Bella Brownlee

Bella Brownlee graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts from Mississippi State University with an emphasis in sculpture in May 2025. Brownlee’s work has been exhibited in numerous juried exhibitions and student shows, such as the 2023 CAAD+CALS Exhibition, the 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 Annual Student Juried Exhibition, where she received the Donovan Dodd Memorial Award for Excellence in Ceramic Art and other honors. She was the 2021 recipient of the Del Rendon Endowed Scholarship for Art, a 2023 recipient of MSU’s Fine Art Portfolio Scholarship, and she was awarded a Penland School of Craft scholarship in 2024 and 2025. In addition to her personal practice, she has worked on public projects, such as a collaborative sculpture installation at Starkville’s J.L. King Community Center. In collaboration with Sarah Demus and the MSU Biology Department, she completed a mural at MSU’s Harned Hall inspired by Mississippi native flora and fauna.

Zoe Elwood

Zoe Elwood (they/them) is an interdisciplinary sculptor who uses their work to interrogate heteronormative and binary notions of domesticity. Utilizing found objects and assemblage, they investigate the effects of such on queer identity formation. By subverting what gender associations and object functionalities may be seemingly given, their work prompts discussion around concepts of (un)belonging, secrecy, latency, and transformation.

In 2024, Zoe was recognized as one of 35 influential artists under the age of 35 by Utah’s 15 Bytes Art Magazine in 35x35: The Zellenial Edition. They have presented their visual art research at the Utah Conference for Undergraduate Research (2023, 2024) and SECAC in Richmond, VA (2023), and will return to this year’s SECAC in Cincinnati, OH (2025). In 2023 Zoe graduated with a BFA from Utah Valley University. Currently, they are residing in Newark, DE, as they pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Delaware.

Jason Kash

Jason Kash (He/Him) is a visual artist based in Lexington, Kentucky, where he received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Kentucky. For Jason, art has the unique power to transform thought into a bodily experience, communicating on a more fundamental level than language. Through his assemblage process, his work discusses themes of growth, transformation, and decay and their connection to human and nonhuman realms. In the process, inspiration is drawn from biology, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory. While he is an active maker, Jason is also a firm believer in the power of art to create community, shaped by his experiences in metal casting and public sculpture. 

Holly Kranker

Holly Kranker is a recent Sculpture + Experimental Media MFA graduate from the School of Art at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and recipient of a J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Science Fellowship. For nearly a decade, and just prior to attending the University of Arkansas, she was the Artists-in-Residence Program Manager at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, Nebraska). She also held the role of studio manager and lead assistant to renowned glass sculptor, Therman Statom. Holly has exhibited nationally and has received awards from the Birger Sandzèn Memorial Gallery in contemporary metal craft, George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in photography, and has work included in the National Park Foundation–Lewis and Clark Historic Trail permanent collection. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the recipient of a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship.

Nina Rastgar

Nina Rastgar is an artist and educator working across Craft, Performance, sculpture, and installation. They were raised among the Gilaki ethnic communities of Gilan province, a region renowned for its rich food culture, where they worked as farmers and artisans. They were also a member of the Cultural Heritage, Tourism, and Handicrafts Organization of Gilan for years, holding positions in gardening and farming to create wearable handicrafts with wood and metal, further expanding their interdisciplinary approach to art, material, and cultural critique.

Currently based in Columbia, South Carolina, Nina graduated with their MFA as a Presidential Fellow and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of South Carolina. Their pedagogy emphasizes hands-on learning, conceptual exploration, and social awareness, drawing from personal experience and a deep sensitivity to material language.

In 2025, Nina is a PhD candidate in Media Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University, continuing to explore the intersection of eco-social and cultural contexts about materiality and technology.

Rory Randle

Rory Kristine Randle is a Southern contemporary artist from Olive Branch, Mississippi, who currently resides in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the University of Mississippi and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas. In her practice, Randle enjoys combining her traditional sculpture background with digital processes and printmaking. She finds her inspiration in gothic media, Victorian architecture, toys of the by-gone eras, and Southern culture. With a love of storytelling and the macabre, she aims to create narrative-based work, focusing on gender roles and expectations, generational trauma, and grief through a Southern African-American lens. 

Jurors

Mary Neubauer

Mary Neubauer creates prints, sculptures and interactive artworks addressing metro and geophysical phenomena. Her digital production is combined with traditional fabrication and casting methods to dimensionalize contemporary environmental, civic, and scientific data. Mary has a deep interest in the rhythms and cycles of nature as well as contemporary urban systems, and has completed many projects visualizing municipal and geophysical input. Her cast metal sculptures and digital prints artworks utilized computer coding to drive the textures and surfaces. These works have a natural beauty and clarity that express hidden and long-term aspects of our environment.

She has shown her sculpture and prints nationally and internationally, and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Fellow (Cambridge, UK), and a Ford Fellow. She has completed numerous public artworks in the western states, including collaborative environments utilizing interactive light and sound. Mary is a President's Professor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Mary serves on the Board of Directors for the Shemer Art Center in Phoenix and also for the Digital Stone Project, based in Tuscany, Italy, and has participated in the Digital Stone Project for the past ten years. Her art endeavors include two Arctic Circle remote-site expeditionary residencies, service as a visiting artist at the Anderson Ranch Center for the Arts, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, and the John Michael Kohler Arts and Industry Iron Foundry program.

Albert Paley

Albert Paley, an active artist for over 40 years at his studio in Rochester, New York, is the first metal sculptor to receive the coveted Institute Honors awarded by the American Institute of Architects, the AIA’s highest award to a non-architect. “The allure of Paley’s art comes through its intrinsic sense of integration of art and architecture,” as one noted architect stated. Paley, Distinguished Professor, holds an Endowed Chair at the College of Art and Design at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Commissioned by both public institutions and private corporations, Paley has completed more than 50 site-specific works. Some notable examples are the Portal Gates for the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Synergy, a ceremonial archway in Philadelphia, the Portal Gates for the New York State Senate Chambers in Albany, Sentinel, a monumental plaza sculpture for Rochester Institute of Technology, as well as a 65-foot sculpture for the entry court of Bausch and Lomb’s headquarters in Rochester, NY.

Broadly published, and an international lecturer, Paley received both his BFA and MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Rochester in 1989, the State University of New York at Brockport in 1996, St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York in 1997, and the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden in 2012.