Graduate Students

Lauren is a mixed media artist focused on piecing together fragmented memories to gain better clarity on her identity as a biracial woman. Her work aims to weave together the good and bad experiences she has faced to both highlight what has been overcome and celebrate staying hopeful despite the circumstances. Lauren received her bachelor’s in fine arts degree from the University of Texas in Tyler, where she also worked as the ceramics studio assistant, and she has exhibited both locally and nationally.

Taryn Uribe Turner (b. 1997, San Antonio, Texas). Taryn is an artist whose paintings/drawings primarily explore the relationship between the human experience and nature.Her work is informed by stories of her matriarchal border family culture and growing up as an only child in the rural Texas Hill Country. Through painting, she seeks to remember a sacred presence from the clutter that naturally evolves with experience and learning. Driven by an intellectual passion and a poetic nature, she collects symbolic and figurative images trying to understand the narratives and connections we tell ourselves. Bodies of water, animals, the underground, femininity, and landscapes of Texas and Latin America are all motifs in her work which are subsumed to tell a visual evolving story.Taryn graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in Liberal Arts Honors triple majoring in History, Anthropology and Art History in 2019. She received an A.A. in Studio Art in 2021. Several of her artworks have been exhibited in various Austin venues.

Matthew Solon-Lee Weimer (b. 1996, Arlington, TX) is first and foremost a painter and secondly a film photographer, preferring to live in the moment and the finesse it possesses. His work explores sexuality and sexualization of male figures through the Pink Boy world, full of it’s Queer Homoeroticism. He loves to play with the mind of the viewer and invoke their interpretation on what is actually happening; but is it really happening or is it just their dirty mind forming things from their subconscious?

The execution of how he paints invokes a sense of fantastic in the world the figures exist in. The abstraction of objects borders in the realm of Impressionism, or in the term he uses “fudge it,” especially in relation to painting parts of a figure.

He received his B.F.A. in Painting with Honors from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2021.

Carolina Yáñez (b. 2001, Austin, Texas) is a Tejana artist primarily working with photographic processes such as cyanotype, darkroom photography, and collage work to explore ideas regarding Texan culture; specifically Tejano history, culture, and politics, place, gender and sexuality issues, and mental illness in which they can all intersect. Many of her works revolve around social issues that directly impact her and the communities she cares about, often socially disadvantaged ones. Other themes her work surveys is feminine identity, women’s rights, immigration, environmentalism, and social equity through mediums of video, installation, painting, textile, prose and narration, and interactive art. Her approach to her work is to remove the elitism of art language and comprehension to allow viewers to interact and easily understand her art and its contexts. She completed her BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston in 2023.

Sharmeen Uqaili (b. 1980, Karachi, Pakistan) draws profound inspiration from the allure of rugs and architecture from the Islamic lands. Her art serves as a vibrant reflection of her cultural identity and a captivating exploration of Sufism's mystical depths. Her creations are a harmonious interplay of evocative words and meticulously crafted patterns, reminiscent of the ancient tools of compass and ruler. Themes in her work revolve around spirituality and the pursuit of paradise, while finding strength in holding on to her roots and heritage. Sharmeen graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas in Visual Arts in 2023. Several of our artworks have been exhibited in numerous Dallas-area fine art exhibitions where she has also received various awards and recognitions.

Shinwoo Song is an interdisciplinary artist who worked in computer graphics, which cultivated this broader understanding of digital media, kept his primary interest in abstract painting and ceramics alive, and gained a general skill for animation, complicated visual effect techniques, 3D modeling, and photography. His works also include installation and performance art, which have expressed, in a way, getting him to an aspect of the inward related to unconsciousness. He currently studies how to pull out his emotional sources of nostalgia, freedom, happiness, comfort, identity, rage, desire, and excitement from unconsciousness. He received BFA in studio art from Southern Methodist University in 2022.

Taylor Cleveland is an artist driven by a fascination and curiosity of technology’s effect on the human experience. Working across mediums, his work includes installation, performance, video, viral marketing, code, sound, and paint. Cleveland looks to immerse audiences within spectacles that examine, explore, and exploit ways that technological systems shape our physical, cultural, and individual environments & identities. Taylor Cleveland received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and expects to receive his MFA from Southern Methodist University in 2025. His work has been recognized internationally through various exhibitions, collaborations, and partnerships. He has worked for commercial clients including Disney, American Express, & Paramount Studios, and has recently helped win various marketing awards for this work including Webby, Clio, and Shorty Awards.