Graduate Students
Lauren Alexander
Lauren Careese Alexander (b. 2000, Dallas, Texas). Lauren is a mixed media artist focused on bringing joy through her playful ceramics and paintings. She pulls from her own happy sources of nostalgia, comfort, and excitement to provide brightness and solace to a dark and hurting world. Lauren uses an abstract cloud form as a vessel for displaying these positive motifs, as clouds have always been a strong source of comfort, connection, and joy in her own life. She utilizes illustrative techniques and simple stylistic qualities as a subtle nod to her childhood and her love of cartoons, books, video games, funny characters, and bright colors to further push elements of positivity and playfulness. Lauren received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Tyler, where she has also completed a public mural that is on permanent display, and has exhibited in various galleries nationally.
Sara Dotterer
(b. 1995, Richmond, Virginia) Sara is an interdisciplinary artist and dancer taking an embodied approach to researching the overlap between urban ecologies and digital technology. In ecology, ecotones are overlapping boundaries between ecosystems that nurture the greatest biodiversity, and Sara is particularly interested in the ecotones between urbanity and nature, mind and body, and human and digital technology. Her work is filled with ecotones as she develops photos that are blurry with low contrast, and sound and video that are hard to discern due to overlay. Her artistic language moves across various media from writing to collage to projection to spatial installations. She uses diverse materials that often blend into one another– harder materials (sticks, plaster, aluminum, rocks) and softer ones (leaves, scrim, paper) to create immersive and contemplative spaces. Sara received her B.A. in Studio Art and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University. She is now living in Dallas, Texas as a candidate for Southern Methodist University's MFA in Studio Art.
Taryn Turner
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.