Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts

Jan Avgikos is an art critic and historian who is based in New York and the Hudson Valley—where she works and lives. She is a recipient of CAA’s Frank Jewett Mather award for distinction in art criticism and was a graduate Mellon Fellow in art history at Columbia University. She is currently a contributing editor with Artforum International, where she has enjoyed a long-standing affiliation, and regularly publishes reviews. Her writing about modern and contemporary art spans over 30 years and has been published in numerous museum and gallery catalogues, as well as magazines that include Frieze, Flash, Parkett, Brooklyn Rail, and others. Upcoming publications include essays on Dorothea Rockburne and Michelle Grabner. In addition, Ms. Avgikos is currently involved in research for a book on a core group of women artists affiliated with the Woodstock art colony and active in NYC art scenes from the ’20 through the ‘70s.

Ms. Avgikos teaches at the School for Visual Arts in the MFA photo program and the Visual and Cultural Studies program where she focuses on various histories of modern and contemporary art, as well as globalization and the arts. She also teaches in NYU’s MFA program where she guides students in their thesis exhibition.

For fun, Ms. Avgikos cultivates extensive gardens and engages in historic house renovation.

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Deborah Davidson is an artist, curator and educator. She received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University and BA from Binghamton University. She is founder and director of Catalyst Conversations, devoted to the dialogue between art and science. She also maintains a studio practice, and is the director and curator at the Suffolk University Gallery. Her work is in many private and public collections, including Yale University, Wellesley College, Boston Public Library, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Deborah has had solo exhibitions at the Danforth Museum of Art, Kingston Gallery, Oresman Gallery, Smith College and Nesto Gallery, Milton Academy. Awards include Humanities Center Artist in Residence, Northeastern University, Finalist, Brother Thomas Fellowship and a Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. grant. She is featured on the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s podcast Creative Minds Outloud. Deborah will have a solo exhibit at the Carole Calo Gallery, Stonehill College in fall 2024.

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Stephen DiRado is a professor in the Visual and Performing Arts Department, Clark University. He is a photographer and filmmaker whose art is primarily inspired by his captivation and admiration for the people in his community. His scrupulously skilled photographs portray the underlying intimacy of individuals and the interactions within group dynamics. His films are narratives and commentaries about the people in his life.

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Alex Jackson currently lives and works in the greater Philadelphia area. He received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015 and received his MFA from Yale University in 2017. He has attended residencies at Yale Norfolk, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Yaddo. Recent exhibitions include Chrysalis at Jenkins Johnson Projects (Brooklyn, NY 2021), and Earthgrazer at Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA 2023). His work can be found in public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and the DeYoung Museum.

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An arts administrator with a background in editorial, Rebecca earned her BA from Brandeis University and her Creative Writing MFA from Lesley University. In previous roles, she interned at Esquire magazine, and covered arts & dining for hyperlocal publications.

Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist and writer who emigrated from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee in 1980. He works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation, digital art, and graphic narrative. His many projects attempt to bridge the gap between painting and conceptual art and notions of high and low while frequently merging analog and digital approaches. His fine art has been shown widely both in the United States and abroad and has been exhibited at such venues as The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, PS1/MOMA, Artpace, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The ICA Philadelphia, the Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K., and a host of private galleries. His writing and art criticism, under the pen name David Geers, has appeared in October, Fillip, Bomb, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, and Frieze and often focuses on the convergence of art, politics, and technology. Meanwhile, his illustrated fiction and comics-based work has appeared in the Third Rail Quarterly, Unbag, Topic, in Devil’s Due’s much publicized Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force and Talk Bernie to Me anthologies, as well as the Ringo Award-nominated Pandemix anthology. His recently released debut graphic novel, Damnation Diaries, received a 2023 MoCCA Award of Excellence, positive reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, Artforum and other venues and was listed by the New York Public Library as one of 2023’s Best Comics for Adults. Rostovsky currently teaches at New York University and Parsons New School.

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Toby Sisson earned her B.F.A, Magna Cum Laude, from the College of Visual Arts in Saint Paul, Minnesota and her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her areas of specialization include drawing, painting and printmaking, as well as community-based research, service learning, and curatorial projects.

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Ben earned a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work has been exhibited at the 13th Havana Biennial, Matanzas, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, MFA, Boston, Queens Museum, Dublin City Gallery/The Hugh Lane, and the Peabody-Essex Museum.

His solo exhibitions include those at Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal, ACC Gallery in Taipei, Steven Zevitas Gallery in Boston, Coop Gallery in Nashville, Front Gallery in Oakland, and Gallery 126 in Galway. In 2009, he was a Fulbright Faculty Scholar to Taiwan.

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Soren Sorensen holds an M.F.A. in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Sorensen teaches the bulk of the Screen Studies program’s production offerings including advanced courses in documentary and short narrative filmmaking.

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Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based painter whose work applies esoteric correspondence systems to materialize structures outside of perceptible reality. Exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, NY and group shows at Cheim and Read gallery, NYC; Leslie-Lohman Museum, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. In 2022/23 Sparks received a project grant to produce an immersive installation for Invisible Prairie at Tinworks Art, Bozeman MT. A forthcoming solo show Time Machines will open at Kate Werble Gallery, NY in March 2024.

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Ulm has been an emergent media artist, game developer, and professor of interactive media for over 15 years. Ulm received their MFA from Lesley University and maintains a studio at a local maker-space [and in the cloud], believing that practice and purpose intersect at the community level.

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Oliver Wasow is a fine art photographer living and working in Rhinebeck, NY. He received his BA from Hunter College and his Master’s Degree from the Transart Institute in Austria. His work is currently represented by Theodore: Art Gallery in NYC. Wasow has had a number of one person exhibitions, including shows at Theodore: Art, Josh Baer Gallery, Janet Borden Gallery, Tom Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and the Hilliard Museum in Lafayette, LA. His work has been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as ‘Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop,’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Image World,’ at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, and ‘The Photography of Invention,’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

His photographs are included in a number of private collections and are represented in various prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, The Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, and The Milwaukee Art Museum.

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Deb Todd Wheeler is an award winning multi-disciplinary artist in the Boston area who creates emergent spaces of radical generosity for emotional transformation and reclamation. In her most recent project, she guides participants through a geo-located audio-walk in the partially remediated landscape of Lost Pond, which you can read about in her recently released Book of Walks. She generates intimate experiences through interactive installations, objects, and participatory happenings, creating provisional communities through gathering, grief work, and holding commemorative space. Her expertise is wide ranging, encompassing the construction of images, objects, and experiences.

She is a Deep Listening facilitator, a founding member of the LENNYcollective, and is represented by Ellen Miller Gallery.

Personal website

for recent projects: debtoddwheeler.org/news