Titles and contact information are displayed below. Click on a
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section. Click on a name to see full biography for that person.
Painting and DrawingM.F.A. Painting, Cranbrook Academy of Arts, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 2005M.F.A. Drawing, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 2003B.F.A. Painting, Azad University, Tehran, Iran, 1998Appointed 2015
Video and Media ArtsM.F.A. University of California, San Diego, 2000B.F.A. NYSC, Alfred University, School of Art and Design, Alfred, NY, 1992Appointed 2005
PrintmakingM.F.A. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2001B.A. Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design University of Dundee, 1998Appointed 2017
Ceramic SculptureM.F.A. Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, 1981B.F.A. NYSC, School of Art and Design at Alfred University, Alfred, NY, 1978Appointed 1997
In Person: Week 1 WR 9-5:30; Week 2 MTF 9-5:30Remote: Week 1 MTF2:30-5:30; Week 2 W2:30-5:30 R 1:30-5:30
Ariel Collatz is an academic advisor and program manager for the Arts Group Advising Center. She holds a B.A. degree in History from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota and a M.S. in Counseling with a specialization in Career Development from Sacramento State University. She has worked as an undergraduate advisor at UC Davis for over 10 years. Her passion is helping students create a rewarding undergraduate experience.
Jordan Benton is a Kentucky-born photographer who works to
understand a relationship to place through investigating the
connections between an environment and the people interacting
there. Much of his work focuses on the landscape of the American
South in the places where he grew up. His approach to photography
is situated between an on-the-road style of American documentary,
which embraces narratives of the everyday, and observational
photo story telling that unobtrusively captures life’s
spontaneity.
Justine Di Fiore uses the body in painting as a location for
social change and greater personal awareness. She reaches back
into the history of figurative representation and mark making as
she cultivates a critical and sensitive engagement with the
process of painting the contemporary figure. Her practice
incorporates her own body’s movement and an awareness of her
immediate physical relationship to the painting process through
movement based experiments inside and outside of the studio.
H. Gene Thompson is an interdisciplinary artist from
Pittsburgh, PA who uses wearable soft sculpture performed with
dance and movement to uncover unseen narratives, and explore
themes of closeness and isolation. Thompson uses a unique visual
language to disrupt expectations and isolating barriers, building
inclusive public art performance events that connect people. They
work at the intersection of sculpture and performance, using the
work to facilitate change in social space, and asking questions
about the boundaries of our interactions.
B.A., Studio Art, California State University, Stanislaus
Having been stripped of bodily/cognitive/emotional autonomy by
illnesses which interrupted his undergraduate studies,
Phillip Byrne utilizes the act of making as an opportunity to
play the role of ontological surgeon – placing his own
metaphysical body on the dissection table and exploring its
interior contents.
Sofía del Pedregal was born in 1989 in Concepción, Chile. She is
an artist formerly based in Santiago, Chile. In 2013, she
obtained her BFA Visual Arts degree at Universidad de Chile.
Since 2010 she has participated in national and international
group exhibitions and has made three solo shows in Santiago,
Chile.
M.A., Studio Art, Maharishi UniversityB.A., Art and Self Development, Maharishi UniversityB.A., Women and Gender Studies, University of California, Davis
Morgan Flores is a Mexican-Japanese-European-American visual
artist from California, exploring themes related to
decolonization, the everyday, detribalized Indigenous identity,
and present-day relationships to land and the environment.
Working with natural, non-toxic, recycled, and found materials,
Morgan seeks to provide reflections of our unsustainable modern
world, which means our disconnection from land and the (many)
Indigenous point(s) of view, and possible “solutions through
example” via the philosophy of her art practice.
B.F.A., Studio Art (Ceramics), University of Wisconsin, Stout/Menomonie
Emily Gordon received her BFA in Studio Art Ceramics from
the University of Wisconsin-Stout in December of 2019. Her work
functions in a place of in-betweenness by weaving together
influences of painting, ceramics and performance art.
B.A., Studio Art (Painting Emphasis), Sonoma State University
Melanie Hernandez is a Los Angeles born artist who attended
Sonoma State University as a Studio Art major with an emphasis in
painting, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2018.
Kelley O’Leary is an interdisciplinary artist moving between
image-making, sculpture and social practice. Compelled by the
ways our digital landscapes have become part of our ecology, she
investigates how our future relationship to the natural world
will be shaped by these forces and vice versa.
B.A., Art Practice, University of California, Berkeley
Born in 1995 in Tehran, Iran, Helia Pouyanfar immigrated to
California in 2014 and received her B.A. in Art Practice from the
University of California, Berkeley in 2019, specializing in
contemporary sculpture and installation art. She is currently
residing in Northern California, completing her MFA in Studio Art
at the University of California, Davis.
Whitney Vangrin is an artist formerly based in Brooklyn, New
York, but originally from Northern California, who
works across mediums with an emphasis in performance and
video.
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up-to-date on your life after UC Davis, including your awards,
achievements, job and life changes. Please send us
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