Staff
Mark Gens
Assistant Chairperson of Fine Arts
Mark Gens is a multimedia artist whose work includes collage, installation, video, e-literature, sculpture, and critical writing. He lives, works, and writes in Brooklyn. Recently, Mark’s work was exhibited at Kraftwerk Bille (2022) and Galerie Postel (2021) in Hamburg, Germany. Mark was a Keyholder resident at The Lower East Side Printshop, NYC (2020-21). He has exhibited in many group exhibitions throughout the US. His paper A Critical Analysis of Art in the Post-Internet Era was published in Gnovis Journal (Spring 2017) A peer-reviewed journal from the Graduate Communication, Culture & Technology Department at Georgetown University. Additional work has been published in Caustic Frolic, a journal published by NYUs XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. In addition to his prolific studio practice, Mark has worked on community-building projects with NY City youth, prepared and presented LGBTQ+ materials and events at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, implemented art education workshops for incarcerated people at Rikers Island, and curated exhibits.
- BFA, Otis College of Art, Sculpture/New Genres
- MFA, Pratt Institute, Fine Arts
Jane South
Chair of Fine Arts
Born in Manchester, UK, Jane South worked in experimental theater before moving to the United States in 1989. She has a BFA in Theater from Central St. Martins, London, UK, and an MFA in Painting & Sculpture from UNC Greensboro. Solo exhibitions include Switch Back (2020), Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Shifting Structures: Survey (2019), Mills Gallery, Central College, Pella, IA; Raked (2014), Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; Floor/Ceiling (2013), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; Box (2011), Knoxville Museum of Art, TN and Shifting Structures: Stacks (2010), the New York Public Library, NY. Selected group exhibitions include the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, NY, SLASH: Paper Under the Knife, Museum of Arts & Design (MAD), NY; Burgeoning Geometries: Constructed Abstractions, Whitney Museum of American Art, Altria; The Drawing Center, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD. South’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, the LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, New York Magazine, Frieze, ArtNews, NY Arts Magazine, and The New Yorker. She is a contributor to the book “The Artist as Cultural Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life” (editor: Sharon Louden). Grants and residencies include Brown/RISD Mellon Foundation Fellowship (2015); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2009); Dora Maar House, Menérbes, France (2010); Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France (2010); Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001 & 2008); New York Foundation for the Arts (2007); Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2008); MacDowell Colony, NH (2002 & 2004); Yaddo, NY (2001 & 2002). In 2018 South was elected to the National Academy of Design. South was awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship.
- BFA, Central St. Martins, Theater
- MFA, UNC Greensboro, Painting
Faculty
Michael Brennan
Adjunct Associate Professor, CCE
Brennan is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter. BA, University of Florida (Classics), 1987; MFA/MS, Pratt Institute (dual master’s degrees Painting and Art History), 1992. He has been teaching at Pratt Institute since 1998, and is currently Adjunct Professor with CCE, GCC Chair, and Graduate Painting Area Coordinator. He has also taught at Hunter College, Cooper Union, and SVA. Brennan is represented by Minus Space, and has worked with Lucas Schoormans, Anthony Meier Fine Art, Yoshii Gallery, and Thatcher Projects. He has exhibited internationally in such cities as Brussels, Cologne, Mexico City, Paris, Shanghai, Sydney, and Venice. Brennan’s group exhibitions include MoMA PS1, CCNOA, and Industry City. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Art, and San Jose Museum of Art, as well as General Dynamics, American Express, among other private collections, and has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Brennan has written numerous articles for Artnet (Painters Journal), The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, as well as many catalog essays.
- BA, University of Florida, Classics
- MFA/MS, Pratt Institute, Painting/Art History
Cassils
Associate Professor
CASSILS is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’s art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle and survival. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’s work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment. Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.They are the recipient of the National Creation Fund (2022), a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalog Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils’s work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.
- Ecole Nationale Superieur des Beaux Arts, Paris, France
- BFA, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
- MFA, California Institute of Arts, Art and Integrated Media
Gabriela (Gaby) Collins Fernandez
Visiting Assistant Professor
Gaby Collins-Fernandez is an artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees from Dartmouth College (BA) and the Yale School of Art (MFA, Painting/Printmaking). Her work has been shown in the US and internationally, including at Peter Freeman, Inc., the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and el Museo del Barrio, NY. Her work has been discussed in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail and artcritical, and on the video interview series, Gorky’s Granddaughter. She is a recipient of residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), The Marble House Project (Dorset, VT), and a 2013 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Art Award. Collins-Fernandez is also a writer whose texts have appeared in Cultured Magazine, The Miami Rail, and The Brooklyn Rail. She is a founder and publisher of the annual magazine Precog, and a co-director of the artist-run art and music initiative BombPop!Up.
- BA, Dartmouth College
- MFA, Yale School of Art, Painting/Printmaking
Grayson Cox
Adjunct Associate Professor
Grayson Cox is a Brooklyn-based artist that combines sculpture, furniture, printmaking and painting to make artworks with psychological thresholds where the viewer is offered slippery points of entry into unknown power dynamics. He holds a BFA in Printmaking from Indiana University and a Masters of Fine Art from Columbia University. Grayson is the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic innovation and collaboration grant, National Society of Arts & Letters Career Award, the Daisy Soros Prize, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency. He has exhibited in New York and internationally including the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the New Museum, NY; Elizabeth Foundation, New York; the Fisher Landau Center for Art, Queens, NY; Kunsthalle Galapagos, Brooklyn, NY; the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, NY; and the Sculpture Center in Queens, NY.
- BFA, Indiana University, Printmaking
- MFA, Columbia University
Joe Fyfe
Adjunct Professor, CCE
Joe Fyfe is a painter and art critic, based in New York City.
His paintings are deceptively simple. Using acrylic paint on primed burlap and jute, he limits his palette to a few colors in each work.
His works have been exhibited in places as diverse as New York City, Philadelphia, Paris, and Hanoi.
He was awarded a 2002 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant and has received a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo, and MacDowell colonies.
- BFA, University of the Arts (Philadelphia College of Art)
Langdon Graves
Visiting Assistant Professor
Langdon Graves is a Virginia-born, New York City-based artist who holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting and Printmaking and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. She is adjunct faculty at Parsons where she teaches for the First Year Program and HEOP; a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute; and works with teen artists across NYC’s public schools through Studio in a School and the Department of Education. Langdon is represented by Dinner Gallery in New York City and has had solo exhibitions in New York, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas, Vermont and Massachusetts and has participated in group shows throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia. Langdon has attended the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Kunstenaarsinitiatief Residency and Exhibition Program in the Netherlands, the Object Limited residency in Bisbee, Arizona and will attend STONELEAF Retreat in the summer of 2022. She is a recipient of Canson & Beautiful Decay’s Wet Paint Grant and has been featured in Art in America, VICE, Juxtapoz, Art F City, Blouin Artinfo, Hyperallergic and Madeline Schwartzman’s See Yourself X.
- BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Painting and Printmaking
- MFA, Parsons School of Design, Fine Arts
www.cargocollective.com/langdongraves
Anna Hoberman
Visiting Assistant Professor
Anna Hoberman is an artist and printmaker living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Anna completed undergraduate degree study at Skidmore College and the Glasgow School of Art and received an MFA in Printmaking from Brooklyn College. Anna also attended the Tamarind Institute for professional printer training in lithography and has assisted at several printshops including: Island Press, Solo Impression, Milestone Graphics, Deb Chaney Editions and The Lower East Side Printshop. In addition to running her own contract shop, Afternoon Editions, Anna is an adjunct instructor of printmaking at New York University and Pratt Institute.
- BFA, Skidmore College, Glasgow School of Art, Fine and Studio Arts
- MFA, Brooklyn College, Printmaking
Catherine Le Cleire Wright
Adjunct Professor, CCE
Solo and group exhibitions include Montclair Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, William Paterson University, College of New Jersey, University of Wisconsin, Dana Library, Center for Contemporary Printmaking, University Council on the Humanities; also taught at MIT’s Visual Arts Program, Hunter College, Bennington College, Maryland Institute of Art.
- BA, Ursinus College, Political Science
- BFA, Philadelphia College of Art
- MAE, Philadelphia College of Art, Art Education
- MFA, University of Southern California, Printmaking
Steve Locke
Professor
Steve Locke was born in Cleveland, OH, and lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to muse on the connections between desire, identity, and violence. Locke received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2001. Extending his commitment to a painting practice, he began to seek alternative ways to amplify public engagement around his art, partnering with institutions, municipalities, and even the US Postal Service to reach new audiences.
- BS, Boston University
- BFA, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
- MFA, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
- Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Nat Meade
Visiting Associate Professor
Nat Meade is a Brooklyn-based painter and educator who uses his work to reflect on the complex feelings that surround the experience of moving through different phases of life. The figures in Meade’s paintings become stand-ins for himself in his investigation of the experience of becoming an adult, husband, and parent, each character viewed through the dual lens of self-scrutiny and societal expectation. Meade received his BFA from the University of Oregon and his MFA from Pratt Institute. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally and has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, Juxtapoz, The Boston Globe, and Hyperallergic. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 2009, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in 2016, the Siena Art Institute in 2018, and the James Castle House Summer Residency in Boise, Idaho in the summer of 2021.
- BFA, University of Oregon
- MFA, Pratt Institute
- Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Carlos Motta
Associate Professor
On sabbatical Fall 2025
Carlos Motta is an artist and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice, Fine Arts, Pratt Institute. His multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia. His career-survey exhibition Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance is on view at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) through October 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria in 2026 and Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France in 2027. Motta received a Ruth Arts Award in 2025.
- BFA, School of Visual Arts, Photography
- MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College
- Whitney Museum Independent Study Program
Niama Safia Sandy
Visiting Assistant Professor
Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based curator, essayist and musician. Sandy’s curatorial practice delves into the human story – through the critical lenses of healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. She is an agitator who calls into question and makes sense of the nature of modern life and to celebrate our shared humanity in the process. Her aim is to leverage history, the visual, written and performative arts to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them to lift us all to a higher state of historical, ontological and spiritual wholeness.
- BA ,Howard University School of Communications, Journalism
- MFA, SOAS University of London, Anthropology Migration & Diaspora Studies
Steven Sergiovanni
Visiting Assistant Professor
With over 20 years experience in the gallery world Steven was the former Director of Mixed Greens, a gallery established in the late 1990s to support emerging artists so they could gain a wider audience. Mixed Greens had a reputation as an approachable and inventive gallery where artists were given their first New York solo exhibitions. It was also a gallery who pioneered promoting artists online and in experimental spaces.
He is the co-founder of The Remix, a project-based curatorial team established to exhibit the work of underrepresented artists. The Remix’ first podcast will be released in Summer 2018. Sergiovanni’s experience as director, gallerist and dealer hinges on a continued methodology of transparency.
Prior to Mixed Greens, Steven started his career at Jack Shainman Gallery, and has since worked for several galleries including Charles Cowles, Holly Solomon and Andrea Rosen. He is a member of the New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA) and was the former Vice President of the Board of Directors for Visual AIDS, a Contemporary arts organization committed to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness. He regularly speaks at institutions such as FIT, NYU and New York Academy of Art. He is currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute, teaching Professional Practices.
- BA, Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, Art History
- MA, New York University, Arts Administration
Jean Shin
Adjunct Professor, CCE
Jean Shin is known for her sprawling and often public sculptures, transforming accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity, and community engagement. Often working cooperatively within a community, Shin amasses vast collections of everyday objects—Mountain Dew bottles, mobile phones, 35mm slides—while researching their history of use, circulation, and environmental impact. Distinguished by this labor-intensive and participatory process, Shin’s creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the U.S., Shin works in Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, New York. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where in 2020 she was the first Korean-American woman artist featured in a solo exhibition. Shin has received numerous awards, including the Frederic Church Award for her contributions to American art and culture. Her works have been highlighted in The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine, among others.
Her body of work includes several permanent public artworks commissioned by major agencies and municipalities, most recently a landmark commission for the MTA’s Second Ave Subway in NYC. She is a tenured Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute and holds an honorary doctorate from New York Academy of Art.
- BFA, Pratt Institute, Painting
- MS, Pratt Institute, Art History and Criticism
- Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
Laurel Sparks
Adjunct Associate Professor
Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work embodies encoded symbols and patterns that pay tribute to counter-culture legacies and esoteric magic traditions. She holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, MA. Her exhibitions include solo shows at Kate Werble gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn and group shows at Cheim and Read gallery, NYC; EFA Project Space, NYC;; Franklin Street Works, Stamford, CT; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC; Barbara Walters Gallery at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Berman Museum at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; and Art In General, NYC.
Sparks’ work has appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, Blouin Artinfo, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Modern Painters, New American Paintings, the Drawing Center’s the Bottom Line, Art21 Magazine, Vogue Mexico, Boston Globe, Art in America, Bloomberg, Timeout New York, Huffington Post, and Art and Auction. She has received numerous grants and fellowships including a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, Residenza del Palmerino, Associazione Culturale Il Palmerino, IT, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship.
Sparks recently completed an immersive installation and six performances in collaboration with sound/video artist Shawn Hansen at Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn NY. She has a forthcoming project grant and residency at Tinworks Art, Bozeman, MT.
- BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University
- MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of Art, Bard College
Adrienne Tarver
Visiting Assistant Professor
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY, with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch.
She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo shows at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; the Academy Art Museum in Maryland; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA; Dinner Gallery (formerly Victori+Mo) in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia; and two-person exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in New York and Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair and has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.
Adrienne is represented in Los Angeles, CA, and Sun Valley, ID, by OCHI.
- BFA, Boston University
- MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago