Dallas Contemporary North Texas Graduate Student Program

Janay Bookhart (University of North Texas)  is a lens-based artist based out of Lewisville, Texas. She graduated from the University of Central Florida with a Bachelor’s of Science in Photography. Her creative journey has led her to a series called “Mattie’s World,” which focuses on her grandmother’s house and belongings as a way to hold on to her, connect with her, learn more about her life in depth, and understand how Alzheimer’s affects African American families. Bookhart is a member of Black Women Photographers, the Society for Photographic Education and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority where she was recognized as a Graduate Scholar by the Alpha Kappa Alpha Educational Advancement Foundation. She presented Mattie’s World at Revitalize!, the 2024 annual conference hosted by the South Central Chapter of the Society for Photographic Education.

Her work has been shown in spaces such as the Paul Voertman Gallery, the Lewisville Grand Theater Art Gallery, Praxis Gallery, the Midwest Center for Photography, Black Box Gallery, the Southeast Museum of Photography, and the Orlando Museum of Art.

Marcy Davis (Texas Christian University)  is a sculptor based in Fort Worth Texas. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Sculpture with a minor in Glass from the University of Texas at Arlington. Davis warps the familiar until it becomes unrecognizable. Materials such as wax or felt masquerade as skin, wounds, or scars, remaining unnamable and unstable as they slip between recognizable and obscured, provoking both attraction and unease. Her work unfolds in this unsettled in-between, where body and structure, inside and outside, are never fixed. By shifting the scale from the body to a form that works within the architecture of the space, ambiguity is added to the origin of the form and meaning. Davis has won the Graduate Student Research and Creative Activity Fund three years in a row.

Her work has been shown in spaces such as Arts Fort Worth, The Pool Near South Side, Artspace111, UNT CoLab, Gallery West, Gallery 414, and The Holy Art Gallery.

Alexandra Green (Texas Woman’s University) is an interdisciplinary fiber artist, puppeteer, and new media artist based in Denton, Texas. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Visual & Dramatic Arts from Rice University where she was awarded Distinction in Research and Creative Works upon graduation. Her work heralds from an alternative fantasy world where social roles and group behaviors have new rules and logic, and where creative self expression is forefronted. The artwork is a way in which she carves out a place for belonging in a social landscape that tends to punish nonconformity. In 2024, Green was announced as one of the 30 under 30 artists awarded by the Greater Denton Arts Council. She was awarded second place in the graduate division of the John Weinkein Juried Student Exhibition at Texas Woman’s University by Vicki Meek for her piece The Grungle.

Her work has been shown in spaces such as Joseph Gross Gallery, Sault Area Art Center, Janette Kennedy Gallery, the Greater Denton Arts Council, East/West Gallery, Anna Street Studios, 500x Gallery, and the Moody Center for the Arts.

Christopher Nájera Estrada (Texas Christian University) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Fort Worth, Texas. He earned his BFA in Studio Art and BA in Visual Studies from the University of North Texas in 2014. His work deals with ideas of queer/latine/postcolonial identities, history, and ontology. Imagining consciousness as a value system capable of resisting colonial frameworks. Through drawing on paper, concrete, and metal, he traces the intersections of the celestial, the physical, and the ethereal, weaving them with personal experience. Guided by an exploration of both personal and collective spiritual landscapes, his art reflects a larger cultural shift toward the mystical and transformative.

His work has been shown in spaces such as The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, Porchlight Gallery, Aldredge House, Atlanta Contemporary, Keijers Koning, Arts Fort Worth, and The Ecleticka.

Nadin Nassar (University of North Texas) is a mixed media sculptor based in North Texas. She graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in Sculpture. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Nassar’s work examines the dehumanization of marginalized populations, exploring violence, identity, and resilience through fragmented, abstract forms. Her practice reclaims narratives of humanity and agency, using sculpture and installation to confront systemic erasure and its enduring impact. Nassar was a 2025 International Sculpture Center Award nominee.

Her work has been shown in spaces such as MotherShip Studios, The Greater Denton Arts Council, UNT CoLab Gallery, Paul Voertman Gallery, the Lewisville Grand Theater Art Gallery, Third Space Gallery, the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance Conference, and the Blaffer Art Museum.

Alfredo “Freddy” Ortega Marquez  is a Mexican-born artist whose work explores mestizo identity and the experience of living between worlds as an immigrant. He blends European art historical traditions, pre-Columbian cosmologies, and pop-surrealist visual language to create hybrid compositions that mirror his own mixed heritage and layered identity. Humor is central to his practice, disarming viewers while prompting reflection on cultural in-betweenness and historical legacies. Raised along the U.S.–Mexico border in El Paso, Ortega draws on his experiences navigating multiple cultures to develop work that honors ancestral knowledge while questioning established narratives. 

His work has been shown in spaces such as The Pool Near South Side, the Moncrief Cancer Institute, Alameda Art and Salvage Gallery, Ro2 Gallery, 400h Gallery, Easyside, Artspace111, Light Art Space Gallery, Encore Gallery, Argos Studio/Gallery, Moudy Gallery, UNT CoLab, and Arts Fort Worth.  

Susan Seaborn (Texas Woman’s University) is a painter based out of Denton, Texas. She has a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from Stephen F. Austin State University, a Bachelor’s of Arts in Italian Language Studies, and Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas. Examining the quiet nature of suburban Denton with a close lens, Seaborn captures the sides of Midcentury style houses, stills of the sky, shadows and light on grass. Seaborn runs and curates the project space Anna Street Studios. Exhibiting emerging and mid-career artists from the DFW community, both academic and professional, with the goal of bringing together the various robust visual arts communities in Denton and beyond.

Her work has been shown in spaces such as Goldmark Gallery, The Eclectika, UNT CoLab Gallery, South Dallas Cultural Center, The Greater Denton Arts Council, Ro2 Gallery, and the Fort Worth Modern.

Tina Vahed (University of Texas at Dallas) is a multidisciplinary performance artist and photographer whose work examines the body as a site of memory and transformation. Focusing on how identity, gender, and spatial conditions shape emotional and physical experience. Vahed graduated with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Puppet Theater from the University of Tehran. With a multi-hyphenate background in performance, film, dance, and photography– she works through improvisation, movement, and observational processes. Vahed constructs fragmented environments that highlight moments of uncertainty, vulnerability, and displacement. Her projects investigate how lived experience is processed through the body, inviting viewers to consider the connections between personal history, perception, and the environments we move through. She is a recent recipient of the Research Graduate Award at UTD.

Her work has been shown in SP/N Gallery, the UTD Theater, 500X gallery, the Omni Hotel, 14th International Student Puppet Theater Festival, the Tajrobeh Theater Festival, and the Reconnect Festival.

Courtney Broussard’s (University of North Texas) interdisciplinary practice spans installation, sculpture, and functional pottery, exploring shared experiences within the domestic sphere by crafting humorous narratives. Her anthropomorphic approach integrates textile and organic material into porcelain to highlight the tension between the permanence of objects and the fragility of memory. The duality of hard and soft, ephemeral and everlasting, bring the objects to life, sparking emotions and memories in both familiar and unexpected ways.

Recent exhibitions include: the 63rd Annual Paul Voertman Juried Student Art Competition & Exhibition, University of North Texas, Denton, TX (2024); Ceramics Showcase, Voertman’s Gallery, University of North Texas, Denton, TX (2022); Humble Cup: A National Juried Exhibition, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX (2021); Extended Family, Las Vegas City Hall Lobby, Las Vegas, NV (2021); and Serve it up, Clay Arts Vegas Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (2020).

Christina Childress (The University of Texas at Arlington) explores the parallels between human and botanical familial relationships, focusing on how personal, cultural, and geographic histories shape individuals and influence broader societal structures. This investigation is rooted in Childress’s experiences of motherhood, as both a mother and a daughter. Inspired by the life cycles of plants and ecological discoveries pointing to the similarities between plant and human family systems, Childress develops an installation-based visual language using organic materials such as soil, rocks, plants, and fungi alongside photographs, cultural ephemera, painting, and ceramic sculpture. In blending human and botanical life, she articulates the shared dynamics of growth, connection, and the life-death-regeneration cycle across species and generations.

Solo exhibitions include: Do you remember how it feels to press your hands into earth?, MFA Thesis Exhibition, The Gallery at UTA, Arlington, TX (2024) and Is This It?, PRP Agency, Dallas, TX (2023). In 2023, Childress also exhibited Ecologies with Michael Scogin at Gallery West, Arlington, TX. Group exhibitions include: Hypnic Jerk, Lamontes Belly, Dallas, TX (2024); Back to School, Photographique, Dallas, TX (2024); While I am I and you are you, B-Side, Dallas, TX (2024); Forward, Gallery West, Arlington, TX (2023); and MACHINE, Gallery West, Arlington, TX (2022). In 2022, Childress was awarded the McDowell Center Innovative Project Award for Visual Artists.

Lisa Clayton (The University of Texas at Arlington) is guided by current events and views her artwork as reactions to societal injustices. Using readymade and found objects, fabric, wool, yarn, paper, and wood and interspersing feminine objects, Clayton seeks information, understanding, and solutions through an intersectional lens. The result is a visual language that centers subversive discourse, dialogue, disobedience, and debate.

In 2023, Clayton exhibited at Unbroken Gallery, Mansfield, TX and in 2022 held her BFA Honors Thesis Exhibition at Texas A&M Commerce, Commerce, TX. In 2023, Clayton was an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX Summer Art Workshop in Foundry/Casting.

Taylor Cleveland (Southern Methodist University) is driven by a fascination with technological systems that shape realities, from artificial intelligence (AI) to digital media, the internet, and social technologies like culture, language, and politics. Drawn to vibrant materiality—the idea that matter possesses the ability to change and influence human and nonhuman actors—Cleveland’s practice challenges reality by exploiting systems and leaning into humor and absurdity. Through video sculpture, AI renderings, installation, traditional media, and collaboration, her provocatively playful art acts as a means to reveal, question, create, and play with reality.

Together with Adnan Razvi, Cleveland has produced MAWIMBI, a visual series that has exhibited at Overstory, London, UK (2024); px.lab, Dallas, TX (2024); World Islamic Economic Forum, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2024); and more. Later in 2024 and 2025, the project will travel to San Antonio River Arts Foundation at Confluence Park, Houston, TX and CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea. Other exhibitions include: WATER WARS, Ro2 Gallery, Dallas, TX (2024); Affordances of New Media, New Media Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2024); New City Park x MOTS DFW, Old City Park, Dallas, TX (2023); and HYPERLOCAL III Group Exhibition, The Mac, Dallas, TX (2023), among others.

Pablo Cruz (University of North Texas) reflects on his hyphenated identity as a Mexican-American and the in-between space that bridges both cultures, particularly through the history of photography that has shaped the Chicano experience. As a tool of documentation and portrayal during the Mexican Revolution, photography contributed to a sense of national identity to an emerging republic that still resonates today. Cruz’s photography practice—across photojournalism, studio lighting, and alternative processes—is informed by this history of mechanical reproduction and its importance to both Mexican and Chicano cultures to reconcile the gap between cultural and racial identity and reflect the tapestry of the Mexican-American experience.

Cruz has exhibited at: the Latino Cultural Center, Dallas, TX (2024); Paul Voertman Gallery, Denton, TX (2024); Elm Fork Education Center, Denton, TX (2023); the Gallery at the Lewisville Grand Theater,

Lewisville, TX (2023); Plush Gallery, Dallas, TX (2023); Subspace, Tucson, AZ (2022); Lionel Rombach Gallery, Tucson, AZ (2022); Grey Door Gallery, Tucson, AZ (2022); and Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ (2021) among others.

Veronica Ibargüengoitia Tena (University of North Texas) creates installations as spaces for questioning systems of migration and mental adaptation processes, delving into the human capacity for resilience and adaptation in conditions of displacement. Interested in the transformation and reconstruction of one’s identity in a new dwelling and how this is influenced by landscape, language, belonging, culture, physical risk, and disorientation. Using non-precious materials like cardboard, sand, paper, and eggshells to create barriers, paths, and surfaces, Ibargüengoitia Tena evokes the emotional stress, grief, and disruption of the migratory reality and encourages tactile, conjunctive relationships between bodies to build spaces for understanding and empathy.

Solo exhibitions include: Fractured Light, Anya Tish Gallery, Houston, TX (2021); Iterations, Glade Gallery, Spring, TX (2020); and Espacios Experimentales, El Rojo de Tacubaya, Mexico City, Mexico (2019). Ibargüengoitia Tena has participated in the Texas Biennial, Houston, TX (2024); Bienal Fronteriza, Borders Biennial, Museo de Arte, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico (2024); AMoA Biennial 600, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX (2023), as well as numerous group exhibitions.

Austin Lewis (Texas Christian University) makes structures and compositions from items and materials found in everyday life, collected over extended periods of time. Often these are common household items or discarded materials like cardboard, wood, plastic packaging, assembled into three-dimensional form. This process of collecting extends to Lewis’s text-based work, in which he gathers words and phrases from media and popular culture and arranges them into colorful compositions. Across these structures and objects, Lewis encourages a reconsideration of oddity and wonder in the mundane.

Group exhibitions include: the TCU Annual Faculty, Moudy Gallery, Fort Worth, TX (2024); the TCU Annual Juried Student Exhibition, Moudy Gallery, Fort Worth, TX (2024, 2023); 150 Years / 150 Artists, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts Gallery, Fort Worth, TX (2023); Rising Star 8, Turner House, Dallas, TX (2021); In Spite of Everything, Arts Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2021); and Expo 2020, 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (2020). Lewis held a solo exhibition titled Quiet Interlude at Anna Street Studios, Denton, TX (2022) and in 2023 was awarded the Societe Anonyme Award at the TCU Annual Juried Student Exhibition.

Katherine Pinkham’s (Texas Woman’s University) work is centered around the coverage of beauty and disgust, exploring femininity, domestic craft, and gender roles. Through mixed media processes like weaving, ceramics, and found object assemblage, Pinkham evokes a unique sensory experience that questions and disrupts embedded social hierarchies. In pairing symbols of womanhood with grotesque motifs and eliciting disgust—a powerful emotion that is both instinctual and guided by cultural norms—she inverts traditional aesthetic values and expectations, critiquing how such conventions promote harmful outcomes for women. 

Recent exhibitions include: Forward Motion, MFA Candidate Exhibition, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX (2024); Angelo State University Graduate Ceramics Juried Exhibition, Angelo State University, San Angelo, TX (2023); 16th Annual Mini Art Exhibit, Ghost Gallery, Seattle, WA (2022); and Little Art Show, Texas Woman’s University, Denton, TX (2022), for which Pinkham received the Best in Show Award.

Abigail Rainey (Texas Woman’s University) is a mixed media artist examining spirituality, faith, and hope through personal memory and shared everyday experiences. Her collages, installations, and artist books combine inherited fabrics, found objects, and cut paper with watercolor, acrylic, and graphite renderings. In arranging fragments of realism with ethereal elements in pastel palettes, Rainey walks the border between the physical and the spiritual, exploring the concurrence of the mundane and the sacred. In doing so, she celebrates the small graces of everyday life and creates contemplative and safe spaces for pause and engagement with one’s own spirituality.

Rainey has exhibited at: the 30 Under 30 open call exhibition, Greater Denton Arts Council, Denton, TX (2024); the College Expo at 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (2024); and Gallerium Art, Ontario, Canada (2023) among others. Solo exhibitions include: Uncommon Grace: All That I Don’t Deserve, Dorothy and Wendell Mayes Art Gallery, Brownwood, TX (2024) and her BFA Solo Exhibition at Howard Payne University, Brownwood, TX (2020). In 2024, Rainey was the winner in the student category at the 13th Biennial Artist Book Competition, University of North Texas Libraries, Denton, TX.

Elijah Ruhala (Texas Christian University) examines interior spaces and how they subtly affect the body across painting and installation using the figure and familiar domestic motifs. In playfully abstracting construction industry standards, Ruhala challenges architecture’s traditional utilitarian purpose and emphasizes its malleability and creative potential. In combining construction processes and materials like stud walls with formal elements like line, value, and texture, he investigates alternative ways of building that echo human scale and experience.

Recently, Ruhala has exhibited in: A Queer Narcissus, Arts Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX (2024); Refract, Fort Worth Contemporary, Fort Worth, TX (2024); CCAN, Center for Contemporary Arts, Abilene, TX (2023); Artspace 111, 10th Annual Texas Juried Exhibition, Fort Worth, TX (2023); 150 Years / 150 Artists, The Fort Worth Contemporary, Fort Worth, TX (2023); Significant Otherness, Center for Contemporary Arts, Abilene, TX (2023); and Figur-ish, Bill Arning Exhibitions, Houston, TX (2023). In 2023, Ruhala participated in the Dallas Art Fair with Bill Arning Exhibitions. He has been awarded the 2024 TCU School of Art Award, the 2023 and 2022 Graduate Research and Creative Activity Grant, the 2021 Turner House Prize, and the 2019 YoungArts Finalist Award among others.

Narong Tintamusik’s (University of North Texas) research explores contemporary living through a speculative ancestral future, imagining a return to cultural traditions as a survival strategy to a dystopian world shaped by human-induced environmental devastation. Using Thai food as her central medium—across paintings, sculptures, and wearable art—Tintamusik explores the movement of food through bodies and landscapes: small-scale paintings depicts internal digestion and absorption processes, while edible pendants and altar-like structures act as support and guides in climate-driven nomadic migrations. Together, they serve as a warning and inspire new ideas to rethink and revise a collective future.

Solo exhibitions include: Soul Sequencing: Unveiling Ancestral Topography, Spellerberg Projects, Lockhart, TX (2024); Cloaked in Flesh, Boundless in Spirit, Daisha Board Gallery, Dallas, TX (2024); This Vessel Holds No Water, 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (2022); The Tides Swallow My Secrets, Angelina College, Lufkin, TX (2022); Red Oblivion, Plush Gallery, Dallas, TX (2021); They Die Only to be Reborn Again, 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (2021); To Sleep on a Bed of Tears, Tarleton State University, Stephenville, TX (2021); and Thirsty, 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX (2020). Tintamusik has also held numerous group exhibitions, including at The Turner House, Dallas, TX; Friends Co., Denton, TX; 500X Gallery, Dallas, TX; Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, NY; Meadows Gallery, Denton, TX; The Highline Loft, New York, NY

Sharmeen Uqaili (Southern Methodist University), trained in both secular and Islamic artistic styles, develops a distinctive technique that combines various elements of Islamic geometric patterns connected to her Pakistani identity with contemporary forms to conceive works that are individual yet similar. Uqaili’s practice evokes depth of meaning, rhythm, and movement to draw the eye to move along each piece, capturing the path from the Earthly realm to the unseen.

Uquaili has exhibited at: Craighead Green New Texas Talent (2024); RCAS Juried Art Exhibition (2022, 2018); Texas and Neighbors Regional Art Exhibition (2018); 125 Plano Art Exhibition (2018); Dallas Arboretum Artscape (2017); and Islamic Art Society of Houston (2016), amongst others. Awards include: Best of Show, Irving Arts Exhibition (2022); 2nd place winner, 125 Plano Art Exhibition (2021); Rosemary Cheney Award, 53rd Annual RCAS Exhibition (2019); 2nd place winner, 52nd Annual RCAS Exhibition (2018); and 2nd place winner, 51st Annual RCAS Exhibition (2017).

Vajihe Zamaniderkaani (The University of Texas at Dallas) uses painting and installation to explore the beauty of rootlessness and the complexity of belonging, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in her narrative and fostering a shared sense of understanding and empathy. Zamaniderkani merges paintings with living foliage to reflect on displacement, adaptation and the innate human desire to belong. While some plants adapt, assimilate, and survive and others struggle to endure, she creates a portrait of the resilience and fragility inherent in the immigrant experience. 

Select group exhibitions include: Foreign Affairs, Site131, Dallas, TX (2024); Small Talk, SP/N Gallery, Richardson, TX (2024); Image Reading/Reading Image, Nebula Gallery, McDermott Library, Richardson, TX (2024); Women Life Freedom DFW, Fort Worth Community Art Center, Fort Worth, TX (2023); Opportunity, Contemporary Art Museum, Isfahan, Iran (2013); On Paper, Noor Gallery, Shahin Shahr, Isfahan, Iran (2007); and 4th International Painting Biennial of Islamic World, Saba Gallery, Tehran, Iran (2006).