If you happened to wander past the Forsyth Park bandshell on Saturday during Sidewalk Arts, you were in luck. Witnessing the Bee Sharps performing their version of KATSEYE's top bop "Gabriela," complete with choreography, was another perfect part of an unforgettable, magical day.

The weather was sweet. The record-breaking crowd celebrated chromatic chalk excellence. The 45th edition of beloved Sidewalk Arts festival reached its colorful culmination.

Prizes for best student, graduate student, prospective student, and student group artworks were richly, deeply, deserved. Spirit Awards and Best of Show were, as ever, the chalk of the town.

Stroll control: a great day for Sidewalk Arts 2026!

And the winners are….
 
Student Spirit Award: "Lawnmowers" (Federica Merljak, Nicolas Espinosa, Thiago Franco Morassutti)
Alumni Spirit Award: Morgan Winters
Best of Show: Daniella Reilly
 
Individual Student 1st Place: Casey Russ
Individual Student 2nd Place: Catherine Bock
Graduate Student: Grace Wisdom
 
Student Group 1st Place: "Purple" (Lily Anderson, Mikaela Parrish)
Student Group 2nd Place: "Soulcrushers" (Chris DeMassa, Isabella Kiely)
 
Alumni 1st Place: Britt Spencer
Alumni 2nd Place: Hunter Muddiman

Prospective Students:
1st: Star Peteranetz
2nd: Lola Gourneau
3rd: Dana Kim

Art by Casey Russ.

Art by Lily Anderson and Mikaela Parrish.

Art by Britt Spencer.

Art by Daniella Reilly.

Art by Morgan Winters.

Free to Bee: thanks for coming to Sidewalk Arts 2026!

Spring has sprung, and it's time for the 45th annual SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival! This Saturday, April 25, the chalk will rock as SCAD students, alumni, and local high school students transform Savannah's historic Forsyth Park into a technicolor landscape of chromatic compositions in a beloved tradition. More than 800 squares in the heart of the park will serve as concrete canvases for the day. 

"Beneath the majestic canopy of Savannah's grand live oaks, our visionary Bees elevate the city's sidewalks into an ethereal gallery of otherworldly enchantment where magic blooms in thousands of delightful, colorful works of wonder," said SCAD President Paula Wallace. "Come see the artistry of SCAD students and alumni in chalk-dusted éclat, step by step, square by square. See you there!"

Prizes will be awarded for Best of Show, as well as for the top individual SCAD student, student group, alumni, and graduate student. The SCAD Student Spirit Award and SCAD Alumni Spirit Award celebrate the best chalk works that embody the heart of the hive. Local high school students will also place in the competition.

Each spring, SCAD hosts Family and Alumni Weekend, offering three fun-filled days of events and opportunities for SCAD families to visit Savannah and for alumni to reconnect with their university community. The highlight of the weekend is the annual SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival.

Thousands of attendees, including SCAD faculty and staff, local Savannahians, and city visitors will converge downtown for this event, shop in local stores, and dine in local restaurants. This event, like so many SCAD signature events, has a huge economic impact on Savannah. According to a 2023 study conducted by Tripp Umbach, the leading national consulting firm for nonprofit, arts, and tourism sectors, SCAD generates $1 billion annually for the Savannah area.

During this year's event, guests can "take a turn" on a life-size Monopoly board and enjoy a concert by SCAD's elite ensemble The Bee Sharps, who will perform at noon and 1:15 p.m.

Food vendors will include Java Burrito Company, Roly Poly Sandwiches, Chick-fil-A, BowTie Barbecue, Savannah Square Pops, Leopold's Ice Cream, Maui Wowi Hawaiian Coffees & Smoothies, and Coca-Cola. This year's SCAD Sidewalk Arts Festival is sponsored by Bon Appétit Management Company, Coca-Cola Bottling Company, Yates-Astro Termite & Pest Control, The Flatbush Foundation, E. Shaver Booksellers, BrightView Landscaping, Doki Doki Ice Creamery, EventWorks, Sunstates Security, Visit Savannah, and Ex Libris. Festival attendants are encouraged to share their imagination and creativity through Instagram using #SCADchalk.

Learn more about this year's event here!  

It would have been worth it for the Rihanna story alone.
 
On Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Jones sat on stage at the SCAD Museum of Art theater, recounting the first time he met the Barbadian pop star. Rihanna had just so happened to have been wearing one of his hats, and told him: "I bought it at Dover Street Market." As Jones spoke, he placed his hand over his heart, a moment of graceful astonishment from the greatest milliner of the past half century.
 
The beret-wearing, bright-eyed Jones was in conversation with SCAD chair of fashion Kori Smith Urso during SCADstyle 2026. Having visited classes at Eckburg Hall earlier in the day, Jones now addressed the theater full of students: "My first year at college was 1976," he said. "I was a punk." Cue the milliner's centrality to crucial moments of cultural foment.

Jones has thrived at the forefront of fashion now for decades, making iconic hats for royalty and rock stars including Boy George, Lady Diana, Mick Jagger, and Lady Gaga. Fashion houses from Vivienne Westwood to Christian Dior have embraced him, making him haute couture's milliner of choice. He came to SCADstyle 2026 with impeccable timing, as the SCAD FASH exhibition Dior: Crafting Fashion opens this week in Atlanta.

Smith Urso kicked off their conversation: "Stephen, you started in the high energy DIY world of the Blitz Kids' London club scene, and now you work at the highest level of the fashion industry. What is the one rebellious lesson from your early days that you still rely on when working within the rigorous heritage of Dior?"

Chapeau my gosh: magnificent millner Stephen Jones at SCADstyle.

"There's always high life and low life, the two things that you really combine," Jones said. "Whether it's experience or innovation or creativity or boredom or angst or no night's sleep, all that goes into the great blender and becomes something new."

A slide show of extraordinary images looped on the stage's big screen: seaside scenes from a Liverpool childhood; a glimpse of Jones in Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" video from 1982; dozens of vibrant models wearing his stunning creations; Jones aside collaborators including John Galliano, Raf Simmons, and Maria Grazia Chiuri.

"I think it's my job to make everybody feel happy or more optimistic," he said. "A really important part of what I do is put people in a good mood."

The first English milliner to work for a French couture house enthused over the pioneering hat designs of Christan Dior himself: "Monsieur Dior, either he did big hats which he thought were glamorous and sexy and represented Paris, or small hats which were supposed to be about the future and modernity and getting into a car."

The topic turned to Jones' collaborations creative director Jonathan Anderson, including Dior's recent, rapturously received spring/summer 2026 collection. The milliner explained how the hats made from flowers bound with satin ribbon were installed to models' heads: "The weight of the flowers was more than a hairpin could support. So, we did a braid on the girl's hair, and a wire connecting, and then we had to sew the wire onto the braid. They were positioned exactly correctly and symmetrically. Then the hair was taken from the front over the back so it looked as though it was the most effortless thing ever. But it was so complicated, I cannot tell you."

Suddenly, Jones said to Smith Urso: "You're going to be my model." Reaching towards an adjacent table, he picked up a tricorne with an epic brim, and fitted Smith Orso with the stingray. The hat was a sensual, architectural marvel. It looked fantastic. The chair beamed.

Jones cast then models from the students in the audience. Each took the stage and was adorned with a hat. Stars were born. Jones had a final reminder: "A hat is a frame for the face."

Hat's all, folks! Thanks to everyone who made SCADstyle 2026 such a smashing success!

"How do you photograph the unphotographable?" asked artist Farah Al Qasimi, her head tilted at a curious angle. The artist also known as Frequently Asked Question then offered her answer: "A little bit of intervention."

Al Qasimi was in conversation with museum exhibitions associate curator Brittany Richmond. It was deFINE Art 2026 live on the SCAD MOA theater stage, and it was awesome.

The occasion was the opening of Psychic Repair, Al Qasimi's double whammy activation of the museum's street-facing marquee vitrines and trippy inner gallery. "You're an image maker and you have a very specific relationship to images," Richmond began, prompting Al Qasimi to explain the dynamic between Instagram posts and museum-ready fine art.

"For photographers there's often this hierarchy where something made with your camera is an art object, and things made with your phone somehow count less," Al Qasimi replied. "I think of it all as the same enterprise, the same project of world-making."

What a world she's made: the Abu Dhabi-born, Brooklyn-based artist spoke of her "collaged sense of identity" (Emirati father, Lebanese mother, fluent in Photoshop and the Ivy League scene) that has left her "feeling like an outsider everywhere. Luckily that's a very good quality for a photographer to have, because you can find something a little bit fantastic or otherworldly in the everyday."

Psychic Repair (per the exhibition's promo collateral) presents "highly saturated images that explore rituals of self-presentation and their ties to identity, memory, and belief formation." Photographs like "Absolute Radiance" vibrate at freakish peaks of the chromatic spectrum, seductive and strange.

Farah Al Qasimi, Psychic Repair, exterior museum view, 2026.

Al Qasimi then name-checked doyenne of dancing dolphins Lisa Frank, and mentioned "something a little bit more sinister underneath the surface of all that celebratory color." "We are so accustomed to images trying to sell us something," Richmond observed.

"I like the idea that these [photographs of mine] aren't trying to sell you on anything except maybe a deeper understanding of the language of consumerism and the seduction of the image," Al Qasimi replied, shuffling her boots.

At one point, the artist referred to Psychic Repair's video installations as "moments to pause." When the curator encouraged the audience to go experience the exhibition, those moments had arrived.

In the museum, TV screens flickered. One was labeled "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Room," its title a riff on Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Headphones beckoned.

There was Al Qasimi on screen, dressed in a suit like Robert Palmer in his iconically vapid 1986 MTV smash "Addicted to Love." Then she appeared as a dorky Dubai teen, smitten with Iron Maiden and high on skin whitening cream, crooning through her karaoke machine: "Hey dad / I bought a guitar / I'm in a band / please don't be mad."

Post-sinister, parody-ready pop pantomime became a fun way to beat time. FAQ's little bit of intervention had gone the distance.

Farah Al Qasimi, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love My Room," video still from digital video, 2016.

Courtesy of the artist and Francois Ghebaly, Los Angeles / New York.

"A skeleton walks into a bar," said Laurie Anderson from the Trustees Theater stage. "And the skeleton says, 'Gimme a beer, and a mop!'"

It's unlikely that anyone came to the keynote address of deFINE Art 2026 expecting one of the world's finest performance artists to tell jokes. Yet subverting expectations is part of Anderson's mischievous métier, at least since she scored a pop hit in 1981 with the genuinely strange soundwork "O Superman." Elfin oddity is funny stuff.

The SCAD deFINE ART 2026 honoree was in Savannah on the occasion of the opening of her SCAD MOA exhibition All in Your Head. A combination of written words plus projected images achieves generative effect in the show, priming museumgoers for sensory re-orientation. A VR component lets you visit the moon.

Reports that Anderson herself would be unable to attend deFINE due to an actual blizzard in New York City were soon squashed by the sightings of her distinctive diminutive figure — dressed in wooly togs and a slouch hat — moving through the SCAD MOA galleries on opening night. Two days later, her keynote address at Trustees became a full ninety-minute concert performance that no one in the packed house will ever forget.

A violinist, a monologist, an expert b.s. detector, a martial artist: Anderson began her performance with an echoing, electrified fiddle solo, as images of outer (or inner?) space flitted across on the towering screens behind her. Are those whirring helicopter blades coming from inside the building?

"Hi," she said. "Thank you so much for this amazing award. It's great to be here." The artist then explained that last spring she was invited to perform at a festival in Austria, "and the theme of the festival was the rise of fascism in Europe." Her eyebrows spoke volumes.

Oh mom and dad: Laurie Anderson performs at SCAD deFINE Art.

Anderson began a sort of fireside chat, full of well-read references to intellectuals and spiritual leaders from Cornell West and Pema Chodron to John Cage and Sigmund Freud. As the talk evolved, woven with her childhood memories and her dazzling, alien-baiting violin playing, she rounded on her theme: the power of words and the meaning of love.

Letters rained in recombinant digital showers on the screen as she spoke of her dead friend William S. Burroughs ("he wrote these very dark and very funny books") and Burroughs' belief that "language is a virus from outer space." Anderson pointed out how odd it had once seemed to her, the idea that "language is a virus communicable by mouth."  

Nothing polemical: meaning inferred. With a comedian's timing, the artist opened unexpected spaces for in-rushing meaning. Anderson invited the audience to think.

In the program's second half, the honoree mentioned a man named "Lou" — her late husband, the rock and roll star Lou Reed. Anderson performed a transformed rendition of Reed's gritty 1989 hit "Dirty Blvd." with its lyric "your poor huddled masses / let's club 'em to death." Ironic doublespeak became mournful. Keeping Lou alive by performing his song was an act of love.

As the evening concluded, Anderson invited the seven hundred-plus people in the audience to stand. Then she led a few, simple tai chi movements. That synchronized spontaneity created collective release. Also love.

All In Your Head is on view at SCAD MOA through June 7.

Lady Whistledown is serving! And rest assured, at this year's SCAD TVFest, her invitation is making good on its promise.

At a glorious event to celebrate the festival opening evening, SCAD students and very special guests mingled over tea, macarons, and "other petit delicacies." The news came fully detailed via an exclusive edition of Lady Whistledown's SCAD Society Papers, including the announcement that "two gems that certainly set Shondaland aglimmer" would appear.

Penelope requests your presence: "Bridgerton" fans at TVFest.

Cue the festivites at the SCADshow theater in Midtown Atlanta. Adjoa Andoh (Lady Danbury) and Golda Rosheuvel (Queen Charlotte), the scintillating stars of "Bridgerton" and its prequel "Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story," appeared to receive the Outstanding Achievement in a Series Award.

SCAD TVfest, held from Feb. 4-6, highlights the achievements of critically and commercially acclaimed performers, writers, artists and producers in television and streaming. Entering its 14th year, the festival brings together professionals from all aspects of content production, including broadcast, cable, streaming, web, social media, and advertising to discuss current industry trends and showcase today's best content.

"SCAD students and alumni are basking in the limelight alongside the industry's brightest stars, on screen and on set, with Emmy Award winners, showrunners, and casting visionaries," said President Paula Wallace. "Our SCAD students specializing in film and television are gaining a front-row seat to learn directly from their mentors and future collaborators."

"We are truly living in a golden era of television — one where the bar continues to rise and storytelling grows bolder and more ambitious every year," said Christina Routhier, senior executive director of SCAD TVfest.

Our Queen: "Bridgerton" star Golda Rosheuvel radiates with students.

This year's lineup of award recipients also includes Aldis Hodge (the Luminary Award); Ali Larter (the Distinguished Performance Award); "Survivor" host Jeff Probst (the Legend of Television Award); Lili Reinhart (the Spotlight Award); and Jackson White of the Atlanta-filmed series "Tell Me Lies" (the Rising Star Award).

Series from network and streaming platforms such as ABC, Adult Swim, Apple TV, CBS, Fox, HBO Max, Hulu, Mubi, NBC, Netflix/Shondaland, Prime Video, The Roku Channel, Sony Pictures Television, Universal Studio Group and Warner Bros. Television have been confirmed to be featured as part of the festival's content.

As stars Andoh and Rosheuvel mingled with students, was there a tiarra-topped chance to pick up hints to the fairy-tale inspired part two of the fourth season of "Bridgerton"? Perhaps.

Now please inform "the ton" that the time is now night to polish off those majestic macarons and sweep the crumbs from the table. There are more desserts to come at this year's SCAD TVFest!

Red is the color: Andoa Anjoh of "Bridgerton" at TVFest 2026!

Big screen dreams are coming true for freshman Pilot Bunch and professor Frank Hall Green, as the much-anticipated feature film Run Amok premieres at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
 
Run Amok, a dark comedy written and directed by Nitzan Bachar "NB" Mager, will be shown on Jan. 26 as part of the competition at Sundance, the legendary film festival entering its final year in Park City, Utah. The film showcases the artistry and collaboration of two of SCAD’s own — professor and producer Green and first year Bunch (B.F.A, film and television) — whose talents shine alongside an acclaimed ensemble cast.
 
"It is surreal to be going to Sundance. People work their whole lives for this opportunity, and I feel incredibly honored,” says Bunch, from Locust Grove, Ga. “What makes it even more special is knowing my mom has always dreamed of seeing one of my or my siblings’ films at Sundance, and now that dream is coming true."

"Being a working actor while studying at SCAD has been an incredible experience,” Bunch continues. “SCAD allows me to balance auditions and professional work with rigorous preparation, giving me the tools to create my own projects. As an actor, I want to gain a deeper understanding of every aspect of the industry, so I can tell my own stories, collaborate effectively, and bring my vision to life on screen.

“What makes SCAD’s film program so powerful is how directly it connects education to the industry,” said Green. “As a working independent film producer, I bring my real-world experience into the classroom so students understand how films are actually made—from story development to post-production. For Run Amok, I brought eight SCAD students onto the production, giving them firsthand experience on a professional set. That’s the SCAD model: bridging the classroom and the career. Our students are learning and working in the same environment as today’s top filmmakers.”

Students and alumni contributing to the production include background casting director and coordinator Anna Jane Gustavsen (B.F.A. film and television, 2024; B.F.A. acting, 2024), along with other alumni and current students who contributed as casting coordinators, editors, set assistants, and office assistants:

●      Brynn Lilley (M.F.A. film and television, 2024)
●      Hadley Holyoak (M.F.A. film and television, 2025)
●      Olivia Graff (B.F.A. film and television, 2026)
●      Kay Tagliaferri (B.F.A. film and television, 2025)
●      Ayush Thayya (M.F.A. film and television, 2025)
●      Jules Santamauro (B.F.A. film and television, 2023)
●      JJ Zink (B.F.A. film and television, 2026)

Run Amok tells a bold, satirical story about a teenage girl who stages an elaborate musical about the one day her high school wishes it could forget. The film stars Alyssa Marvin, Patrick Wilson, Margaret Cho, Elizabeth Marvel, and Molly Ringwald. Run Amok will  premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26 at the Eccles Theatre in Park City. For more info about screenings click here.

Sundancing: Run Amok cast photo (Bunch in red letter jacket) courtesy NB Mager.

"Always my favorite panel of the year," said film professor Michael Chaney from the intimate stage of the Gutstein Gallery on Thursday as "SCAD Alumni Voices" began. "We get to find out where our students have been, where they're going, and where you might be going as well."
 
What followed was one of the best hour-long blocks at this year's SCAD Savannah Film Festival. The alumni panelists were Sebiye Behtiyar (M.A. acting), Virginia Berg (M.F.A., production design, 2015), Nathan Engelhardt (B.F.A., animation, 2007), Filipe Messeder (B.F.A., sound design, 2016), and EmmoLei Sankofa (M.F.A., sound design, 2014).

"Tell us what happened from the time you received your diploma at SCAD to sitting here right now at Film Fest," Chaney prompted. 

Here are nuggets from each alum's response.

Grad schooling: Chaney speaks with Behtiyar and Berg.

Behtiyar made her feature film debut as the co-lead actor in this year's Preparation for the Next Life. Sebiye: "During my first year studying acting here at SCAD, I was working on projects with my film friends, and I got to know this actress who is also from China, and one day she randomly sent me a message about a testing call and said, 'I think they're looking for you!' I was so nervous, like, maybe this is the one and only chance I will have to speak my own mother tongue [Uyghur] in a film. As an international student, I never expected that there would be a role in the world that would be for me. I put all of my heart into this film."
 
Art director Berg has worked on films including Avatar: The Way of Water and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Virginia: "When I graduated, Georgia had just signed a tax incentive for the film industry, so there were film productions coming to Georgia, and one was The Do-Over by Adam Sandler, and my first job ended up being assistant for his family. Through that experience, I met production designer Perry Blake, who wrote me a letter of recommendation for the Art Directors Guild. I drove out to LA and worked my way up from production assistant, assistant art director, and now I'm an art director. A tough journey, but fantastic to find my way."
 
Engelhardt is an animation supervisor at Walt Disney Animation Studios. His film Forevergreen was featured during this year's "Professional Animated Shorts" showcase. Nathan: "I always wanted to work at Disney or Pixar or Blue Sky. After SCAD, I packed up my apartment and started driving with my mom to LA. Right around Texas, I said, 'Wouldn't it be funny if Blue Sky called because they're in New York, and we're going in the opposite direction?' And that's what happened. I got my first gig in New York with Blue Sky on Horton Hears a Who! Then I did Ice Age, Rio, and ended up going to Disney for Wreck-It Ralph, and have been there ever since. I just finished work on Zootopia 2."
 
Sound designer and editor Messeder worked on Weapons, Black Phone 2, and this year's festival favorite If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Filipe: "My junior year at SCAD, I was able to line up one internship at a Foley studio in New York. A year later, I decided to rent the absolute cheapest apartment in the most expensive city in the world and go full freelance and make connections and lean on every one of my colleagues that I had met at SCAD. I started working on a lot of shorts and independent films. Through the years, the people I met working on independent films started making bigger films. I've been working nonstop ever since."
 

Sounds good: EmmoLei Sankofa drops science on composing for TV.

Sankofa (M.F.A., sound design, 2014) is a composer who has worked on TV shows including The Other Black Girl. EmmoLei: "When I was doing my master's at SCAD, I saw what was happening in the film industry in Georgia, and I was like, hmm, maybe I should stay here, but first, let me go to LA for a few years to learn the lay of the land and bring that knowledge back. I'm a woman TV composer, so I knew that was my end goal, but I leveraged the skills that I learned in the sound design department as a production sound mixer to get directors' attention. That was my strategy and it was unconventional. When I came back to Atlanta, I got my first TV show, Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, I did horror work for AMC+, and then Step Up, and here we are today!"

Alumni all-stars (l-r): Engelhardt, Berg, Behtiyar, Messeder, Sankofa.

"The hero of my young life was Walt Disney himself," Don Bluth says in a pivotal moment in the documentary Don Bluth: Somewhere Out There, which premiered opening weekend of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. "I had been dreaming about working at Disney Studios since I was four years old." Bluth's dream permeated every frame of the film.
 
Directed by Chad Walker and Dave LaMattina, the documentary follows the life of the creator of classic animated films including The Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1996), and Anastasia (1997), and pioneering video game Dragon's Lair. As a young man, Bluth had felt driven to revitalize the glory days of animation exemplified by the golden age of Disney.
 
Working chronologically, the doc hinted at paternal darkness in Bluth's Mormon childhood, underlined his early obsession with drawing, and recounted how at age 17 he gained employment at Walt Disney Productions. At Disney, Bluth contributed to The Fox and the Hound, then had the audacity to leave a dream job to form Don Bluth Productions with friends Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy. With that, the transformation of the animation industry was underway.

Hand-drawn animation cell from An American Tail, as held in the SCAD Jen Library Special Collections.

Disney intentionally released films to compete directly with Bluth productions. Bluth films began being hurried into production before they had a top-notch script. The rub was that, through competition, Bluth had reawaked a giant, and Disney recovered its former form with 1989's The Little Mermaid. The documentary found a villain in Roy Disney who, according to Bluth, invited him back to Disney, and when Bluth declined, told him, "Then we will crush you."
 
Now a living legend himself, Bluth appeared at the Lucas Theater for Q&A following the screening to an ecstatic ovation. "I don't even recognize who the guy in the movie was," Bluth said. "I looked at it and I said to myself, that's a bossy guy!"
 
The Q&A proved to be as insightful as the film. Directors Walker and LaMattina (I Am Big Bird) were joined by composer Fergal Lawler (founding member of Irish rock band The Cranberries) and Bluth's right-hand man Lavalle Lee, VP of Don Bluth Studios.

The Secret of NIMH, said Bluth, remains the film he's most proud of, since it was made "when we were the most innocent, when we didn't know what we were doing, so we tried harder, and the story was really, really good, because it was really about a little mother trying to save her family. Every movie after that followed the same pattern."
 
Bluth and SCAD are as close as Fievel Mousekewitz and his lucky hat. The Don Bluth Studios Animation Archive, held at the Jen Library Special Collections, provided a key source of archival material for documentary directors Chad Walker and Dave LaMattina. (The archive, celebrating its twentieth anniversary at SCAD, is a crucial teaching tool for students studying film, animation, and all forms of visual narrative storytelling.)
 
Aware that the audience in the Lucas was filled with students in awe of his life and legacy, Bluth addressed them directly: "Every drawing that you make, every sketch that you make, make it represent a human emotion. So, when the viewer looks at your drawing, they feel something."

Tale waggers: Bluth (center, seated) flanked by Lavalle Lee (left) and Dave LaMattina (right), with Feargal Lawler and Chad Walker (standing, l-r).

When Hannah Esquenazi (B.F.A., photography) arrives at Dr. B's on her scooter after afternoon class in Alexander Hall, she's smiling in the sun: "This weather is the best!"

Between sips of iced oat milk latte, Esquenazi happily discusses "Dots and Stripes," her signature image for this Friday's Fine Arts Showcase, while giving enthusiastic shout-outs to photography faculty Chris Lane, Dillon McDaniel, Vivien Allender and chair Josh Jalbert, as well as printmaking professor Debora Oden.

"Hannah’s photographic work with mixed media additions mirrors her complexity and playfulness," observes Oden, who taught Esquenazi in Screen Printing for Fashion, Luxury, and Interior Spaces (PRMK 260). "Her joy regarding the process of creation elevates the classroom experience, and she has a beautiful way of allowing her subconscious mind to drive her artistic process."

The following remarks are condensed from a longer conversation.

Hannah Esquenazi, Dots and Stripes, 2024, pigment print, 25 x 18 in.
 

Hannah Esquenazi:

I would describe myself as a very tactile person. I grew up in Cali, Colombia, touching leaves and flowers, with nature all around me. So, with photography, I need to feel it in my hands and do something with a photo to make it a little bit more personal.

Sophomore year I started printing my photos on matte paper. The ink really gets into the paper, and I liked that. Someone in my class told me, oh, then you're really going to like screen printing! I signed up for the class, not knowing what it was really about. That was with professor Debora Oden.

Deb is wonderful. She dives in with each student's individual project, and pushes you to approach and achieve your vision with clarity. Her class is where I first screen printed one of my photos with polka dots. I started to see my photos as raw material for mixed media pieces, that a photo would not be the end product but the start of something.

All my work is highly collaborative. "Dots and Stripes" began as a project I did with SCAD Manor. It was a photo shoot on a white background with the model doing different poses, using her body to create geometrical shapes. The model is Isabelle Leaf, she knows how to move. We were playing with poses, finding triangles with her arms and legs.

Once I had the digital photo, I started figuring out, how can I add an element to give it that Hannah stamp? I printed it on regular printer paper and drew on top with a crayon, like a mock test of how polka dots would look if I were to screenprint it large-scale, though I never got around to making that screen print. Later I went back and saw the test version that I'd done really quickly by hand and thought, oh, there's something to this.  

I wanted to have the elegance of her pose be as sharp as could be. I scanned what I had and masked out the dots, layered it to preserve my hand element, and made the final version.

Fine Arts Showcase is an exciting and rewarding event where you get to see what you've worked on for months or years being on display for your peers. So much art is created just for your phone, and although I think that's important, there's something about seeing work in person that changes everything and forces you to be with the piece, the sizing, the framing, you look at it and appreciate it without having to scroll.

To have this image used on the physical flyer card for Fine Arts showcase, it goes back to the tactility of the original work, and makes me so happy. I'll see you there!

Connect with Hannah Esquenazi on LinkedIn.