Meet Our
Painting Faculty
Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies, and Program Head of Painting
Painting, Art History
Philip Glahn, PhD
- Email: phglahn@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9176
- Office: Tyler 300B
Philip Glahn’s research and teaching focus on the histories, theories and practices of art as technology, labor and activism. His writings on the legacies of avant-garde strategies, the politics of drawing, digital media and new social formations, radio and the public sphere, as well as other topics have appeared in publications including Art Journal, Afterimage, The Brooklyn Rail, Parallax, Panorama and PUBLIC, as well as several anthologies.
His research has been supported by several grants including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Helena Rubinstein...
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Associate Professor and Chair of Art
Painting
Gerard Brown
- Email: gbrown@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9713
- Office: Tyler 210U
Gerard Brown is interested in secrets. His creative and scholarly work, which encompasses studio processes such as painting, drawing, printmaking and other forms, examines the use of writing to camouflage and conceal messages in the public sphere.
As a writer, Brown has contributed essays to Ceramics: Art & Perception, Philadelphia Weekly and Juxtapoz, among other magazines. He is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Visual Art Criticism. He has organized exhibits for the Levy Gallery at Moore College of Art & Design...- Read More
Assistant Professor
Painting
Mark Thomas Gibson
- Email: mark.gibson@temple.edu
- Phone: 917-805-3794
- Office: Tyler 300C
- Website: www.markthomasgibson.com
Mark Thomas Gibson is an artist who uses modes of caricature, pop, fantasy and narrative to reflect on current American history. The work most often takes the form of drawing, painting and books.
As a graduate student at Yale University, Gibson was the recipient of the Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Award in 2013. In 2016, Gibson co-curated the exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo, which has traveled from Yale to the International Print Center New York (IPCNY), University of South Florida and Wesleyan University. The exhibition was also reviewed by The...
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Professor
Painting
Dona Nelson
- Email: paint@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9710
- Office: Tyler 300C
- Website: www.donanelson.com
Dona Nelson is an influential American painter and educator best known for immersive, gestural abstract works employing unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional ideas of painting and viewership. She has worked at Tyler School of Art and Architecture since 1991.
Nelson has had twenty solo exhibitions of her work, primarily in New York City. In 2014, she was included in the Whitney Biennial. In 2018, she had a large survey show of her paintings at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, which was comprised of thirty large...
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Professor
Painting
Odili Donald Odita
- Email: ododita@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9176
- Office: Tyler 300A
- Website: www.jackshainman.com/artists/odili-donald-odita
Odili Donald Odita is an abstract painter exploring color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense.
In recent years, Odita was commissioned to paint several large-scale wall installations including Newark Museum (2017); Nasher Museum of Art, Durham (2015); Mural Arts Philadelphia (2016); Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (2015); Savannah College of Art and Design (2012) and the United States Mission to the United Nations, New York (2011).
Odita has had several exhibitions in museums and institutions across the...- Read More
Associate Professor
Painting
Mark Shetabi
- Email: mark.shetabi@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9176
- Office: Tyler 300B
- Website: www.markshetabi.com
Mark Shetabi is an artist whose work examines a disjointed and subjective overview of history through concurrent bodies of work in painting, sculpture and installation. Born in New York, as a child he lived in Tehran, Iran for five years, returning to the United States on the eve of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The experience of straddling two cultures often in conflict is an enduring subtext of his work.
Shetabi has exhibited in venues such as White Columns in New York; the Smithsonian National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.; Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia,...
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Assistant Professor of Instruction
Foundations, Painting
Simona Mihaela Josan
- Email: sjosan@temple.edu
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
Glass, Painting
Sharyn O’Mara
- Email: sharyn.omara@temple.edu
- Phone: 215-777-9128
- Office: Tyler 120D
- Website: www.sharynomara.com
Sharyn O’Mara is an artist and educator whose interdisciplinary works explore the marks of language and the language of marks. Her practice is comprised of drawing, sculpture, digital photography, printmaking and installation.
O’Mara’s current work involves reflections on empathy and longing while living in a media-possessed culture that so often feels devoid of intimacy and trust. Deeply connected to her dogs, she works with the residue of their existence—nose prints, shed hair, cremains—taking otherwise overlooked materials and phenomena and giving them significance...- Read More
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 makes paintings and drawings that reference cartooning, 14th century woodcuts and the history of modernist painting. Her recent pieces specifically address the uneasy juxtaposition of the everyday and the political.
Simpson’s work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been included in solo and two-person exhibitions at Firecat Projects; Gallery Joe; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center; Tufts University; the Lawndale Art Center in Houston; Slugfest Printmaking Workshop in Austin, Texas and Gallerie Michael Rasche in Fribourg, Germany. Her art has...
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Adjunct Professor
Painting
Rebekah Callaghan
- Email: tua04473@temple.edu
- Website: www.rebekahcallaghan.com
Rebekah Callaghan is a Philadelphia-based artist who paints gardens and plants that are reduced to abridged forms to broaden the landscape of color, touch and light. She is interested in finding space in her paintings for moments of transformation that call to both the complexity of change and the simplicity of growth.
MFA, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
BFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

Adjunct Professor
Painting
Anthony Coplan
- Email: anthony.coplan@temple.edu
- Website: www.anthonycoplan.com
Anthony Coplan’s work focuses on process, repetition and reflection through visual anecdotes. His work has been exhibited in The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Fleet Week exhibition as well as several other institutions.
MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
BFA, Montclair State University

Adjunct Professor
Painting
Kati Gegenheimer
- Email: kati@temple.edu
- Website: www.katigegenheimer.com
Kati Gegenheimer is a Philadelphia-based artist working primarily in painting and drawing. Her paintings serve as an ongoing visual diary exploring ideas around feminism, emotional labor and 'women's work' through symbolism, landscape and language. She has a strong interest in researching decorative and folk arts as they relate to painting, installation, heritage and domestic environments.
MFA Yale University School of Art
BFA Tyler School of Art

Adjunct Professor
Painting
Brooke Lanier
- Email: elizabeth.lanier@temple.edu
- Website: www.brookelanier.com
Brooke Lanier uses art to search for patterns and logic in scenes that seem impossibly complex. She creates nuanced, collage-based paintings that explore architectural interjections into the natural environment, particularly areas near water.
MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Adjunct Professor
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 Professor
Painting
Dana Lok
- Email: tu69395@temple.edu
- Website: www.danalok.com
Dana Lok is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in painting and drawing. Her work imagines speech, knowledge and the passage of time as activities that happen on a stage, not unlike tricks in a magic show.
MFA, Columbia University
BFA, Carnegie Mellon University

Adjunct Professor
Painting
Stuart Lorimer
- Email: stuart.lorimer@temple.edu
- Website: www.stuartlorimer.com
Stuart Lorimer is a Scottish-born, New York-based painter and curator. Stuart makes narrative paintings that employ a realism informed by observation and fiction. He paints figures often posed in action and tinged with allegory—or otherwise, they are at rest and caught in seeming existential worry. These characters present unclear psychologies and exist within graphic environs that conjure municipal and leisure spaces.
MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
BFA, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee
Adjunct Professor
Painting
Riley Strom
- Email: tuj78717@temple.edu
- Website: www.rileystrom.com
Riley Strom is a painter and educator based in Philadelphia. In her painting, she investigates the relationship between image and lived experience by means of figuration and abstraction. She co-directed the artist-run gallery 99 Cent Plus Gallery in Brooklyn, NY from 2013–2016.
MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University
BFA, Sarah Lawrence College

Adjunct Professor
Painting
Kyle Thurman
- Email: tuo28213@temple.edu
- Website: www.kylethurman.com
Kyle Thurman is a New York-based artist whose multifaceted practice weaves together both diaristic and journalistic perspectives. By employing primarily drawing and painting, Thurman’s work often considers subjective relationships to the distribution, digestion and aging process of analog photography and digital imagery.
MFA, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College
Guest student, Kunstakademie Dusseldorf
BA, Columbia University

Adjunct Professor
Painting
David Walsh
- Email: tua55699@temple.edu
- Website: www.davewalshgallery.com
Dave Walsh makes large-scale paintings that investigate American mythologies of nature in national parks and recreation spaces. He explores how history and culture have informed perceptions of landscape over time in the United States; utilizing fieldwork, research and memory to recreate environments using multiple perspectives.
MFA, Yale School of Art
BFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University

Adjunct Professor
Painting
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
Adjunct Professor
Painting, Sculpture
Misha Wyllie
- Email: misha.wyllie@temple.edu
Originally from the South, Misha Wyllie is a Philadelphia-based artist and teacher with a commitment to art creating space for dialogue. Her interests include education, language, ecology and theories of representation, appropriation and the politics at work in them. With a background in making objects, she approaches writing and 2D work through sculptural concerns.
MFA, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
BFA, New College of Florida
BFA, School of Visual Arts

Adjunct Professor
Foundations, Painting
Ricardo Zapata
- Email: tuh16851@temple.edu
- Website: www.ricardozapata.net
Ricardo Zapata makes interdisciplinary work in painting, drawing and sculpture concerned with notions of power struggle, displacement, transgression and anxiety. He is a member of Pink Noise Projects, a collectively-run project space in Philadelphia.
MFA, University of Pennsylvania
BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Richard Cramer
We mourn the loss of Richard Cramer who passed away on April 10, 2020. Richard Cramer taught at Tyler School of Art and Architecture from 1966 to 2003. He developed two unique courses during his time at Tyler: Urban Industrial Landscape and Color. Upon his retirement, he established The Richard Cramer Color Award in Painting for which we are most grateful. Read his obituary by his wife, Carol Markel.
Early in his career, Cramer developed a proprietary color mixing system to create thousands of nuanced colors for use in his color-field paintings. This work was shown widely in New York and across the country and at both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in a one-person exhibition in 1978. After this body of work, Cramer went on to create drawings and paintings in an abstract-figurative style.
MFA and MS, University of Wisconsin
BS, University of Wisconsin
BFA, Layton School of Art

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Marilyn Holsing
- Email: mholsing@temple.edu
- Website: www.marilynholsing.com
Professor Holsing’s work has been included in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts among others. Her paintings and work on paper have been shown at MIT, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Drawing Center, and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, as well as, galleries in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer and many online publications, such as, the Huffington Post and the Artblog. Professor Holsing has received two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, a National Endowment, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation grant, and recently an Independence Foundation grant.

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Margo Margolis
- Email: margom@temple.edu
Margolis is the recipient of numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, New York State Council on the Arts Grant, Yaddo and Mac Dowell Residency Grants. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at at Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, Esso Gallery, New York, Beth Urdang Gallery, Boston and included in group exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago Chicago, Munson-Williams Proctor Institute, Utica, New York, University Museum, Santa Barbara, California, Delahunty Gallery, Dallas Texas. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia Museum, Philadelpia, Zimmerli Archives, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, Chase Manhattan Bank Collection, New York, General Mills, Minneapolis, MN, Estee Lauder Corporation, New York among other public collections.

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Susan Moore
- Email: susan.moore@temple.edu
- Phone: 267-693-7044
- Office: Tyler 300A
- Website: www.susan-moore.com
Susan Moore is a painter whose evolving group of portraits combine painting, photography and collage. Each portrait is painted individually and has a particular presence even as they relate to each other, catching a distinct light and texture in their own space. Her works continue to explore the tensions, revelations, intersections and disconnects of individuality and anonymity.
Moore has been the recipient of numerous grants including the BaderFund Fellowship; four Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships; a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Mid-Atlantic NEA. Moore’s work is in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; The Pennsylvania Convention Center and the New York Public Library. She had a major retrospective at Denison University in Ohio in 2019, which included 40 years of work and over 60 paintings and drawings.
MFA, University of California at UC Davis, 1979
BFA, Indiana University, 1977Selected Awards
Bader Fund Fellowship (2003)National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1989)
Selected Award
Moore, S. (2019). Susan Moore: A Portrait Retrospective 1980-2019. Denison University
Artspace, Newark, OH, February 1–March 8, 2019.Moore, S. (2014). Sub Rosa and Double Persona. Spazio Galleria Aquadro, Rome, Italy,
May 13–May 26, 2014.Image credit: Stephanie Price

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Keith Morrison
- Email: keith.morrison@temple.edu
- Website: www.keithmorrison.com
Keith Anthony Morrison is an artist, art educator, curator, art critic and administrator. His native country of Jamaica awarded him the national title, Commander in the Order of Distinction (CD) and also selected him to represent Jamaica at the 2001 Venice Biennale.
His works are included in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the Corcoran Gallery of Art; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art, Monterrey, Mexico; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Jamaica. He has had solo exhibitions in galleries in New York, Chicago, Boston, Washington and San Francisco; and in such museums as the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the University of Delaware Museums; and the Alternative Museum, NYC.
MFA and BFA, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Charles Schmidt
Charles Schmidt has had 26 solo exhibitons of his paintings in America and Europe. His work can be found in over 50 museum and public collections.
MFA, Cranbrook Academy
BFA, Carnegie Mellon University

Professor Emeritus
Painting
Stanley Whitney
Drawing influence from a range of sources, including Abstract Expressionism and his African-American heritage, but hewing to none, Stanley Whitney produces abstract paintings focused on color. In inexhaustible variations, Whitney organizes blocks of colors into grids that fill the canvas. He likens his process to the call and response flow of traditional African-American music, explaining: “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call and response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way around.”
MFA, Yale University
BFA, Kansas City Art Institute