2026 Creative Arts Awards Recipients & Projects

Jean Laurenz, DESCENDED
DESCENDED is a multidisciplinary performance work inspired by the writings and legacy of 19th-century author Lafcadio Hearn. Blending chamber music, theater, film, and media art, the project reexamines folklore, marginalized histories, and enduring social questions through a contemporary lens. Created by Hearn’s great-great-grandniece, Jean Laurenz, with multimedia artists Maria Finkelmeier and Greg Jukes, DESCENDED transforms Hearn’s ghost stories into an immersive, 55-minute live performance supported by sound, light, projection, and movement.
The project proposes an international tour and series of public engagement events in locations central to Hearn’s life, including Cincinnati, New Orleans, Ireland, and Greece. By pairing performances with discussions, screenings, and readings, DESCENDED expands access to experimental multimedia performance while reconnecting Hearn’s work with the communities that shaped it.

Christina West, Re-staging Gender in the Language of the Ceramic Figurine
Building on my research about gendered representations of the body in Classical sculpture that has informed my work over last 5+ years, I am starting new, but related research into the ways gender has been represented within 18th-20th century ceramic figurines. Figurines—miniature sculpted figures on a decorative bases—have served as both elite luxury objects and mass‑market décor at various points in time, offering a lens into how decorative objects encode social roles and gender norms. This research will start in London at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Paris at the Sèvres National Ceramics Museum.  Following this travel, I will begin developing new sculptural forms that implement this research while at a two-week artist residency titled “Thinking Through the Body” at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. I will then create a new series of large-scale performative ceramic sculptures, and accompanying photographs, informed by my research.

Tanya Habjouqa, Absence as Archive
Absence as Archive is a research-based photographic and printmaking project that examines how histories of displacement, erasure, and racial myth are produced and sustained through images. The project draws from my Circassian-Texan lineage and builds on my long-term work in Palestine, where I have studied how political violence and forced displacement shape land, memory, and visual culture. Through field research in Jordan and Texas, archival research in Wisconsin collections, and sustained studio production, I will create a body of photographic, print-based, and book works. Using portraiture, archival materials, and printmaking processes, the project treats absence as historical evidence rather than a void. The outcome will be exhibition-ready work, including an artist book, developed as part of my MFA thesis. Fellowship support provides essential time and resources for research, travel, and studio production.

Maurice Norman, Don’t Lose Heart
Don’t Lose Heart is an original production that blends documentary poetry, oral history, and orchestral music to illuminate Black cultural memory. Developed through ethnographic research and community collaboration, it centers the lived experiences of historically marginalized Black communities and transforms them into an immersive performance. Its first iteration premiered to a sold-out audience at the Cain Center for the Arts in North Carolina and earned recognition in Charlotte for its artistic merit and community impact. The next phase expands the work into a tour-ready production with deeper research, new musical arrangements, and partnerships with Black Madisonians, culminating in a debut at the Center for Black Excellence and Culture. Funding from the Graduate Student Creative Arts Award will support writing, composition, archival research, workshops, and broader community engagement, positioning the project as both an artistic offering and a catalyst for public dialogue.

Lars Shimabukuro, within and through
I am requesting funding for materials to develop the work that will result in my MFA Thesis Exhibition in the spring of 2027. As a sculptor I work at an architectural scale because enveloping the audience in my textile works is key to talking about the themes of homelands, lineage, memory, and queer materiality that my work grapples with. For my largest show and culmination of my studies at UW Madison, I want to narrow my focus on the poetic elements within fibers that resonate most in my practice. Funding for this material research and final exhibition is crucial, coming at a pivotal point in my time at UW Madison. Beyond the thesis show, the work that I develop for my exhibition will become the portfolio I will present as an applicant for professional opportunities after completing my graduate work.

Tina Rose Rea Meister, Soft Places
This project uses textiles, archives, and oral history to create a unique record of the queer home archive through the lived experiences of participants. This work centers the participants as self-archivists and experts on their own lives, and seeks to empower them and open up opportunities for viewers to experience a piece of the archive often hidden, erased, or overlooked. This project blends curatorial practices with material culture, using the embedded cultural and personal histories of everyday textiles to bring stories to life and create a meaningful experience of interacting with the archive and learning about the queer home.

Blue Rachapradit & Aida Arosoaie, Weird Opera for the Fall of the Anthropos
Weird Opera for the Fall of the Anthropos is a performance-installation that explores the spectral presence of petrochemicals in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, where industrial toxicity is both omnipresent and largely invisible. Centered on using blob-tracking technology and a cyanotype of the Louisiana chemical corridor, the work translates bodily presence into a shifting soundscape composed of field recordings from petrochemical facilities, swamp environments, and bodily sounds. As visitors move across the map, sonic density shifts, mimicking the slow accumulation of chemical exposure.
Intervals of 95-minute live performance activate the installation through fragmented vocalization and movement, staging the chemical as a ghostly, non-human agent that speaks through contaminated bodies. Drawing on ecohorror and post humanist theory, the project invites the audience to expand their awareness of environmental justice histories not as distant data but as a transcorporeal condition.

Christie Tirado, Cosechando Historias
For my MFA thesis exhibition, Cosechando Historias, in Gallery 7 (Humanities Building) this spring, I am creating an immersive 80-foot installation and companion leporello artist book exploring how cultural memory and the keeping of traditions alive endure through gesture, ritual, and the everyday labor of making. The project begins as carved linoleum relief prints that will then get translated into laser-cut, life-size silhouettes cut from black archival mat board. Installed slightly off the wall, the silhouettes cast shifting shadows that activate the gallery and heighten the tension between presence and absence, reflecting how memory is carried, layered, and reactivated over time. The narrative follows maíz from cultivation and harvesting to domestic scenes of nixtamalization and tamal-making, evoking the intimacy of my grandmother’s kitchen. Framed prints and  text fragments drawn from oral histories will be interspersed throughout, grounding the installation in lived experience.

Emily Nott
Emily Nott has been an exemplary graduate student in community-engaged arts, building strong partnerships across the University of Wisconsin, local arts organizations, and community groups in Madison and Chicago. During four years in Curriculum and Instruction, Emily taught community-engaged arts courses and collaborated with university partners to support MMSD teachers and organizations such as the Goodman Center. In addition to teaching and mentoring emerging teaching artists, they co-created a Feminist Disability Studies coloring book with Miso Kwak and partnered with the City of Madison Department of Civil Rights to share it widely. They also produced a fully tactile/braille version, demonstrating a deep commitment to accessibility in the visual arts. The project functioned as mutual aid, raising funds for the Disability Visibility Project. As both artist and educator, Emily has centered community-engaged arts with transformative impact on campus and community.

Anne E. Stoner
Thank you for considering me for the Lyman S.V. Judson and Ellen Mackechnie Judson Graduate Student Award in the Creative Arts. I hope you will find from my application that I have made significant contributions to multiple artistic modes, both materially and theoretically. Throughout my time at UW Madison, I have exhibited/will exhibit four solo/collaborative exhibitions, two of which with major American art museums. You will also see that I have published with cutting-edge journals and arts publications in sound and performance. In my time in my MFA, I have been extremely grateful to be given multiple awards and fundings from the Division of the Arts. I would be thrilled to receive one more award in my third and final year. Thank you very much for your consideration and time.

Elizabeth Larson
The advent of photography was controversial. Many argued it was not “true” art, it was too easy, too mechanical, inauthentic, or even plagiaristic. Yet, photography has ultimately reshaped ways of thinking about art and the world: we can now freeze time. This power is both exciting and unsettling.
I can permanently freeze joyous moments with my sister Lucy, who I once feared would not live to adulthood. At the same time, cameras can be used as surveillance or to warp narratives, capturing protestors at political rallies and reporting them to the state or portraying them in an uncharitable light in the news. This tension defines my work. I am to use cameras, drones, code, and satellite imagery responsibly within photojournalism—because photojournalism is more than just technical and artistic skill, it is also deliberate moral judgement about what is portrayed, who is exposed, and how images shape perception and accountability.

Jameson Milhaupt
I am looking to acquire grant funding to help fund a production of Falsettos, a musical by William Finn and James Lapine. This musical will serve as a capstone for my senior theatre honors project, which focuses on directing. This project will improve my directorial skills, provide interdisciplinary student opportunities, and create an opportunity for extensive dramaturgical work, allowing for a deeper and more contextually informed production from actors and the directorial/design team. This project proves significant challenges from a directorial standpoint, which allows me to build experience in directing under more challenging circumstances. This project will also include a presentation of research in the form of a talk-forward to an audience before a performance. This story has spoken to me for a very long time and I think now is a good time to tell it. A story about the many stories that love and life can tell.

Bryce Dailey, Nomadic Gallery
My application outlines my business plan for Nomadic, a gallery without a fixed space representing emerging artists in the Pittsburgh area. The primary form of programming are pop-up exhibitions. This is a continuation of a previous project called Midwest Print Showcase, a four-day art show I organized last year. I am forming Nomadic as a way to provide a stable structure for future events and to build a returning audience. The very first event hosted under the Nomadic name is a 2027 exhibit named ROOTS: Regional Art Review. The objective of the exhibit (as well as future events) is to assist student and emerging artists find an audience. Nomadic places a high priority on exhibiting America’s most innovative yet unknown artists. As the gallery’s audience grows, I plan to feature more public programming such as free workshops, grant opportunities, and larger collaborations with the many local art nonprofits.

Ahema Odeng-Otu, 1997
1997 is a multimedia gallery that explores the nation Ghana using my parent’s wedding as an anchor point. It explores Ghana’s landscape, culture, and language through the design of a stool, symbols, photographs, and comics. I will also explore Ghanaian philosophy and symbology. In this way, this gallery will explore the idea of the abstract versus the material.
This process of using an abstract symbol/ icon to understand a material event runs parallel to the purpose of the gallery: the material event of my parent’s wedding being an anchor point between the invisible aspects of Ghanaian culture, like philosophy.

Vivian Ye, Signals
Signals is an immersive, data-driven installation that translates environmental information from wildland–urban interface (WUI) zones into a dynamic visual and auditory experience. Drawing inspiration from Richard Mosse’s infrared photographs of the Amazon and UW-Madison’s MFA artist, Anne Stoner’s sonic installations that convert data into sensory form, the project reimagines wildfire research as a deeply immersive and embodied encounter.
In its first iteration of the project, Signals transforms patterns of wildfire frequency in WUI into shifting projections created through Adobe’s Lumetri Scope. These moving images create an immersive surface of shifting light and color that mimics the atmospheric environment of wildfire landscapes. By merging scientific data into sensory forms, the work bridges environmental science and visual art, creating a sensory based installation that confronts the precarity and urgency of changing fire ecologies shaped by climate change and human presence.

Matthew Lyga, Canyon Sleaze FW 2026
Canyon Sleaze is a Fall/Winter 2026 collection inspired by the edge effect between the Grand Canyon and the Las Vegas Strip. Prominent themes are warm and cozy earth tones and pops of bright neons. Through handicraft techniques such as floor loom weaving and machine knitting, I will create a five look collection featuring machine knit and hand woven fabrics and tailored garments.

Justin Russell, Splus
In the past year I’ve used the studio in Sellery to launch my brand “Splus” into the world. Rap in Madison has a long history of being disregarded, frowned upon, and even banned. My rap collective and I, for the first time in 50 years of hiphop in Madison, have built a rap scene in the city that is picking up buzz. This scene is 100% centered around the youth and creatives helping other creatives. My collective wants to fund a large scale performance to show how far the new generation of music has brought the city in the last year. This award would help us get one step closer to not only showcasing great young talents in the city but social justice as a whole.