Elizabeth Arzani (b. Charlotte, NC) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited nationally at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC; The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, Portland, OR; Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR; SOIL, Seattle, WA; The Seattle Art Fair with The Vestibule, and internationally in Luxembourg and Australia. She is a member of the artist collective, Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR. Arzani has been granted artist residencies at Kulturschapp; Walferdange, Luxembourg and New Harmony Clay Project; New Harmony, IN. Arzani has been the recipient of a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission with support from the Ford Family Foundation as well as two project grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council. Arzani holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art and a BFA in Painting and Art Education from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Tanner Lind is an artist based in Portland, OR. His abstract paintings explore an evolving language of marks, color, forms, and movements which arise from a dynamic engagement with materials, allowing them to become active participants in the discovery of an image. Lind’s paintings each exhibit an individual evolution as much as a communal progress and become remnants of an infinitely shifting discovery of change. Lind has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally, most notably at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND; the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, ND; the South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings, SD; the Hanson Howard Gallery in Ashland, OR; the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, OR; and at Nationale, Melanie Flood Projects, Carnation Contemporary, ILY2, and the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture in Portland, OR. He has been an artist in residence in the School of Design at South Dakota State University and at the McCanna House through The North Dakota Museum of Art. Lind received his BFA from North Dakota State University and his MFA in Visual Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Vo Vo (they/them) explores support strategies and models of community care within a post-traumatic social landscape, focusing on the resilience of BIPOC, LGBTQIA2S+ and disabled communities.
In their transdisciplinary art, they work in textiles, embroidery, audio, video, weaving, and furniture building. Their installations seek to interrogate power dynamics, structural oppression, challenge histories and realities of imperialism, white supremacy and colonization.
Alexis Day’s creative practice explores introspection, cultural identity, and material play. Drawing on her background in psychology and anthropology, she investigates the human mind and how culture and experience shape its perceptions of reality. Working in mixed media—including photographs, fabric, and thread—Day creates artworks that reflect both her lived experience and the broader cultural landscape. Through layering, cutting, and combining materials, Day’s practice echoes the way cognitive processes like memory and identity are pieced together within the mind. The resulting artworks are materially complex and depict Day’s distorted and dreamlike investigations into the contemporary world.
Alexis Day is an Oregon-born artist, originally from the coastal town of Bandon and based in Portland. She has held solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, including Gravid: Tides of Becoming (2024), Faceted: Time and Expectations (2021), and Cascades: Synapse and Satin (2020). Other solo exhibitions include Schemata: Dissonance and Distortion at Forsberg Art Gallery in Longview, Washington (2021), and Dismantled at the Lodge Gallery in Portland (2019).
Her work was featured in the 2020 Forefront Symposium at Cynthia Reeves Gallery in North Adams, Massachusetts, and she has completed artist residencies at The Studios at Mass MoCA (2020, 2022), The Studios of Key West (2021), and Caldera in Sisters, Oregon (2018).
Day holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (2019), a BS in Art Practices from Portland State University (2017), and a BS in Psychology from the University of Oregon (2010). Her background in psychology and anthropology informs a multidisciplinary practice centered on identity, memory, and cultural narrative.
Melanie Stevens is an artist, illustrator and writer. She is the creator of the graphic novel series, WaterShed, and the founder and director of black whole Press, a printmaking studio that hosts free workshops and provides resources, funding and residency programming for artists from marginalized communities. Most recently, she was commissioned to create a large-scale woodwork installation at North Portland Library's Black Cultural Center. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree for Political Science from Yale University and her Master’s of Fine Arts degree for Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she currently teaches.
Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and currently based in New Orleans, La. She creates the things that would have better sustained her younger self--simulations of a more livable future, and the obstacles that intervene. These look like: fictive text, videogames, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. Her work has been shown at apexart in New York, the Pilot Light in Knoxville Tennessee, Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Ganka Gallery in Tokyo, and has been covered by i-D Magazine, the New York Times, Art in America, and the Architectural Review. She hopes you're doing okay.
Takahiro Yamamoto is a choreographer, performer, and multidisciplinary artist. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He uses his artistic endeavors to think through the complexities of these ideas with his and his collaborators' mental state, physicality, and emotional response in the hope of learning how to wholeheartedly navigate living and coexisting with others in society. He has received support from Creative Capital, NEFA, Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, NCCAkron, NPN, Japan Foundation, Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium and others. His projects have been presented at Tufts University Art Galleries, On the Boards, the Chocolate Factory Theater, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, The Henry Art Gallery, GoDown Arts Centre Nairobi, among other venues.
The Office of Career Design hosts dozens of professional development workshops each semester, from grant writing to contracts for artists to building websites. The Office of Career Design also helps students find internships and jobs and hosts events for recruiters.
Willamette University