and uses her culture as inspiration in her art. Castro received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Midwestern State University with emphasis in ceramics and minor emphasis in graphic design. A candidate for a Master of Fine Arts at Florida State University, she continues her ceramic research and practice. For the past 7 years she has participated in Empty Bowls, which raises money and awareness for the Food Bank of Wichita Falls, Texas. Castro received the Ceramic Merit Award, President’s Award for Art, Rotary Club Scholarship, and awarded a scholarship by the Wichita Falls Alliance for Art and Culture. In the Spring of 2020 she was elected as the Student Director at Large for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). In Search of a Smoother Pebble is an exciting project as she looks forward to investigating her affinity for the sciences in tandem with her affinity for the arts.
Kevin Curry,
Graduate Director Department of Art Florida State University
Kevin Curry is a multidisciplinary artist currently serving as an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of the MFA Program at Florida State University, Department of Art. Through the application of sculpture, photography, traditional craft, and digital fabrication, Kevin’s studio practice explores the mobility and authorship of language and objects – an investigation into how we navigate through, and within the geography of experiences, with reinterpretations of language, memory, and information serving as essential elements. Kevin has had his work exhibited internationally and garnered a multitude of artist residencies, including the Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX; Art342 in Fort Collins, CO; Platteforum, and Redline in Denver, CO; and a 2013 a three-week residency at Grand Canyon National Park. In 2015, Kevin was the U.S representative for the Chilkoot Trail Artist Residency in Alaska and British Columbia, which involved a two-week hiking and camping expedition retracing the steps of the 1898 stampeders as they made their way to the Klondike goldfields.
Jeremy Guyton
MFA Candidate, School of Dance 2022
Florida state University
Jeremy Guyton is a performer, choreographer, educator, alchemist, dreamer, and new world conjurer. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he was first introduced to movement styles birthed in his hometown: Krump and Jerking. The vibrations of the city in which Guyton was raised tickled flesh and sinew and set the foundation for his movement vocabulary. Upon graduation from high school, his curiosity let him to the Mid-Atlantic, where Guyton studied theatre at Georgetown University, joined a local dance crew, and absorbed the movement languages of Baltimore club and go-go music. Guyton layered this vocabulary on top of that of his birth language, tracing the similarities in each and listening intently to the ways in which they spoke to each other. In 2008, he landed in New Orleans and immersed himself in the vocabulary of second-line footwork and bounce. He traced lines from jerking to backjumping to Wu-Tanging and emerged as a tri-linguist of sorts. Guyton spent seven years, a life’s cycle, in this sacred haven, before transitioning into this current phase: obtaining his MFA in choreography and performance from Florida State University.
Tom Hall
Artist and Adjunct Professor
Florida State University
Tom Hall’s work is often theatrical; reconstructions of imagined historic spaces or mythical giants crossing the Mexican US border. They are immediately engaging, involving you through scale and production. However there is something disturbing underneath. Most work balances between the uncertainties of the future and history. His attraction to the CERN project is sparked by what seems to be a human need to understand and make sense of our ever-expanding horizons.
Hall graduated from the Wimbledon School of Art in 1994 with a degree in sculpture and subsequently completed an MA at the Royal College of Art, London in 1998. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1994, including exhibitions at the 57th Venice Biennale, Dowd Gallery and Schweinfurth Art Center -NY, Trinity Buoy Wharf – London, Les Tombées de la Nuit arts festival in Rennes – France, Crawford School of Art – Cork, Republic of Ireland and commissioned by Bournemouth Arts By The Sea Festival and artSouth. He won first prize in the juried show, Made in New York, in 2017 at the Schweinfurth Art Center, NY.
Makenzie Heinemann
MFA Candidate 2022
Florida State University
Makenzie Heinemann is an interdisciplinary artist and graduate student in the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University. Her work is influenced by childhood trips to her grandmother’s farm in Wellton, Arizona. The unmediated experience of isolation is an ever-present source of inspiration for her practice. In 2017, Njideka Akunjili Crosby and Eric Fischl chose her painting, “The high Road” for the Vanguard Award at Phoenix College. Heinemann is passionate about keeping art in schools and strengthening local art communities.
Ben Howard
MFA, School of Dance
Florida State University
Ben Howard is an interdisciplinary performance artist living in Tallahassee, Florida. He received his BFA and MFA in Dance from Florida State University. His work draws on a background of site-specific dance collaboration, scenography, elaborate murder mystery role-play dinner parties, and a love of immersive art and entertainment. He constantly questions the boundaries of traditional theatrical venues and seeks to find and/or create interesting locations in which to perform his work. His latest project, The Unspoken, took the form of an immersive dance theatre reimagining of Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Stephanie James is former Chair of the Department of Art, College of Fine Arts at Florida State University. James is a fine artist previously serving as Director of the School of Art at Syracuse University, NY and Associate Dean and Head of the School of Visual Arts at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), United Kingdom. James is a member of several professional organizations: European League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA), National Council of Art Administrators NCAA and the College Art Association CAA. She was a member of the steering group of Paradox Fine Art European Forum, affiliated to ELIA for 6 years. James’ research focuses on curation and the dynamic between space and the creative process. She creates artworks and engages in exhibition making–organizing, curating, and developing strong working external partnerships to realize major projects; including Boite-en-Valise at the Venice Biennale and Smoother Pebble at CERN and Tallahassee City, Florida. James works in non-ferrous metals, found objects, stones and other useful materials.
Stephanie James
Professor
Department of Art
Florida State University
Terri Lindbloom
Professor
Department of Art
Florida State University
Terri Lindbloom is currently a Full Professor at Florida State University, Department of Art. As a multi-media interdisciplinary artist, she has worked with various mediums to include drawings, photography, digital media, 3-D forms and found materials. Terri has shown her work extensively both nationally and internationally to include New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Texas, New Mexico, Morocco, Lituania, and Spain. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Fulbright for research in Morocco to complete a site-specific installation within a historic Koranic School titled “je suis l’espace ou je suis”. She also received a New Forms Florida Grant partially funded by NEA, Andy Warhol, And Rockefeller Foundation for a project titled “Frenchtown”. In addition, she has received fellowships at VCCA and VCCA in France, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. Terri has also been included in the New American Painting publication four times and curated contemporary exhibitions titled “Running Around the Pool”- a contemporary drawing exhibition (with a catalogue) and Dispossessed Installation (also with a catalogue).
Ljiljana Obradovic-Edmiston
Professor of Fine Arts
Tallahassee Community College
Ljiljana Obradovic-Edmiston is an artist working in multiple two-dimensional media; drawing, painting, and printmaking. She has exhibited her work in the U.S.A., Bosnia, and Hercegovina, and Italy. Her work explores ideas of permutation within physical and social context. Born in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia educated in Maine and Florida, she has a unique perspective and complex experiences which are reflected in her work.
Obradovic-Edmiston teaches many different art classes at Tallahassee Community College and she taught multiple classes in different disciplines at Florida State University for 14 years.
Keith Roberson
Associate Professor
Department of Art
Florida State University
Keith Roberson is a tenured Associate Professor of Digital Arts at Florida State University, and Co-Director of the FSU Expanded Cinema Lab. He has been creating animated, virtual, interactive and Kinetic sculptures for more than 25 years. Roberson’s work has been presented internationally in the US, as well as in the UK, Australia, Korea, and China. His work has been shown in the following venues: the Jepson Center for the Arts Savannah, Arlington Center for the Arts, Royal Theatre of Manchester UK, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, The Venice Art Center, SIGGRAPH LA and Orlando, and the Venice Biennale. His science education exhibit, Our Reefs: Caribbean Connections, has been shown in over 25 venues in the Caribbean and the US. His science education interactive education games, Burning Issues and Silent Invaders, have been distributed to more than 20,000 classrooms.
Daniel Smith
Specialized Faculty
School of Dance
Florida State University
Daniel Smith is an American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator best known for his collaborations with preeminent dance institutions and choreographers. He currently serves on the faculty of the Florida State University School of Dance. Smith’s works have been performed by artists and ensembles around the world. Recent highlights include his composition of piano and cello, Roses in December, which was premiered alongside composter/cellist Logan Castro in May 2019 at The Kennedy Center, Welliver Variation, which toured internationally as part of the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 2018 season, and the film score to SEALEGS (2019), a screendance that has screened at numerous iconic venues, such as the Cyprus International Film Festival, The Tipperary Dance Platform, and the Astoria Film Festival. He has worked with notable contemporary dance companies and choreographers, including Urban Bush Women, Camille A. Brown, Ralph Lemon, Emily Johnson, Ananya Dance Theatre, Alex Ketley, Pam Tanowitz, and Monica Bill Barnes, among many others. Smith continues an active career as a performer of both classical and Jazz repertoire. He was piano soloist for The Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s Final Season Opening Gala, performing Chaconne Choreographed by George Balanchine. He has performed with many esteemed musicians, such as Kristin Chenoweth (Emmy Award and Tony Award winner), The Manhattan Transfer (10-time Grammy Award winner), Sharon Isbin (multi-Grammy Award winner), and Mary Wilson of The Supremes. He is a strong proponent of new music and has given world premieres and U.S. premieres of work by Nico Muhly, Dave Brubeck, Chris Brubeck, and Dorothy Hindman. As a conductor, Mr. Smith has been deemed “nuanced, detailed, and insightful.” He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2005. Smith serves as a musician for dance technique classes, having accompanied more than 3,000 ballet and contemporary dance classes. Smith is a 2018 recipient of the Reubin O’D. Askew Young Alumni Award, the highest honor bestowed to young alumni by the FSU Alumni Association. He was a subject of the 2015 documentary film The Music That Makes Them Dance, which investigated prominent dance musicians. Smith received a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Florida State University in 2005 and a Master of Music Education degree from The University of Florida in 2015.
Anne Stagg
Foundations, 3-D Foundations
Area Supervisor
Department of Art
Florida State University
Anne Stagg wears many hats: artist, mother, wife, and educator. Born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama “The Rocket City,” space and exploration are integral parts of her earliest memories. “Though I am mesmerized by our accomplishments, my thoughts always drift back to the behind-the-scenes work that is required: the calculations, missteps, and teams of people working day-in and day-out in order to realize the dreams of humankind.” This is the inspiration for her abstract paintings in which she inputs multiple units of color and shape to form a larger abstract equation. Her colorful paintings intuitively respond to hidden systems that are critical to the world we know. Color becomes a touchstone for memory and a catalyst for the imagination.
Anne Stagg lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida where she teaches at Florida State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she is the recipient of several grants and fellowships.
Holly Stone
MFA Performance and Choreography
Florida State University
Holly Stone is a dancer, choreographer, engineer, film-maker, and educator currently in Tallahassee, Florida. Holly is creatively driven to unify her artistic and scientific life. She graduated with degrees in Bioengineering and Neuroscience from Syracuse University in 2014, and worked as a chemical engineer until 2017. She left the private sector to pursue an MFA in Performance and Choreography at Florida State University. Her thesis work, Strange Loops, uses contemporary dance and theatrical projection design to ask: How does human consciousness emerge from discrete, repetitive building blocks? Holly has choreographed and directed a wide variety of work, including theatre, opera, and film. Her background in classical and contemporary ballet, as well as her professional ballroom dance career allow her to move seamlessly between genres and to challenge expectations of gender and partnership. Holly is an experienced educator, bringing dance to all levels from academia to community centers. Her creative mission is to defuse the tension between science and the arts, through teaching, choreography, and placing equal importance on both disciplines to share and inspire.