natalie daise

For more than 30 years, Natalie Daise has developed and facilitated interactive learning experiences for educators, students, and audiences in schools, universities, conferences, and other venues. Her belief in the positive power of stories is demonstrated in her speaking as well as in the performing and visual arts. A self-taught, visionary artist, Natalie's painting and functional art pieces arise from the tradition of storytelling.

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She has been married to Ron Daise, her cheerleader, supporter, and committed partner in creativity and life since 1985. They have two children, Sara and Simeon, by birth, and one, Sabrina, by heart. She earned a BA degree from Vermont College in 1992 and a MA in Creativity Studies in 2014.

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Best known as Ms. Natalie on Nick Jr.'s award-winning television program, Gullah Gullah Island, Natalie is committed to making presentations that entertain, educate, empower, and inspire.

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Awards and nominations include:

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• 1997 and 1998 IMAGE Award nominations

• 1998 Daytime Emmy nomination

• Silver and Gold Parent's Choice Awards

• South Carolina's highest honor, The Order of the Palmetto

• South Carolina's Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, given for lifetime achievement and excellence in folk art

• Merit Award for Art, ARTFields, 2017

christina
dixon

Christina Dixon was born and raised  in Nashville, Tennessee, where creativity can be found everywhere and  anywhere. She caught the art bug early, for which she credits her  mother, a former art dealer. She studied art at Furman University,  concentrating in graphic design and ceramics, and graduating in 2015.  While at school, her professor introduced her to horsehair raku, which  is still her favorite firing technique.

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Following graduation, Christina joined the West Main Artists Co-op (now the Artists Collective | Spartanburg) in the fall of 2015. Since then, her work has been shown in galleries in South Carolina, Georgia, and at local art fairs. Christina has been the Ceramics Studio Manager here at the Spartanburg Art Museum since the late fall of 2017 and teaching for SAM beginning the  summer of 2018.

katerie
gladdys

Katerie Gladdys is a transdisciplinary artist who thinks about place, marginalized landscapes, sustainability, mapping, consumption, food, agriculture, and disability. She creates installations, interactive, sculpture, video, and relational performances. Her creative work has been exhibited in national and international juried venues, including in the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Croatia. She is currently an associate professor in Art and Technology in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. In 2009, she received the College of the Arts award for mentoring graduate students. Gladdys also participated in a USIA teacher exchange at Kinnaird College in Lahore, Pakistan in 2000. Recent partners in collaboration include Forage Farm, a community resource center for educating people about sustainability and local food, University of Florida School of Forest Resource and Conservation, University of Florida Office of Sustainability and Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ Center for Public Issues and Education and the Gainesville community. Gladdys has also received an artist fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Florida, Gladdys was the multimedia education coordinator at University of Illinois at Springfield teaching workshops digital imaging, video and web design. Gladdys taught English in Japan. She served as an educator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art traveling to rural counties with the Artmobile teaching K-12 workshops as well as creating exhibition programming targeting underserved communities. She received her MFA in New Media from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Art and Design from the University of Chicago. She also has an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages with a specialization in pragmatics and discourse from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

isabella losskarn

Isabella Losskarn is a German-American visual artist currently based in Asheville, North Carolina. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing, as well as a Bachelor of Art History in December 2021 from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

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Born in 1999, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Losskarn grew up in a way that was synchronous with technological and societal change. Coming of age in the early 2000’s, she has experienced firsthand how the portrayal of gender stereotypes in mass media and popular culture can influence one’s own perception of gender. Confused by a lack of honest dialogue and unequal representations of gender in the media, at home, and at school, as a teenager Losskarn became motivated to use art as a way to communicate an understanding of the impacts of gendered experiences to broad audiences.

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Now, navigating these gender stereotypes as an adult, Losskarn’s pastel drawings make use of striking, absurd visual metaphors to communicate with her audience on gender-related topics. Using soft pastels, pastel pencils, and blending tools, Losskarn’s work encompasses a wide variety of strangely manipulated pop-culture subject matter, rendered with detail and color which pushes the boundaries of hyperrealism. This manipulation of pop-culture objects appears consistently in Losskarn’s work, purposeful and jarring; she mimics the ways in which popular culture distorts perceptions of gender.

Working exclusively from artist-captured reference photographs, she collects and spends time with each of the objects seen in her drawings before they are placed in a composition and photographed. Rooted heavily in the regular study of gender-based research, the artist’s studio practice pulls from personal and anonymous gendered experiences in an effort to address a specific absurdity— the circumstances and consequences of the overwhelming presence of gendered stereotypes, ideas and imagery in our daily life.

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“My artwork confronts the idea of gender and all of the absurdities associated with it— how gender constantly impacts our daily lives, the existence and use of gender stereotypes in media and popular culture, and how different people perceive and live gender in different ways.” -Isabella Losskarn

mable ni

Mable Ni was born and raised in Spartanburg, SC. She is a BFA candidate at Converse University and primarily focuses on printmaking and painting. Her artworks are currently being exhibited in national and international juried exhibitions in the South. 

Her body of work attempts to display traditional and Americanized Chinese cuisine as a means to explore family dynamics, acts of love, and present her experiences as a Chinese American. Mable often expresses those themes through depictions of food, anecdotes, and design elements.