Ange Altenhofen is an interactive sculptor and wearable art maker currently based in Iowa. Shortly after earning her MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was diagnosed with presumed ocular histoplasmosis, a degenerative eye condition that could eventually lead to permanent blindness. As a visual artist this diagnosis forced her to rethink her creative practice, and she began to create work that relied on physical interaction and the sense of touch to communicate meaning. Notable exhibitions of Altenhofen’s work include the MCA Chicago, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Hyde Park Art Center which sponsored “Project Molehill”, a hand sewn climbing wall installed in the Chicago Loop. After relocating to Iowa in 2015, Ange was named an Iowa Artist Fellow in 2019 and received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant and a Rauschenberg Foundation Grant in 2021. She is a 2025 recipient of a Project Grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Iowa Arts Council.
Melissa Athey is a glass and mixed media artist. She received her BFA in Fibers from Colorado State University (CSU). She went on to spend two years as a visiting artist and followed by two years teaching glass casting and fusing in the Sculpture Dept. at CSU. Melissa earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Craft and Material Studies program with a concentration in glass. While especially drawn to glass, Melissa utilizes a broad array of materials and processes when making her work, a reflection of her background that bridges multiple disciplines. Recently, Melissa was a recipient of the Penland Vision Scholarship in 2023 as well as awarded a 2024/2025 Studio Residency at the Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA.
Sookyung Augustin is a West Michigan based metalsmith and designer who graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Art in illustration from Grand Valley State University. She started her own jewelry business, Sookyung Designs, and worked under industry goldsmiths before teaching beading and metalsmithing workshops in Grand Haven, MI. Six years later, she joined Studio JSD Gallery and added lapidary workshops to her teaching rotation for the next five years. After Sookyung was invited to adjunct for her alma mater, she returned to academia in 2023 as a student, accompanied by her Service Dog, to seek her Masters in Fine Art at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Patrick Bell Patrick Bell is a sculptor, teacher, writer, and gallery director based in Baltimore, MD. In 2016, they earned a BFA in Ceramics from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, followed by two years of post-baccalaureate study at Wichita State University in Kansas. In 2020, they completed their MFA at Kent State University and later moved to Baltimore to join Baltimore Clayworks as a Long-Term Resident Artist and Lormina Salter Fellow. Patrick has written for BMoreArt, Two Coats of Paint, and Whitehot Magazine; teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Baltimore School for the Arts, the Community College of Baltimore County and Baltimore Clayworks; and is a founding member and Director at-7 Red Giant Gallery. Patrick’s art has been exhibited in galleries and institutions across the United States, including the All St. Gallery in New York, NY; Frisson in New York, NY; American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, CA; SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, NY; Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, FL; Rhizome in Washington, DC; and The Peale Museum in Baltimore, MD.
Chelsea Clarke is a visual artist based in Houston, Texas. Centering her practice in textiles, she weaves colorful, tactile metaphors that explore themes of resilience and softness as a form of strength. Before completing her MFA at University of Kentucky, she received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she also earned a Post-Bacc in Nonprofit Management to further her goal of founding a radically accessible artist residency.
Erin S. Daily is the Co-Founder of Brooklyn Metal Works in Brooklyn, New York, a jewelry and metalsmithing studio, educational lab, and exhibition space. Trained as an artist Erin is engaged in creative practices across disciplines. This includes building a community of artists and makers through exhibitions, artist talks, and discussion groups, as well as creating a studio workshop that gives artists space to build their practices. Erin’s art practice emphasizes non-ferrous metalsmithing with a curiosity about materials and their cultural connections to the made world. Flatware and tools for the table, items that fit in the hand and reevaluate utility, are often subjects for investigation. Traditional goldsmithing practices from alloying, milling, forming and fabrication are worked alongside sculptural explorations in both jewelry and larger objects. In 2019 Erin co-founded Specific Gravity, a jewelry and object retail location to support the community of artists at Brooklyn Metal Works. This shop serves as a platform for emerging and established artists and as an opportunity for audiences to engage with a diversity of jewelry expressions. Erin has taught extensively at schools across the Northeast; currently at Brooklyn Metal Works and SUNY New Paltz.
Lohitha Kethu is a multiply disabled multimedia artist, medical artist, and writer working in textiles, rock, visual poetry, digital media, and sculpture. Originally trained in medical illustration at Johns Hopkins University in 2019, they’ve since illustrated award-winning artwork for medical journals, community health literacy publications, and editorial covers through a health justice lens. Lohitha was also awarded disability justice and arts and culture fellowships, such as the Labs for Liberation Fellowship, that inspired them to develop their visual art into a multisensory practice, aligned with a longstanding trans, disabled tradition of genre-refusing creativity. They’ve exhibited print, 2D, and textile works in New York, at the Peale Museum in Baltimore, and in galleries across the US. Their writing has been featured in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The New River Journal, GARLAND, and more. Lohitha is currently working on a series of multimodal works that craft a visual poetics of prehistory and technoanimism to mythologize trans, disabled epistemologies and imaginations towards a reclamation of collective world-building power.
Selena [Len] Loomis is an artist, educator, and curator who lives and works in Chauncey, Ohio. Loomis holds an MA in Arts Administration and an MFA in Sculpture + Expanded Practices from Ohio University, where they currently teach in the School of Art + Design. Loomis further holds a BA in Performance Art from Antioch College, has been faculty at The School of the Alternative, a Deep Ecology Artist Fellow at United Plant Savers, and regularly hosts botanical dye workshops from their home studio. In 2025, Loomis founded and currently runs tend space art center, a DIY third-space focused on creative connection and collaboration in rural southeast Ohio. Loomis is interested in cultivating spaces to be meaningfully alone, together.
Bhavna Mehta works with paper, fabric, and words. She cuts, embroiders, and writes to tell stories that combine figurative and landscape imagery with botanical motifs, text, and shadows. Her paper and textile installations examine a geography of the disabled body and its relationship to the topographies where she traces her meandering movements. Mehta has exhibited widely in San Diego and Southern California. She is the recipient of the Individual Artist Fellowship grant (2021), Artists In Communities grant (2017, 2019) from the California Arts Council, and the Creative Catalyst grant from The San Diego Foundation (2015). She has won multiple awards in juried shows and she was one of the San Diego Art Prize emerging artist winners. Her public commissions are fabricated in metal and installed at the YouTube theater in Los Angeles (2020) and Lakeside Country Library (2022). Her essays have been published in Catapult and The Massachusetts Review. Mehta teaches paper-making and cutting at Penland School of Craft and at Women’s Studio Workshop.
Dominic Quagliozzi is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator from Massachusetts. His work reconciles his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore personal histories and the domestication of illness. He received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Rhizome.org digital archive and Sloan Kettering Memorial and other hospitals. In 2018, he was on the Keynote patient panel at the Nexus Summit for Interprofessional Care and Education at the University of Minnesota. He was a recipient of the MassMOCA Assets For Artists statewide capacity grant in 2024. He served on the Arts Council for Creative Healing for Youth in Pain from 2020-2024. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Calgary Contemporary in Canada and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia. His work is included in arts scholar Amanda Cachia’s contemporary art anthology Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism.
Sierra Schweitzer is a multidisciplinary artist from Raleigh, North Carolina, whose work primarily focuses on ceramic sculpture and alternative process photography. Schweitzer graduated in 2022 with a BFA in Studio Art and concentration in sculpture at Appalachian State University, in the mountains of western North Carolina. Since then she has been an International Resident Artist in Ceramics through MUDIS in Santo Stefano di Camastra, Sicily, and relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2024. In the past Schweitzer has been awarded multiple scholarships to attend or assist workshops, and intern at Penland School of Craft, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, and Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft. Schweitzer currently interns and creates sculptures out of the studios of Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media and works as an Art Educational Technician at the Community College of Allegheny County.
Lydia Wickham is a mixed media artist based in central Ohio whose work explores wonder, perception shifts, and the layering of materials. She experiments across media, often combining thread, vinyl, paint, photography, and discarded medical materials to create work that expresses how she inhabits her body. Her work has been exhibited nationally in galleries, community spaces, and juried exhibitions, and she is the First Place (Professional Division) recipient of Art Possible Ohio’s traveling exhibition Accessible Expressions 2026. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, as well as group exhibitions at Bridgeport Art Center and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and The Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio.
She has recently presented Permeable Condition, a solo exhibition with Stonewall Columbus at Little Gay Bookstore, and has work included in RIGHTS of PASSAGE at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Jennifer Rose Wolken is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. A native of the Missouri Ozarks region, she received her MFA in visual studies from Missouri State University. Jennifer’s line of functional sketchbooks and journals are inspired by a love of craftsmanship from centuries past, the beauty of materials, and a lifelong habit of keeping a sketchbook. Her current body of sculptural work is inspired by her own challenges coping with chronic illness, as well as themes of renewal, recycling, and community connection. These sculptural artist’s books have shown in international juried shows in San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Pennsylvania. They have also been acquired by several private collectors including university libraries.
Sandie Chun-San Yi is an artist, disability activist, disability studies scholar, and educator. She holds a Ph.D. in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Yi’s research and artistic practice integrate disability studies, social practice art, and disability culture creating an informed art therapy, with a focus on reimagining embodiment, care, and access through creative practice. Her work has been exhibited at the SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco; he Center for Design and Material Culture (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Gallery 400 (University of Illinois at Chicago); Museum of Disability History; Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. She is a recipient of the Disability Futures Fellowship (Ford Foundation) and the Make a Wave Award (3Arts). Yi lives in Chicago with her beloved doggie daughter, Abái—whose name means “ugly duckling” in Taiwanese.
