Installation view: Hope Ginsburg’s Meditation Ocean: Aquarius Reef Base at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 2026
When U.S. News & World Report recently named VCUarts No. 1 (tied for) public fine arts program in the country and No. 2 overall in its 2026 Best Graduate Schools ranking, it reflects what our alumni, students and faculty already know: this is a unique place where creative excellence and rigorous inquiry go hand in hand.
Across disciplines and departments, VCUarts faculty and students are producing research and creative work that resonates locally, nationally and around the world. This is a testament to the quality and ambition of the work happening every day in our studios, creative spaces, performance halls and beyond our classrooms.
The accomplishments of VCUarts faculty speak loudly. From Hong Kong to La Jolla, from the exhibiting, inventing and receiving recognition at the highest levels of their fields. They live, push and teach creativity, deploying it in service of something even bigger than the arts—solving real-world problems, shifting perspectives, creating meaning and improving lives.
Finding the Human Behind the Poetry
Featuring Sasha Waters, professor in the Department of Photography and Film
Sasha Waters directed a documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, the first cinematic portrait of the beloved American poet. Waters goes well beyond the public image most readers know, exploring the full arc of her life. Mary Oliver is beloved for her evocative interpretations of the natural world, but Waters wanted to capture the more layered story behind the poetry.
The film focuses on Oliver’s resilience in the face of childhood trauma and her deep affinity for nature as a source of salvation, which she credited for helping her deal with life’s realities. Oliver’s biographer served as a consultant on the film, offering rare insight into the poet’s creative process. The film also features readings by Helena Bonham Carter, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus and Oprah Winfrey, among others.
Waters collaborated with two VCUarts alumni, Tyler Kirby (B.F.A. ’14) and Janelle Proulx (M.F.A. ’14) of Departure Point Films, on the documentary. Previously, Kirby served as Line Producer on Waters’ 2018 feature film, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World reflects Waters’ longer body of work as a documentarian drawn to figures who are outsiders and arrive at recognition on their own terms.
The film is a co-production of Pieshake Pictures and WNET. The film will air Aug. 26 on the PBS series American Masters.
At the Intersection of Listening and Space
Featuring Stephen Vitiello, professor in the Department of Kinetic Imaging
Stephen Vitiello, former department chair of kinetic imaging from 2018–26, has had a remarkable year by any measure. The past year involved new recordings, an international film premiere, a major live performance abroad, and an essay for one of New York’s most significant experimental art venues.
The centerpiece is Second, his album on the Spanish label Balmat, made in collaboration with Brendan Canty of Fugazi, Hahn Rowe of Hugo Largo, and Geologist of Animal Collective. NPR Music named it one of the best albums of the month, and Hearing Things reached for an unlikely but apt metaphor, calling it a “post-rock tasting menu prepared by three James Beard award-winning chefs.”
Three of Vitiello’s additional releases in 2025 have each drawn critical attention from the experimental music press: Trinity with Australian sound artist Lawrence English, Sublingual Infinities with poet Edwin Torres, and the EP Brush with producer Taylor Deupree.
In addition to the recordings, Vitiello composed the score for Every Contact Leaves a Trace, a new documentary by filmmaker Lynne Sachs that premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. For The Kitchen in New York, he authored an essay on the life and legacy of pioneering sound artist Steve Roden, a reflection rooted in years of close friendship and collaboration and a community of practice Vitiello has long helped shape.
With his work in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, his live work has taken him from the New Ear Festival hosted at the Fridman Gallery in New York to CaixaForum Barcelona, where his trio with Canty and Rowe performed alongside the Barcelona-based duo Espacio Vacio—and shows no sign of slowing down.
From Geology to Gold: Art as Environmental Advocacy
Featuring Susie Ganch, professor in the Craft and Material Studies program in the Department of Fine Arts
Susie Ganch was recently awarded a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Arts Grants and the New York Foundation for the Arts to support Radical Jewelry Makeover: Lending Library, which is part of her international traveling community mining project that links recycling and reuse with the creation of jewelry. The lending library aims to shift audience habits away from over-consumptive private ownership toward shared, sustainable ecosystems of reuse.
In 2024, Ganch received the James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Educator Award and the Society of North American Goldsmiths’ IMPACT Award—two of the field’s most respected organizations.
Ganch’s background in geology has heavily influenced her work centered on conversations about the environment, consumption, beauty and adornment. That unusual trajectory from mapping mineral deposits for mining companies to making art that challenges the very industry she once studied has produced one of the most distinctive and socially engaged practices in American craft today.
One Eye on the Past, One Eye on the Future
Featuring Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, assistant professor in the Sculpture and Extended Media program in the Department of Fine Arts
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste doesn’t shy away from difficult history. He walks straight into it, and invites the rest of us to follow.
The award-winning artist was named one of 15 visual artists nationwide to receive a 2025 Creative Capital Award, one of the most prestigious honors in contemporary art. The award provides unrestricted project grants of up to $50,000 and connects recipients with advisors, mentors and peers who can help take ambitious work further into the world.
Toussaint-Baptiste’s project “There, Eyes Were Watching” earned him national attention.
The acclaimed, multidisciplinary conceptual work challenges how antebellum history is distorted through what is known as “heritage marketing,” the use of a place’s perceived history and legacy for promotional purposes. The specific physical site at the center of the work is an antebellum plantation in Louisiana rebranded as a bed-and-breakfast glorifying the antebellum South.
Toussaint-Baptiste seeks to replace that structure with a monument and public space for local and Indigenous governance. The title is a deliberate play on Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, with one crucial substitution. By replacing “their” with “there,” Toussaint-Baptiste anchors the work in something concrete and physical: the building itself, the land, the place where history happened and where it still quietly lives.
While the work will physically transform the building, the artist cautions that transformation is not the same as erasure. His goal is not to rewrite a painful chapter in history but to shape it into something more nuanced, more honest and ultimately more just. The Creative Capital judges recognized the work for something rare—its ability to recontextualize a piece of the present still entangled in a deeply problematic past.
“This recognition felt like an institutional vote of support from my peers in the field,” Toussaint-Baptiste says. “It’s a positive push towards this gesture that’s both deeply personal and also incredibly significant.”
The multiyear project is evolving as a series of installations, writing and performances—a public art intervention whose impact radiates far beyond a single building.
“My hope is that people who view this work will feel a sense of release,” Toussaint-Baptiste says. “I want them to walk away with the feeling that comes with a long exhale. I want them to know that this space now rightfully belongs to a group of people, and I want them to feel a sense of justice.”
Breathing With the Ocean: Art, Science and the Call of the Deep
Featuring Hope Ginsburg, professor and chair of the Department of Kinetic Imaging
Hope Ginsburg has brought one of the most ambitious immersive art installations in recent memory to national and international audiences: Meditation Ocean. She conceived and directed the exhibition in collaboration with an extensive ecosystem of collaborators, using a six-screen installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, to submerge viewers in the marine habitats of Biscayne National Park. This essentially created a physical link between the landlocked Midwest and the Florida Keys, inviting audiences to breathe alongside underwater species through synchronized video and soundscape.
The work has since evolved into Meditation Ocean: Aquarius Reef Base at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. This iteration reimagines the world’s only active undersea research habitat as a space for contemplative practice, contextualized within the scientific legacy of Scripps. Visitors enter immersive projections filmed at the original underwater platform, surrounded by interpretive exhibits including a recreation of the aquanauts’ living quarters.
The installation draws a striking parallel to the “overview effect,” which is the profound shift often reported by astronauts when viewing Earth as a borderless whole from space and applies that same concept to saturation divers living beneath the ocean’s surface. At its core, the project asks how the practice of paying attention “with” other species might strengthen communal resilience as the climate changes—a question that’s as urgent as it is poetic. And one that only an artist could frame this way.
Ginsburg’s engagement with social practice, art that engages communities across diverse fields, goes back to her Sponge projects in 2006, which used the sea sponge as a model for porous, interdisciplinary learning and exchange. Meditation Ocean is the fullest expression yet of that lifelong inquiry.
Notable Faculty Research
Art Education: Yiwen Wei was named 2026 Southeastern Region Higher Education Art Educator by the National Art Education Association, an honor recognizing outstanding art educators internationally. She received the 2026 National Art Education Foundation Research Grant to support research focused on art students’ creative experience with and without the use of generative AI. Her team research project, Capital and Global Knowledge Flow, is the first to critically examine global knowledge flows and the transformation of international scholars’ capital within U.S.-Taiwan art education context.
Art History: Michelle Yee received the prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Archives of American Art. Her research focuses on critical race visual culture, specifically contemporary Asian American and Asian diasporic art.
Cinema: J.M. Tyree is serving as editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly, the oldest academic film journal in the country, covering global film and television through essays, filmmaker interviews and more. His first issue featured recent releases, including the animated Hollywood blockbuster Inside Out 2, the Netflix series Ripley and offbeat gems like The Substance, Love Lies Bleeding and I Saw the TV Glow. Upcoming issues celebrating the journal’s 80th volume will feature dossiers on David Lynch and on Asian American film.
Communication Arts: Ernesto Rodriguez Cruz’s animated short The Discovery (2025) was screened in 24 countries across five continents, receiving over 35 awards and nominations. Told through a surreal and dreamlike narrative, the film explores the weight of past and present decisions, capturing the universal struggle of facing the unknown.
Fashion Design and Merchandising: Jeannine Diego’s film A Wardrobe, An Island took Best Documentary honors at the Shanghai Indie Film Festival and Best Women Empowerment Feature at the Hong Kong Indie Film Festival. The documentary journeys through the mirrors and wardrobes of four Cuban women, revealing an intimate, subterranean Cuba through the unique challenge of dressing on the island.
Kinetic Imaging: Semi Ryu’s SentimentVoice virtual reality and emotion AI to amplify immigrant stories through immersive storytelling. The project was featured at these major venues: SIGGRAPH 2025 Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, a leading conference on computer graphics and interactive technologies; the Ammerman Center Triennial Symposium for Arts and Technology; and the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival, for an invited main exhibition at Hong Kong City Hall.
Photography and Film: Tesora Molina-Garcia’s work exploring migration politics and cultural memory appeared in several prominent exhibitions in 2026: Becoming Sticky: Equatorial Vision at the University of Oregon’s Decolonization and Global Justice Conference; Strategies of Resistance: Immigrant Legacies Beyond Assimilation at Chicago’s Heaven Gallery which examines how Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan artists challenge displacement and cultural erasure; and Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville’s MEDIA SWAMP: New Media in the South, a group exhibition exploring how human and digital bodies intersect with cultural memory.
Sculpture and Extended Media: Michael Jones McKean’s planetary sculpture Twelve Earths, which began in 2017, features a dozen vastly different sites located along a single geographical ring, forming a “unifying great circle” stretching 25,000 miles around the planet. This spring, he added a blue whale feeding and foraging ground off the coast of New Zealand.
