Angelika Brewer is the Ogden City Poet Laureate, an artist and an award winning writer. She has been featured on 15 Bytes: Artists of Utah, Voyage Utah, Standard-Examiner, KUED, The LQ, Toasted Lavender Podcast, LITerally Podcast, and more. She has been working with youth in schools and programs across Utah to offer them resources and creative outlets for the last decade. She is a two time featured speaker at the Utah Conference of Teachers of English, a two time competitor in “Literary Deathmatch” and has performed at the Utah Arts Festival, Ogden Arts Festival, Metaphor, Women in Music, and other events.

She self published and self bound her first chapbook, “I Don’t Want To Miss You” and her work was featured in the compilation “First Moon Manual.” Her journalistic writings have been a part of various newspapers and magazines and she has had two solo art exhibits. She has been teaching Creative Writing classes for 9 years and loves to encourage others to dabble in their creativity. She is responsible for the Ogden Ar(t)chives Mailbox on 25th Street in Ogden.

Above all, Angelika is an advocate for the arts and accessibility. She believes that creativity is the greatest tool we have. By offering space, resources, and opportunities for the artistic idea to flourish, Angelika seeks to encourage a community that welcomes creative thought and communication. Outside of creating art, she loves spending time with her family, gardening, singing and dancing, and spending time with nature.

Samantha daSilva (1978) is a Brazilian-born artist and art educator living in Salt Lake City, UT. She is a third-generation artist shaped by migration, assimilation, and her desire to create. She has moved over forty times as a result of natural disasters and life circumstances. Like many who have experienced migration, she underwent a process of assimilation at the crucial age of 10, and her relationship with things was forever altered by having to leave so much behind. Her artwork has become a navigational tool that helps to connect her to new surroundings and provides a form of consistency in a life full of movement. 

She is best known for her large-scale relief sculptures that resemble topographic maps and cracked earth, made from found materials such as dirt and sawdust. The themes of her work revolve around belonging, spirituality, mapmaking, and resourcefulness.

As an educator, daSilva has partnered with progressive institutions including: The Imiloa Institute, Costa Rica, Donkey Mill Art Center, Hawai’i, Metchosin International School of the Arts, Canada and Atelier Saint-Germain, France.

Inez Garcia grew up in Salt Lake City, UT. Sparked by her desire to pursue art, she moved across the country. She was accepted to Alfred University, a top 10 nationally ranked art program in upstate New York. She continued on her path by fusing her art and biracial identity. She earned a minor in Spanish Literature, specializing in Latin American cultures. Her senior thesis critiqued western exoticism. She used glass sculpture and found objects to represent western perceptions of Latin culture.

Her path of exploration led her to Basque Country in Northern Spain. There she studied a semester in the Universidad de País Vasco in Bilbao and witnessed the Spanish “Crisis” as Spain underwent an economic collapse in 2012. She learned that she has both familial roots in the Basque country. This added complexity to her identity and racial beliefs as she learned that her racial heritage contains both the oppressor and oppressed. This tension of living between two worlds influences her art making and cultural identity that still plays out in her work today.

Now, she primarily works in glass at Spectrum Studios in South Salt Lake, exploring multiple modalities of the medium through casting, painting. and glass blowing.

Joshua Graham is a Salt Lake City based artist and educator. He is best known for his site-specific work and community-based artistic interventions using found objects and other natural ephemera. Artist-in-Residence programs are central to Joshua’s practice, taking him into such diverse places as national parks, ancient castles, and contemporary art museums. His experiential approach to artmaking reflects his commitment to an ongoing investigation into the transformative power of art – a collaborative process that illuminates and strengthens our connection with the people and environments we interact with. He is currently an assistant professor in art teaching at the University of Utah.

Jeffery Hampshire is a local artist from Sandy, Utah, where he was born and raised. He was first introduced to art through the Visual Art Institute or V.A.I. as a teenager, where he fell in love with the process of creation and mixed media drawing and painting. Jeffery continued the study of art, receiving a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University in April of 2021. During his studies at BYU, he explored new media art and sculpture through the use of digital technologies. In September of 2021 Jeffery joined the VAI team as an art instructor and now teaches kids, teens, and adult classes, as well as some outreach programs. He has expressed how art has shaped him in all aspects of his life, and strives to have a similar impact on each of his students. Jeffery is happy to be a part of other communities as well, teaching workshops through the Ogden Contemporary Arts Artist Factory program and the Neighborhood Art Center in Provo.

Adam Hellewell is a student in Theatre Education at Weber State University. He has worked with Weber State’s theatre department for the past 4 years in a variety of capacities. He will be student teaching this Fall. He has worked with Boys and Girls Club of Weber-Davis for the past year, teaching theatre in elementary schools throughout Ogden. He also has worked with Weber State’s Beverly Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program Internship, integrating drama practices in elementary schools in Salt Lake City. He has worked professionally in theatre at various theatres throughout Northern Utah and New York.

Kasey studied at the New York Studio Program, received her BFA from the Ringling College of Art & Design, and her MFA from the University of Connecticut. With over 6 years of teaching experience, Kasey has enthusiastically passed her love of the arts on to her students; encouraging curiosity, boundary pushing, and innovation. Kasey has taught youth art classes for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Donkey Mill Art Center, and Salt & Honey Prism Studio.

Colour was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in Spanish and Political Science and her MFA in Sculpture/Ceramics at the University of Utah. She has exhibited throughout Utah and in surrounding western states and has also participated in several artist residencies, taught art at the University of Utah and facilitated art classes for recently arrived refugee children as way to promote language skills and creative exploration. She was also on staff at Huntsman Cancer Institute where she taught art classes for patients, families and staff as a component of holistic healing. Colour believes that creativity is an inherent part of being human and that accessing this creativity is a way to still our minds and broaden our perspective about the world around us.

Kristen Mitchell is a visual artist whose diverse practice includes material works, community projects, and cross media collaborations. Her work spans digital and physical spectrums to foster new ways of relating to the complexity of our current moment as we grapple with materiality, virtuality, and social and ecological justice crises. She is highly engaged in collaborative art practices as a founder and producer of Living Marks, a cross-media improvisation platform, as a member of The Revolution School, an art collective, and is a contributor to Virtual Care Lab, a series of creative experiments in remote togetherness and is a member of The Rev School art collective, embodying quantum physics/sci-fi/fantasy co-worldings. Her studio drawing practice centers on the relationship of specificity to value, geologic time, and documentation of force through drawing. She has served as chair of the Summit County Public Art Board, public art archivist for Park City and Summit County, public art selection committees, and as a juror for the Utah Film Festival. Awards, grants and residencies include Ogden City Arts Grant, Nine Rails Creative District Grant, Utah State Professional Development Grant, Vermont Studio Center Scholarship Award, Best in Show Award – Kimball Art Center, Juror’s Award – Utah State Annual, Utah Museum of Natural History Artist-in-Residence, Taft Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Artist-in-Residence, residency at REDCAT theater gallery at CalArts, and workshops presented with 18th St Arts and The Armory in L.A. Her work is included in private and public collections including L.A. County Museum of Art, the Summit County public art collection, and the State of Utah Alice Merrill Horne Art Collection.

Nancy Andruk Olson has been a lifetime painter. She started painting as a child with her mother, who is an art teacher, and never stopped. Raised in Los Angeles, she attended Art Center College of Design as a high school student. Andruk Olson has a BFA in painting from BYU, where she spent most of her time working with Bruce Hixson Smith. She also has a post-Baccalaureate certificate from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Nancy’s painting approach is direct, using impressionist techniques. Improvisation, the interaction of paint, the interplay of materials and intensity of color are part of her visual language.

Andruk Olson started the Art Start program at her children’s elementary school when she saw that an art program was not present. Art Start is still in place and is a 100% donation and volunteer program that serves 750 students per month. Nancy also teaches weekly youth art classes at the Bountiful Davis Art Center, and adult workshops that focus on learning new materials.

Rebecca Pletsch received her BFA from BYU with an emphasis in painting. She works primarily in the genres of collage, painting, and murals. Rebecca has exhibited her work in numerous juried, group and solo exhibitions across the state of Utah, including shows at The Museum of Utah Art & History, The Springville Museum of Art, The Museum of Church History and Art and a solo show of her collage work at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, UT. Rebecca has also won several awards for her work. In addition, she also works as a freelance web designer and illustrator and currently resides in Orem, UT.

Born in Morelos, Mexico, Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, independent curator, and art educator. He studied Art at the University of Utah and at Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Rojas’s experience as an educator often intersects his interests as an artist, making work that reflects on issues of interpretation, institutional critique, and the role of cultural, social, and mediated forms of communication in the world. From 2015-2021, Rojas served as director of learning and engagement at Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA), where he oversaw education, community engagement, and programming initiatives for the Museum. At the UMFA, he lead a team of seven professional arts educators who developed and coordinated nationally recognized museum and outreach efforts that annually serve over 60,000 people, including close to 20,000 K-12 students in schools across Utah. Rojas also spearheaded the award-winning ACME (Art. Community. Museum. Education.) , an innovative community engagement initiative dedicated to rethinking the public role of museums. During this time, Rojas oversaw and co-curated multiple exhibitions in the UMFA’s ACME Lab, a space for art experimentation and community-based exhibitions. Prior to his appointment at the UMFA, Rojas was site director for the Venture Humanities Course, where he promoted continuing education among immigrant, refugee, and under-represented populations through a partnership between local universities and Utah Humanities. He taught art history to high school students through the Clemente Course in the Humanities, and was the first Teaching Artist-in-Residence at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, where he developed and integrated art programming into the hospital setting through outpatient and inpatient classes, workshops, and exhibitions. Artists of Utah/15 Bytes named Rojas one of Utah’s Most Influential Artists in 2019. In 2022 he was selected as a Visual Arts Fellow for the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, and received the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award. Rojas’s combined practice as a curator, artist, educator, and community leader directly align with his passion for working with communities towards social, racial and cultural justice. Rojas lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Heath has been designing, fabricating, and installing public art in various metals for over three decades. After graduating from the design college at North Carolina State University, he began his career as an independent artist in Raleigh, NC. He later moved to California, eventually settling in the Arts District area of downtown Los Angeles. There he was an active community member and was elected to serve on the Arts District’s neighborhood council. After seventeen years in California, Heath chose to move his sculpture studio and make Ogden his home. His large public artworks can be found in locations all over the world from Alaska to Dubai. His more recent works have made extensive use of polished stainless steel, corten, and gold.

Douglas Tolman (he) is an interdisciplinary artist primarily practicing in Great Salt Lake and Colorado River Watersheds. He believes inquiry, sense of place, and solution-oriented dialogue are the strongest tools we have for fixing the West’s socio-ecological problems. Residing in the space between sculpture, image, and community work, his practice is informed by place-based youth education, ecological science, and human-powered movement. He is currently in MFA Candidacy at the University of Utah as a Research Excellence Fellow and a recent recipient of the Frankenthaler Climate Art Awards. By facilitating generative spaces of inquiry, he attempts to deepen his community’s sense of place in pursuit of solutions to climate and land-use challenges.

Allie Wheeler is a mixed-media artist whose work focuses on personal memories through printmaking, sculpture, and handmade books. Born and raised in Delta, Utah, she received her Associate of Fine Arts from Snow College. Her work has been shown in multiple exhibitions, including Content – Artists Books in Davis, California, as well as The Book as Art, Decatur Library, Decatur, Georgia. Wheeler is a teacher for Ogden Contemporary Arts, teaching printmaking and mixed media techniques. She thoroughly enjoys teaching these workshops to the youth of the Boys and Girls Club. Wheeler is currently studying at Weber State University, where she will receive her BFA in 2D art, and is currently residing in North Ogden, Utah, with her husband.