Foundations Faculty

Meet Our

Foundations Faculty

  •
    Associate Professor and Chair of Foundations
    Ceramics, Foundations

    Chad D. Curtis

    • Email: chad.curtis@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9167
    • Office: Tyler 210F
    • Website: www.chaddcurtis.com

    • Chad Curtis is an artist and educator who is motivated by politics of the environment, land use, climate change and the evolution of these relationships over time. Visually, Curtis’s work references traditional notions of the sublime landscape and monumental beauty such as vast open spaces, the horizon, trees and mountains. These landscapes represent the very same desires that helped fuel the westward expansion and Manifest Destiny of the United States. In similar ways, digital technology is fueling a worldwide expansion with an equally devastating impact on humanity and the environment....

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  •
    Assistant Professor of Instruction
    Foundations, Photography

    Sam Fritch

    • Email: sfritch@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9000
    • Website: www.samfritchphoto.com

    • Sam Fritch is a photographer whose work seeks to explore the essence of diverse groups, from gun owners to community gardeners to Tyler’s transgender community. This concept extends into his commercial photography business, where he captures the faces, atmosphere and creative work of local schools, businesses and designers in the greater Philadelphia area as they promote themselves in various print and web publications.
       
      MFA, Photography, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, 1997
      BFA, Related Arts, Kutztown University, 1994

       

      Image...
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  •
    Associate Professor of Instruction and Curriculum Coordinator
    Foundations, Painting

    Simona M. Josan-Barkley

    • Email: sjosan@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-760-4786

    • Simona Josan is an immigrant artist whose research interests concern ideas of displacement and memory. Her work often deals with the creation and fetishism of objects that are stand-ins for past experiences and function as material storytelling. She is interested in the role that nostalgia plays in creating a present identity.

      Currently, Josan is working on a series of drawings that attempt to document her memories of having lived in two seemingly incongruous spaces: the concrete apartment buildings of pre-1989 communist Romania and the remote rural areas of her grandparents’...

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  •
    Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
    Foundations, Visual Studies

    Nichola Kinch

    • Email: nmkinch@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-896-4197
    • Office: Tyler 210R
    • Website: www.nicholakinch.com

    • Nichola Kinch is an artist whose creative production is propelled by technical investigations that span pre-photographic practices to computer aided design and manufacturing. Her practice  centers on the creation of objects and installations that explore image production as a metaphor for a variety of fictional constructs.
       
      Kinch’s commitment to learning new processes is uniquely aligned with her interest in innovative curriculum development in the areas of foundation studies and interdisciplinary practice. She has developed an approach to teaching that stems from...

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  •
    Associate Professor of Instruction and Curriculum Coordinator
    Foundations

    Buy Shaver

    • Email: buy.shaver@temple.edu
    • Phone: 267-201-2662
    • Office: Tyler 230G
    • Website: www.buyshaverart.com

    • Buy Shaver is a multi-disciplinary, installation-based artist with a visual arts background that includes Eastern and Western painting, graphic design, illustration and exhibition design. 

      Shaver primarily works site-specifically, often painting directly on walls to create both temporal and commissioned art. His work floats between both abstract compositions and text-based installations that appear simple and seemingly familiar, yet the content and context allow for multiple interpretations, allowing his work to be simultaneously direct yet oddly illusive.

      Shaver...

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  •
    Associate Professor
    Foundations, Painting, Visual Studies

    Samantha Simpson

    • Email: samantha.simpson@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9151
    • Office: Tyler 230C
    • Website: www.samanthasimpson.com

    • Samantha Simpson is an artist who makes interactive VR, books and work on paper. She has a long history of painting on paper but is now making immersive interactive painted worlds in VR. Her work asks questions about empathy, artmaking and politics within the frame of a theatrical vision of the natural world.

      Simpson’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, and has been included in solo and two-person exhibitions at  the Rosewood Art Gallery, Firehouse Art Center, Firecat Projects; Gallery Joe; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center; Tufts University; the Lawndale...

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  •
    Professor and Dean Emeritus of Temple University Rome
    Foundations

    Kim D. Strommen

    • Email: strommen@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9000
    • Office: Tyler 230F

    • Kim Strommen is an artist, educator and arts administrator who has worked with mixed media to produce art with associations to craft and painting. His works have included wall hangings, woven metal sculpture and architecturally scaled environments.
       
      Strommen resided in Italy for over 20 years while serving as the dean of Temple University’s Rome Campus and as a member of the steering committee of the Association of American College and University Programs in Italy.
       
      His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally to include the Palazzo...

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  •
    Associate Professor of Instruction and Curriculum Coordinator
    Foundations

    Jennifer Zarro

    • Email: jennifer.zarro@temple.edu
    • Phone: 215-777-9700
    • Office: Tyler 230K

    • Jen Zarro teaches a General Education race and diversity course which draws on historic and contemporary art of the Americas. Her dissertation research focused on prints, maps, and the culture of geography in late 18th century Philadelphia. A lifelong resident of this city, Jen remains an avid fan of historic and contemporary Philadelphia art. She is currently working on a research project about a 19th century Irish immigrant who arrived in Philadelphia in the early 1820s and continues her practice of historic bookbinding, papermaking, and printmaking. 
       
      PhD,...

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  • Adjunct Assistant Professor
    Foundations

    Asher W. Barkley

    • Email: abarkley@temple.edu

    • MFA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
      BFA, East Carolina University

  • Adjunct Assistant Professor
    Foundations

    Erin Boyle

    • Email: erboyle@temple.edu
    • Website: https://www.erinroseboyle.com

    • Erin Rose Boyle creates sculpture and installations that feature details achieved through her inventive use of uncommon art materials and techniques. She believes that her best work happens when it involves experimentation and play and provides students with a strong foundation in 3-D design while teaching them to look at art from a different perspective.

      MFA, University of the Arts
      BFA, Syracuse University

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Matthew Colaizzo

    • Email: matthew.colaizzo@temple.edu
    • Website: www.matthewcolaizzo.com

    • Matthew Colaizzo makes mixed-media drawings and prints that examine our relationship to the landscape, with ideas about land accessibility and natural history. He is also self-employed as a fine art picture framer, specializing in conservation techniques and working with selected artists and galleries in Philadelphia.

      MFA, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
      BFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

  • Adjunct Professor
    Foundations

    Jazmyn Crosby

    • Email: jazmynmay@gmail.com
    • Website: www.jazmyncrosby.com

    • Jazmyn Crosby works in a wide range of media. Her work explores distances mediated by technology. She engages with the possibilities waiting to be gleaned from everyday discarded objects asking, what can be generated from waste? In addition to making art, she is an organizer, a musician and a founding member of the GRAFT gallery/collective. 

      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
      BFA, The University of New Mexico 

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Rob D'Amico

    • Email: rjd243@temple.edu

    • Rob D’Amico is an accomplished sculptor, metal fabricator and educator living and working in Philadelphia. D’Amico has 20 years of professional experience making prototypes, architectural elements, custom furniture and artistic commissions for artists, architects and designers in Philadelphia and New York City.

      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
      BS, New York University

  • Adjunct Associate Professor
    Foundations

    Michael Grothusen

    • Email: michael.grothusen@temple.edu
    • Website: https://www.inliquid.org/artist/grothusen-michael

    • Michael Grothusen is a sculptor based in Philadelphia. His work is rooted in an investigative process and a tactile connection to material. It is diverse in terms of scale, scope, and content.  He makes objects, temporary site-specific installations, and has completed two permanent public commissions for the City of Philadelphia. Some works are deliberate conversation starters, and some are designed to pre-empt written and spoken language in an attempt to focus on the present-tense moment of looking at sculpture. 

      His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Art Museum of China in Beijing, Philadelphia International Airport, and the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts. Solo exhibitions include Carnegie Melon University, Spaces in Cleveland, OH, Gallery 114 in Portland, OR, Gallery Joe, Drexel University, and Dickinson College. Grants and fellowships include a Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Pollock/Krasner Foundation and three Individual Artist’s Grants from the Pennsylvania State Council on the Arts.

      MFA, Tyler School of Art (1991)
      BFA in Sculpture, University of Kansas (1988)  

  • Adjunct Assistant Professor
    Foundations, Sculpture, Glass

    Brynn Hurlstone

    • Email: Brynn.hurlstone@temple.edu
    • Phone: 419-266-3096
    • Website: http://www.brynnhurlstone.com

    • Brynn Hurlstone is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and fabricator who creates consumptive, sensorial objects and environments that invite engagement. She considers trauma and its relationship to precarity, unspeakability, isolation, connection, and release by allowing material reactivity and subjective experience to speak reciprocally through her work.

      Hurlstone is the owner of Second Generation Glassworks, the co-founder of the Glass Impact nonprofit coalition, and the former Director of Operations of Public Glass in San Francisco. She has exhibited nationally in group and solo exhibitions, including the prestigious Wind Challenge, Art of the State at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, and the recent national exhibition Through a Glass Darkly at Delaware Contemporary Museum, which was hailed as the “new guard of glassmakers” in Glass Magazine.


      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture 2023
      BFA, Bowling Green State University 2008
       

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations, Painting

    Alicia Link

    • Email: alicia.link@temple.edu
    • Website: www.alicia-link.com

    • Alicia Link’s work offers a type of expanded painting that manifests itself across disciplines. Using fantasy and humor to explore the relationship between loss, love and the body, she often lingers in a space that draws attention to the invisibility of trauma.

      MFA, University of Texas at Austin
      BFA, Boston University

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Kedrick McKenzie

    • Email: kedrick.mckenzie@temple.edu

    • Kedrick McKenzie’s work is an inquiry of what lies underneath layers and layers of frontiers. Growing up on the West Coast, where, as Joan Didion puts it, “boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension,” McKenzie has said his work originates from the act of questioning his assumptions about the place he calls home and the stories told about it. By combining quotidian craft practices with ephemeral materials, he challenges the slippery and subjective ways that histories are recorded and recounted. His practice revolves around the uneasy combination of the care and individuality imbedded in craft traditions with the extractive practices and consumer culture that built his homeland. The result is a research-led practice that suggests new stories about place, identity, and history.

       
      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University 
      BFA, San José State University   
       

  • Sculpture Studio Technician
    Sculpture

    Paolo Mentasti

    • Email: paolo.mentasti@temple.edu

    • Paolo Mentasti was born and raised on a plane flying between Sao Paulo, Bogota, and Mexico City. He earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020 and his MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2023. 

      Mentasti’s artwork examines the untimeliness of contemporary life, borrowing archaeology as a method to enter the present and the future. Mentasti works as a forger of a proleptic archaeological record composed of artifacts, traces, and tools produced for future interpretations. Using ceramics and other archaeological mediums, he cites the past and present, invokes the future, and dresses fictions in the cloak of history.

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Christopher Richards

    • Email: christopher.richards0001@temple.edu
    • Office: 230O
    • Website: https://www.christopherrichardsart.com/

    • Christopher Richards is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working in Philadelphia. He works in a variety of adoptive methods to engage with ideas about perception, the passage of time, and imparting life to matter. Through both the production of work and practice of teaching, he creates a site to enable artistic creativity and individual autonomy. 

      MFA, University of Pennsylvania 

      BA, University of Vermont 

  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Dustin Sparks

    • Email: dustin.sparks@temple.edu

    • Dustin Sparks is a multi-disciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance.

      MFA, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
      BFA, Ohio University

  • Adjunct Instructor

    Matthew Speedy

    • Email: matthew.speedy@temple.edu
    • Website: http://www.matthewspeedy.com

    • Matthew Speedy is an artist and educator working in Philadelphia. His work is concerned with depictions of labor in science fiction, ongoing ecological crises, and how to productively worry about the future. Incorporating a multitude of materials, his work uses humor and absurdity to engage anxieties and trivialities.

      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture 
      BID, Pratt Institute 

  •
    Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Sean Starowitz

    • Email: sean.starowitz@temple.edu
    • Website: https://www.sean-starowitz.com/

    • Sean M. Starowitz has worked in a variety of community-based contexts, spanning more than a decade of socially engaged art practice. He uses archival research and public memory as material to reframe our current understanding of natural history and political imaginaries.

      MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University 
      BFA, Kansas City Art Institute 
       

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  • Adjunct Instructor
    Foundations

    Thomas Vance

    • Email: tvance@temple.edu

    • MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
      BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art

  • Adjunct Associate Professor
    Painting, Foundations

    Lauren A. Whearty

    • Email: whearty@temple.edu
    • Website: www.laurenwhearty.com

    • Lauren Whearty is a Philadelphia-based painter, curator and teacher. She is also a co-director of an artist-run curatorial collective, Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY. Whearty's paintings investigate personal identity through memory, lived experience, the familiar objects of everyday life, a love of color and the material processes of painting and drawing which bring them all together. 

      MFA, Ohio State University
      BFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University