Current Fellows
Spirit Chavis
Spirit Chavis is an oil and water-based painter born in South Hill, Virginia. She graduated from UVA with a BA in Studio Art (Painting Concentration) and Drama in 2026. Using her home back in South Hill as a reference, her work engages with themes of transition, time, belonging, and the yearning to return to a familiar space when all that is left are undocumented memories. Through journaling, research, and improvised strokes of paint, she aims to make tangible memories that are lost to time and to rediscover the now-distant emotions found in childlike wonder.
Jolinna Li
Jolinna Li (b. 2003) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker who grew up between Charlottesville, Virginia, Taiwan, and China. Her work explores collective myth-making, animism, and the consequences of displacement through film that draws from experimental and documentary modes. Her practice considers how images construct belief, and how memory, performance, and narrative become entangled through the acts of filming and viewing.
MECOO
MECOO is an artist based in so-called Charlottesville making works rooted in ecological surrealism and animism. With a practice that meanders between object-making, experimental photo and video, performance, installation, and creative writing, their multimedia pieces are united by a tendency to collect, collage, and queer the trappings of mundanity. Found materials, such as rocks, branches, shells, vegetables, old jewelry, river water, fabric, feathers, salvaged junk, and trash, become ways of recording and collaborating with the collective. MECOO creates stories with the Earth that entangle and complicate notions of body, environment, identity, and memory. MECOO holds bachelor’s degrees in Digital Arts and Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia and is currently a 2026 Aunspaugh Fellow and a 2026 New City Arts Fellow. Their work has been exhibited at Second Street Gallery, Ruffin Gallery, and shared through the New City Arts 2025 Winter Artist Exchange.
Reese E. Robers
Reese E. Robers (b. 2003, Roanoke, VA) is a multidisciplinary artist who specializes in filmmaking. Across her work, she draws from her love for comedy and performance. Invested in the power that comedic stories have in creating a collective opportunity for relief and respite, she takes frivolity seriously. Throughout her work, Reese enjoys exploring what happens when we hone the practice of laughing at ourselves; indulging in failure, imperfection, and nonconformity.
https://reeserobers.my.canva.site/
2025 - 2026 Fellows
Chloe Clayborne
Chloe Clayborne was born in Falls Church, Virginia in 2002. She graduated from University of Virginia with a BA in painting. She currently lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and was selected as one of UVA’s Aunspaugh Fellows for the 25’-26’ academic year. She is an interdisciplinary artist who engages with painting and sculpture to create works which explore metaphysical ideas surrounding the body and consciousness; specifically the illusionary, material boundaries of both mind and flesh in relation to material, memory, and change.
Kathryn Hart
Kat Hart, raised in Richmond, Virginia, is a multidisciplinary, conceptual artist who works across painting, collage, assemblage, and text. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in Studio Art (Painting Concentration) and Environmental Thought & Practice and a minor in Urban and Environmental Planning in 2025. Often employing language as a material form, her work engages with individual and social critique to explore intersections of identity, performance, race, gender, and power. Through the appropriation of pre-existing motifs, she uses text to challenge notions of culture and society as a way of confronting the viewer and disrupting physical and social space.
Luke Logan
Luke Logan, raised in Richmond, VA, is an artist working with perceptions of touch, found objects, and the body as an inconstant yet universal vessel. He recently graduated from UVA with a double-major in Studio Art (Printmaking Concentration) and Art History. His works explore the tension between dysmorphic self-perception and reverence for the body through a vocabulary of distorted anatomy. His interest in stone lithography engages a visual dialogue that oscillates between self-acceptance and self-interrogation. He aims to reflect on the ways we attempt to control, accept, and reject our own corporeality.
Dutch Senft
Dutch Senft (b. 2002 in Baltimore, MD) is a painter and visual storyteller whose work explores the absurdities and contradictions of contemporary life. Blending lived experiences with quiet satire, he works to capture the emotional and political instability of the modern day. His visual language pulls from art history, religion, video games, and cartoons—refusing any singular source, just like the world it reflects.
Dutch graduated from UVA with degrees in Studio Art (Painting) and Commerce (Marketing) along with a minor in Art History. While not painting, catch Dutch working alongside his older brother to open the Archer Hawkins Gallery in Baltimore, MD.
Gabi Thornton
Gabi Thornton is a multimedia artist and writer from Norfolk, Virginia. Gabi’s work combines vibrant, fluid painting with textural, glitchy video and audio to create spatial, sensory-rich installations that juxtapose artificial materials with creaturely compositions. Her practice is motivated by the varying confusions she faces in trying to define and articulate identity, influenced heavily by her queerness and her experiences as an autistic person. Through a manipulation of layering and entanglement, Gabi simultaneously confronts and pokes fun at her awkwardness and insecurities in order to navigate the contradictions between who she is and who she feels she needs to be for other people.
Gabi’s work has been shown in a variety of screenings and exhibitions around Charlottesville, including her video piece Jewel Tones at the Mcguffey Art Center in April of 2024. She participated in the ArtLab residency at UVA’s Mountain Lake Biological Station in the summer of 2024, culminating in a group exhibition later that year. Gabi graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Studio Art and English in the spring of 2025.
2024 - 2025 Fellows
Todd Benson
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Todd Benson is a UVA ’24 graduate and painter from Ridgefield, CT. His work follows histories of development from boyhood to manhood. He depicts the loss of innocence, the disconnection between the emerging self and prescribed archetypes of masculinity, and the childlike playfulness that persists—even if hidden—into adulthood.
Zoe Farmer
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Zoe Farmer is an American performance and visual artist working with punk-electronic sound, silversmithing, and found objects to create both wearable and environmental pieces. Zoe was born and raised in Southwest Virginia and graduated with a degree in Studio Art from the University of Virginia in 2024.
Conceptually driven by her grandmother’s Appalachian upbringing, Zoe brings a DIY and feminist approach to her video art and performances. Her work is often visually tumultuous, appealing to immersive scales and modernistic technology to investigate rural subcultures. From wearable projections in “How a Computer Dresses,” displayed at the McGuffey Art Center in April 2024, to working with metal circuitry and deer antler in her latest installation piece “Are You Saved,” her practice is multidisciplinary and variable. Zoe seeks to tell stories and create worlds that are collaborative and futurist; where she acts as both consumer and performer.
Rian Gonzalez
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Autumn Jefferson
Emma Todd
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Emma Todd, raised in Virginia Beach, is a sculptural artist working with multilayered, phenomenological, and playful approaches to space-making and object-creation. Her work is oriented around the embodied, interactive, and affective qualities it facilitates for visitors, integrating sensorial immersion and subjective experience as subject matter. She has just graduated from UVA with a major in Studio Art (Sculpture Concentration) and Cognitive Science (Psychology Concentration) and a minor in Design. She has exhibited in a variety of student shows within Virginia and Scotland, participated in the ArtLab Student Residency at Mountain Lake (2022), and is currently part of the GlogauAIR Online Residency (2024).