Second-Year Students
Frances Adair Mckenzie is a sculptor and animator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Quebec and Richmond, Virginia. Adair’s research into sculpture, digital materiality and its conceptual realms is expanded through rigorous studio practice and constant exploration of new technology and tools. Leading to questions regarding stability of identity, production and consumption of desire and the surface tension between digital interfaces and architectural space. Frances has had solo exhibitions at the Fonderie Darling and Centre Clark in Montreal and at Towards Gallery in Toronto. Two animations and a stop-motion virtual reality piece have been produced by the National Film Board. Her VR piece won a Canadian screen award for best immersive fiction. She was also long-listed in Quebec for the 2024 National Art Gallery of Canada’s Sobey Award.
Alexis Torres Marroquín is a Salvadoran-American artist, architectural designer, and educator based in Richmond, Virginia. Alexis’ mediums include soft sculpture, fiber art, installation, and mixed-media collage. Alexis is a 2025-2026 Visual Arts Fellow at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. They hold a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and are currently pursuing their Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Alexis is a former educator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, and is currently assistant teaching in the Art Foundations department at VCU Arts.
Lorna Williams (b. 1986, New Orleans, Louisiana) creates anthropomorphic sculptures that challenge societal conventions and explore themes of transmutation, alchemy, and the relationship between machinery and nature. Using discarded machinery, forgotten hardware, plumbing components, copper, and organic elements, Williams reconfigures industrial remnants into crucibles of inquiry where salvaged materials shed original identities and forge symbiotic bonds that pulse with uncanny vitality. Williams' work has been exhibited at institutions including the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Montserrat College of Art, and featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Art in America. Honors include awards from the Art Matters Foundation and the Leeway Foundation, as well as residencies with the Joan Mitchell and Rauschenberg Foundations. Works are held in private and institutional collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Columbia Museum of Art.
Erin Ehren (she/themme) is a first year MFA student in Sculpture and Extended Media at VCU. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and she completed significant coursework at the Jewish Theological Seminary of American and Hebrew Union College. Ehren’s sculptural practice is an act of yearning for material honesty and dissonance—a unification of surface that abstracts the concrete into an orientation toward the unknowable Sublime, the Divine. Her work has been shown widely across the US and internationally. She has participated in residencies including the Vermont Studio Center and is the recent recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Graduate Fellowship.
First-Year Students
(b. 1991, Jerusalem) lives and works between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Richmond, VA. Through sculpture, painting, and installation, Shach synthesizes and transforms various elements, exploring the internal tension that exists between them — between the material and the visionary. His work emphasizes how seemingly non-events, when treated with sensitivity, can reveal a fantastic potential. Shach’s works are characterized by ambiguity and are saturated with reflections and transparencies, allowing images and materials to merge into one another. In the absence of a central protagonist, he seeks to imbue objects and metaphors with agency, grace, and at times, even religious significance. The viewer’s initial point of contact with the work is often through its bodily proportions and the tactile experience it evokes. Through intense polishing, ambiguous functionality, and the use of unconventional materials, Shach aims to provoke a physical response, tempting the viewer into touching the piece.
Sara Willa is a sculptor and experimental dancemaker. Through work with found objects, biomaterials, and performance practices, she explores embodiment, affect, material politics, and their entanglements. She has been supported by residencies at La Caldera (Barcelona), PLUTO (Valencia, Spain), Théâtre de Vanves (Paris), Centro Huarte (Pamplona), and The Liminal Gallery (Valencia), among others, and was a participant in the 2025 edition of the Postnatural Independent Program at the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid. She graduated with honors in Studio Art and Dance at Pomona College (CA) and completed significant coursework in Contemporary Dance Performance and Choreography at the Valencia Superior Dance Conservatory prior to pursuing her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media at VCU. She is a cofounder of Matteria transdisciplinary dance collective, where she contributed towards collective performances and choreographic-pedagogical research between 2019 and 2023.
Hannah Berger works in sculpture and writing to call attention to the tenuous boundaries between the real and fictional, authentic and replica. Their work is interested in denaturalizing the construction of individual and collective subjectivity as it intersects with commodification, alienation, and extraction.
Diabou Hubbard (b. Senegal) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores identity, memory, and belonging through the lens of Senegal’s history and its ongoing resonance in the present. Through the fusion of traditional African motifs and contemporary techniques, she draws on moments of resistance, independence, and cultural renewal in Senegal’s past, transforming them into visual narratives that honor what was preserved and question what was lost. Diabou has exhibited widely in solo and group shows, across New York State and was honorably mentioned by the International Sculpture Center for the 2025 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. She has also earned her BFA in Art and Design from Alfred University.