BIOS OF TEACHING ARTISTS


ROTEM AMIZUR was born in New York and currently lives and works in Israel. She graduated from the Jerusalem Studio School Master Class in 2013. In 2009 and 2010, she participated in the Italy Master Class Programs instructed by Israel Hershberg, Stuart Shils and Ken Kewley. Rotem has taught painting and collage since 2014 and has given numerous workshops in Israel and the US. She is represented by Rothschild Fine Art Gallery, Tel Aviv. Rotem has received the Henrion Award for painting from the Hampstead Art Society in London, and her work is part of the permanent collection at the Israeli Presidential Residency and private collections around the world. 


DENNIS CONGDON holds a BFA in painting from RISD and an MFA from Yale. In 1983 he won the Prix de Rome and became a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has taught painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Tyler School of Art, and has been on the faculty at RISD since 1984. In 2003 he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and in 2010 RISD’s John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Congdon’s work has been exhibited widely. Since 2013 he has had three solo shows in New York City: at the CUE Foundation in 2013, (curated by Stanley Whitney,); at the Horton Gallery in 2014 ; and “Congeries” at Zieher Smith and Horton Gallery in 2015. In 2015 his large work “Hummocks” was included in the James and Audrey Foster Prize Exhibition at the ICA Boston, (curated by kijidome.)


CATHERINE DRABKIN received her BFA from the Maryland Institute/College of Art and her MFA from Queens College, CUNY. A founding faculty member of the Delaware College of Art and Design, she has also taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Nebraska/Omaha, and Point Park University, where she teaches drawing.

Grants and residencies include Buhl Foundation/Sprout Fund One Northside, Pennsylvania Project Stream, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Delaware Division of the Arts,

Her work has been exhibited by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Delaware Division of the Arts; Dartmouth College; the Delaware Art Museum; the National Academy of Design; La Maison de la Bretagne; the Eleanor O. White Museum; Yale University, the Painting Center, and most recently, the Susquehanna Art Museum. Her work is represented by Kraushaar Galleries.


ELIZABETH GEIGER majored in painting and mathematics at the University of Virginia, and continued her art studies at the New York Studio School and Vermont Studio Center. Geiger has won a fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, been featured in American Artist magazine, and has shown regularly throughout the eastern United States. Her work can be seen in the Sheltering Arms Hospital in Richmond, the Augusta Medical Center in Fishersville, VA as well as the Clay Center Museum of Art in Charleston, WV.

Known for her still life paintings, she has recently also focused her painting practice on landscape. Along with her regular teaching at the Beverley Street Studio School in Staunton, VA, she has been a visiting artist at the College of William & Mary, the Kentucky School of Art & Design, Washington & Lee University, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Mount Gretna School of Art in Pennsylvania. 

ElIzabeth Geiger regularly shows her work at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.


NANCY GRUSKIN earned her BA in art history and studio art from Connecticut College and her PhD in art history from Boston University. She teaches painting, collage, and digital drawing at the Concord Center for the Visual Arts in Concord, Massachusetts and has taught classes and workshops for Warehouse 521, Winslow Art Center, and the Currier Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited at LaiSun Keane Gallery in Boston, Able Baker Contemporary in Portland, Maine, and Art at Kings Oaks in Pennsylvania. In the spring of 2022, she had a solo show online with Nancy Margolis Gallery.


DAVID HORNUNG is a painter, teacher, author, and curator working from a studio in Woodstock, NY. He holds a BA in art from the University of Delaware and an MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Across a career that spans five decades he has taught at Indiana University, The Rhode Island School of Design, Skidmore College, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and Adelphi University. Since 2012, in addition to his university teaching, he has been running workshops in painting, color, design, and collage for programs in the US and abroad including the Anderson Ranch Art Center, Madeline Island School of Art, the Schweinfurth Museum, and Crow Timber Frame Barn.

David is the author of Color: A Workshop for Artists and Designers. Published by Laurence King Publishing Ltd., its third edition has been translated into six languages. His latest curatorial project was a career survey of the work of Mary Frank at the Dorsky Museum (Suny New Paltz) in 2022. His paintings and collages have been exhibited widely and he is represented in Woodstock NY by the Elena Zang Gallery and in NYC by the JJ Murphy Gallery. 


VERA ILIATOVA grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Art (2004) and a residency at Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation (2007/2008). In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Iliatova’s work has been shown across the US as well in Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark and Great Britain. Iliatova’s work was recently included in exhibitions at the Katonah Museum (2018) and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (2017). Her work was reviewed in Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Time Out New York, hyperallergic.com and other publications. Iliatova is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery, NY. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.


CATHERINE KEHOE earned her BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts, Boston University.

Kehoe has received the following awards: Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, Ballinglen Foundation Fellowship, Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Foundation Grant; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust Grant; Blanche E. Colman Award; St. Botolph Club Foundation Grant, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts Award. 

Kehoe is represented by Anderson Yezerski Gallery, Boston.

She has been a visiting artist at Swarthmore College, Johns Hopkins University, University of Washington, Salve Regina University, Rhode Island College, Colby College, Hendrix College, George Mason University, College of William and Mary, University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and Indiana University.

Kehoe has taught painting and drawing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Brandeis University. She has also taught painting workshops at Art New England, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Armory Art Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, the Washington Art Association, Washington Studio School, Harvard Medical School. She is a founder of Black Pond Studio.


TIM KENNEDY received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from Brooklyn College and he attended the Skowhegan School. Kennedy has received individual artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis and the Clark Hulings Fund. His work has been reviewed in The New York Sun, The New York Observer and the Indianapolis Star Articles on his work have appeared in The Artist’s Magazine, American Artist Magazine, Watercolor Magazine and an interview with him was featured on Larry Groff’s blog Painting Perceptions. He exhibits his work at First Street Gallery in New York and is a Senior Lecturer of Painting at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Kennedy’s work embraces all of the genres but he has repeatedly returned to themes of domestic interior and landscape. He works primarily from observation and directly from the motif or from painted or drawn studies done directly from the subject. His goal is to work directly and without an intervening filter. In relation to his process Kennedy states, “I think of my eye and my consciousness as a kind of funnel that the world is poured into and that judgments about color and space and shape emerge from them in the form of my paintings. This has seemed to me the simplest and best way for me to produce work.”  


KEN KEWLEY was born in Michigan, graduated from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a night watchman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1980-1990. Surveys of his work, along with workshops, have been held at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Hendrix College in Arkansas, Washington Studio School, University of Tulsa, Portland Community College in Oregon, Central Pennsylvania Community College, Kentucky School of Art and Design, and most recently at the Lehigh Valley Charter Arts in Bethlehem, PA. His works and words were recently featured in Contemporary Collage Magazine in the UK. He is currently working on a book about the painted shape. He lives and arranges shapes in Easton PA. 


SUSAN LICHTMAN is a figurative painter of domestic spaces, working out of her home studio in southeastern Massachusetts. She is Professor of Fine Arts at Brandeis University and has been a visiting lecturer and instructor at art programs throughout the US and in Europe.

Lichtman has exhibited at the Rose Art Museum, (Waltham, MA), Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, (New York, NY,) Fahrenheit, (Madrid, SP,) New York, Gross McCleaf Gallery, (Philadelphia, PA) and the Wilson Museum of Hollins University, (Roanoke, VA.) A recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she also has awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. 


LUCY MacGILLIS grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; she then left the States to paint in Italy upon graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. With grants from UPenn, she studied at

Nick Carone’s International School of Art in Montecastello di Vibio and began a series of still lifes and landscapes there. She restored an old farmhouse in Umbria which is now her studio and the home where she lives with her son Vito and companion Piero. Together they prepare canvases from scratch with raw linen and rabbit skin glue. 

MacGillis paints from observation, mixing her own paint from raw earth pigments and linseed oil. She has shown her work in Rome at the Galleria Ca'd'Oro and the U.S. Embassy, in Umbria at the Museo del Laterizio e delle Terracotte, and Galleria l'Unu in Todi, in Austria at the Galerie Lendl Haus der Kunst, in France at the Espace Cultarel des Tanneries of Normandy. In the United States her paintings and drawings are shown at Bee in the Lion in New York City, the Hoadley Gallery in Lenox, Ma, Blue Heron in Wellfleet, and at Selby Fleetwood in Santa Fe. She also teaches painting seminars in Stockbridge, Massachusetts at IS183, the Armory Art Center in Palm Beach, at the Kunstfabrik in Hannover, Germany, Kunstfabrik Wien in Vienna and privately in Italy.


EVE MANSDORF got her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College and her BA in Psychology from Cornell University. She teaches painting at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. She is known for large paintings of figures in interiors, still lifes, and on site paintings that draw from the landscape and neighborhood in Bloomington where she lives.

Eve Mansdorf paints perceptually and often her work is done “close to home”even when her “home” relocates to other countries and parts of the US. She has shown her work at First Street Gallery and Gallery Henoch in New York and at various venues in the Midwest.


MEGAN MARDEN is a painter based in Connecticut. After receiving her BA and MFA in painting from Western Connecticut State University, Megan continued her studies in painting and drawing at the New York Studio School. She has received grants and awards from the State of Connecticut Office of the Arts, the Washington Art Association, and Western Connecticut State University. In 2019 she was a Four Pillars artist in residence at the Mount Gretna School of Art. Megan exhibits her work at the Oxbow Gallery in East Hampton, Massachusetts. Her paintings have been included in recent group exhibitions at the Joyce Goldstein Gallery, the University of Connecticut, The Bowery Gallery, and The Painting Center.


NANCY McCARTHY is a painter who works both from imagination and observation. Exhibitions include: “Veils,” There Gallery, NYC; “Beyond Texture,” Truro Center for the Arts, Truro, MA; “The Unstilllife,” Guest artist, Zeuxis,University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, AK; “A Cat May Look,” Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; solo exhibition, Fitchburg University; "Color Works," Truro Center for Arts, Truro, MA; Manifest Drawing and Painting Center, Cincinnati, OH; Simmons College, Boston; Gutman Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and Bowery Gallery, NY. Awards include: a residency at the Inside Out Museum in Beijing China, a St. Botolph Foundation Award, Artist's Grant, Vermont Studio Center and a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship. She has served as a mentor in both MassArt's and Lesley University's low residency MFA Programs and has taught painting, drawing and color courses at Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 2005. In 2018 she was a visiting artist at the Beijing Royal Academy in Beijing, China.


ROBIN FEUER MILLER is Edytha Macy Gross Professor of Humanities and Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University. A former Dean of Arts and Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author and editor of several books, among them Dostoevsky and The Idiot: Author, Narrator and Reader (Harvard UP); The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel (Yale UP), and Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey (Yale UP). She has also written on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dickens and Rousseau. She is co-editor of Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace, by Kathryn B. Feuer, and the Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel. Her current projects are Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the Small of This World; Kazuko’s Letters from Japan: Love in a Time of Upheaval, and a project based on her childhood diaries from Moscow, 1963.


JOE MORZUCH is an observational painter currently residing in Starkville, Mississippi. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Mississippi State University where he teaches courses in foundations, painting, and drawing. His studio work deals with the still life and self-portrait painted directly from life. In 2006 he received his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has taught at the college level for nearly 20 years and actively exhibits his work nation-wide and abroad. 


MAUREEN NATHAN is a figurative artist who embraces the abstract qualities in the world around her. Examining the seen and the unseen with line, form, and colour is the focus of her practice. As a multidisciplinary artist, the use of differing methods and materials offers many pathways to explore her concerns. Drawing is fundamental to her practice. Born and raised on the west coast of Canada, Maureen has spent her adult life in England. Her work has been shown with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Wells Art Contemporary and the Royal West of England Academy, and is held in private collections in Europe and North America. Her work is featured in numerous publications, including Portrait Revolution 2017, Drawing on Dorset 2019 and Portraits for NHS Heroes 2020.

Maureen runs drawing workshops and outreach creative programmes for her local community as a director of Park Studios, London. She is an alumnus of the City Lit Institute Fine Art Programme and the Heatherley School of Art in London.

 

JANICE NOWINSKI was born and raised in Brooklyn and Rockaway Park. She received her MFA in Painting from Yale University. She has exhibited at American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy Museum, American University Museum, John Davis Gallery, Zurcher Gallery, Leigh Morse Fine Arts, Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, Kent Fine Arts, Lohin Geduld and Schweitzer Contemporary. Currently she has a one person exhibition at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY.

She is the recipient of a purchase prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Her work has been featured and reviewed in the Hudson Review , New Criterion, Hyperallergic , Huffington Post and American Artist.

Nowinski lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.


ELIZABETH O'REILLY received her B.Ed from The National University of Ireland, and an MFA from Brooklyn College, New York. She has participated in residencies at the Ballinglen Foundation, Ireland, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, the Ragdale Foundation, Illinois. She has received numerous awards, including a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, a Charles G. Shaw award for painting and The Peter S. Reed Foundation grant. A documentary on her work, Ealaiontóir Thar Sáile (An Artist Abroad) was shown on network TV in Ireland. O’Reilly shows at The George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, New York. O’Reilly has taught extensively at colleges in New York City, including the New School for Social Research, Brooklyn College and Pratt University. She is currently teaching at The New York School of the Arts, as well as workshops at Art New England, and out of her studio in Brooklyn. O’Reilly taught watercolor and collage for several years at The National Academy of Fine Art. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Sun and Art News, among others. Ms. O’Reilly’s work is found in many corporate and public collections, both in the US and internationally including the State Department, Washington D.C: the State Collection Ireland, and the Memphis Brooks Museum in Memphis TN. Her work is included in Painted Landscapes: Contemporary Views by Lauren Della Monica.


STEPHANIE PIERCE’s paintings explore relationships between light, time, and perception as it is reconsidered over time. Stephanie’s work is represented by Alpha Gallery in Boston and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in NYC. She has exhibited at The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Blindfold Gallery, Seattle; The Staten Island Museum, NY; Asheville Art Museum, NC; Space Gallery, Portland; and Art Chicago. In 2014, Stephanie received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her work has been published in the New Yorker Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and is included in the collections of William Dreyfus, Joan and Roger Sonnabend, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Boston Public Library. She received her MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, BFA from The Art Institute of Boston, and attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Stephanie is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.



JENNIFER POCHINSKI is an American figurative artist. Her work is characterized by gestural marks and simplified forms. Raised in Hawaii, she earned a BFA from the University Of Hawaii in 1991. She spent much of her young adulthood traveling to UK and Europe, finally settling near Athens Greece in 2003. In late 2010, she and her two daughters relocated to California. She has work in the Triton Museum, and the David and Pamela Hornik Collection, and has shown at Dolby Chadwick Gallery on the West Coast. She has shown at Prince Street Gallery and Westbeth Gallery in New York. She has also shown in London at Tregony Gallery. 


ERIN RAEDEKE received her MFA from American University in 2009 and her BFA in Painting from Indiana University Bloomington in 2000. She also studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Raedeke has exhibited her work extensively in both group and solo shows, nationally as well as internationally. One of her self-portraits was included in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006. Along with having solo exhibits in NYC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, among others, in 2019 Raedeke had a solo show at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, FL. She has been a visiting critic at Mount Gretna School of Art, and a guest artist at numerous universities and colleges. Raedeke has taught at the Washington Studio School, The College of William & Mary, the Dulwich Art Group, and Winslow Art Center. 


ELIZABETH REAGH was born and raised in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She lived and worked in Brooklyn NY for twenty years, before moving back to California three years ago. She received a BA in art from San Francisco State University, and a MFA from The University of Oregon in Eugene. Reagh’s work is influenced by both East and West Coast sensibilities, with a current focus on still life. Observational drawing is an ongoing parallel practice. Reagh has shown in New York and California, and has paintings and drawings in collections across the U.S. and in Europe. In 2021 she had solo shows at B. Sakata Garo Gallery in Sacramento, California and The Project Room at The Painting Center, NY.


NICOLE SANTIAGO is a representational painter who has exhibited widely in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Her work features narrative still-lifes and figure compositions. She is currently a member of First Street Gallery in Chelsea, NY, where she has exhibited since 2010. Her works have appeared in several art publications, including The Artist’s Magazine, Art New England, INPA (the International Painting Annual), and Fine Art Connoisseur. She is also the recipient of full-fellowship residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT (2010) and the Ballinglen Artist Foundation), Ballycastle, Ireland (2021). Her work resides in both domestic and international collections. Currently, Santiago is a Professor of Studio Art at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she maintains an active studio practice.


CLINTEL STEED was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. His first memories of painted images go back to the reproductions that his mother had hanging in the house — the Mona Lisa and Goya’s portrait of a boy in red. These images would stay with him. Early memories also include the Pentecostal church, where his grandmother was the pastor. There, he witnessed lives changed by the belief in and passion for God.

Steed completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by an MFA from Indiana University, where Steed focused on painting from perception. Since 2005 Steed has taught and been a visiting artist at the New York Studio School and Harold Washington College. He has given critiques and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design and University of Delaware, among others. In 2015, he received the prestigious John Koch Award for a “young figurative painter” from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Steed continues to paint from perception. He is very much affected by daily events and history as it is unfolding. He uses the events and character of our time as a source and inspiration for his paintings.

 

GWEN STRAHLE has been teaching drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design since 1984, and instigated the Drawing Marathon there in 2004. She shows her paintings with Zeuxis, an association of still-life painters.  She is the recipient of awards from the Connecticut Artist Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She holds a BA from Rhode Island College and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has shown her work around the country and more recently in a show, Shadows, at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects in New York. She lives and paints in eastern Connecticut. 


HARRY STOOSHINOFF was born in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada. His love of visual art developed in early teenage years, later leading to a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Saskatchewan (1979) and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Calgary (1981). After several moves and a Bachelor of Education degree from the University of Toronto (1989), Harry secured employment teaching art at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario where he remained for 26 years before retiring in 2015.

During his teaching career and to this day, he produced a prolific body of work dealing primarily with landscape imagery. In 2006 he began marketing artwork online, a method he favours since it allows direct, immediate contact with clients.

These days Harry can be found walking and documenting the always changing spectacular landscape of the Oak Ridges Moraine.


PETER VAN DYCK is a painter, draftsman and general life-enthusiast living part-time in Philadelphia, PA and part-time in Elba, AL. His primary vocation is the making of oil paintings but he also makes drawings, does home improvement projects of dubious quality and contemplates the nature of existence to the irritation of his family and friends. He also devotes a significant portion of his time to teaching painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine arts where he has been a faculty member since 2005.  


RACHEL YOUENS, a native of Pittsburgh, PA, studied with Imagist painters at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a BFA in painting. She later she relocated to NYC and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College, CUNY, where she consolidated her interest in still life. She went on to receive both a Pollock-Krasner Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been awarded artist residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Fundación Valparaiso, Spain. She has also received travel grants from the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY to pursue arts projects in Alaska and France. Youens has exhibited extensively in the NYC area, with one person shows at Talking Pictures and Open Source Gallery, and in two person shows at Sideshow and Salena Gallery. An occasional writer of art criticism, her essays and reviews have appeared in Cover Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail: ArtSeen, and more recently in the on-line publications Artcritical, Two Coats of Paint, and Painters on Painting. She currently teaches fine art and art history at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, and at the Parsons School of Design. 


DEBORAH ZLOTSKY is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York and Robischon Gallery in Denver. She received a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowships in Painting in 2012 and 2018. She has been awarded recent residencies fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco Foundation, and the Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts. Zlotsky’s work is in a variety of public, private and corporate collections in the US and abroad, including Nordstrom, Fidelity Investments, Capital One, Progressive Insurance, the Waldorf Astoria, and the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection. Zlotsky has a BA in the History of Art from Yale University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Connecticut. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives in upstate New York.