夜色视频

Graduate student profiles

Meet our graduate students

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Danielle Drouet

Danielle Drouet is an artist and sculptor from Eugene, Oregon, currently living and working in Reno, Nevada. She received BFA degrees in Art Studio and Communication Design from California State University, Chico, in 2025 and is currently pursuing her MFA at the 夜色视频. She works across sculpture, cast bronze, mixed media and digital processes, with a deep love for hands-on making. She enjoys moving between digital and physical processes, from video and fabrication to mold making and bronze casting. Her curiosity and love of experimentation are central to her studio practice. Outside of the studio, she enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking with her dog, exploring new places and finding inspiration in the natural world.

Danielle Drouet in black apron standing in art studio.

Artist statement

My work explores the passage of time and the accumulation of moments, memories, and experiences that shape us. I am interested in the body as a vessel that carries these experiences while moving toward decomposition and death, becoming an archive of memory, grief, and meaning. Through sculpture and mixed media, I explore cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, and how our impermanence connects us to the natural world. I work with materials including cast bronze, found objects, fiber, video, projection, and sound, bringing traditional making processes into conversation with contemporary technology.

 

Julia Farner

Julia Farner, originally from Ojai, California, is currently pursuing an MFA at the 夜色视频. Their background is in designing and constructing wooden furniture, and their studio practice arises from an interest in the ways in which organic, constructed, and industrial bodies interact. They take the tools and techniques of traditional craft as a jumping-off point for more exploratory experiments in making, and are always looking for things that can feel at once old and new. They have spent time as both a student and faculty member at several experimental institutions and are interested in alternative education, being outside, and playing music.

Julia Farner sitting on floor with art supplies around.

Artist statement

I am an artist working primarily in sculpture, interested in how our daily sensory experiences are mediated by both external technologies and internalized habits. I use a wide variety of materials and found objects, including industrially produced and naturally occurring ones, and treat their most obvious qualities as opportunities for variation and subversion. I try to treat my studio like a playground – one which can be (like all good playgrounds) by turns edifying, fun, and a little bit dangerous – and aim to make work that invites viewers into a similar physical and psychic space. I work in an attempt to disrupt the passive experience of those technologies and habits that give shape to perception and action, and to introduce uncertainty, novelty, and play. 

 

Summer Hamel

Summer Hamel is an artist who recently hails from the oak woodlands of Oregon, but is originally from the chaparral biome of Southern California. She graduated from Southern Oregon University in 2003 with a BFA in Art (printmaking and sculpture emphases) and a minor in Art History. Following her degree, she focused her life on motherhood. Hamel participated in the London-based Turps Banana Correspondence Course in 2025/26. Now in the high desert of Nevada, she is an MFA candidate at the 夜色视频, where she is eager to learn more about the local habitat of the area, which will inevitably find its way into her practice.

Summer Hamel holding open book sitting in front of book shelves.

Artist statement

Death and grief are the overarching themes of my practice. We culturally avoid the discussion of death in our own species and the extinction of others; the former perhaps because we don’t know how to process grief and the latter due mainly to capitalism. Plants are often my muse, as plant blindness, leading to extinction, is another cultural phenomenon I find intriguing. I’m interested in exploring these ideas through subtlety and beauty, often employing museum-like practices of cataloging, or through the use of humor and irony, because plants as victims can be an entry point to the difficult topic of extinction and everyone’s eventual demise.

 

Gwen Olmos

Gwen Haleola Olmos was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and has journeyed across the mainland throughout her entire life. She is a traditional artist with an emphasis on painting but is always dabbling in other mediums. During her childhood, art had been a constant in her life. This led her to receive a BFA in Studio Art at the University of North Texas. She is currently an MFA candidate at the 夜色视频, excitedly expanding her art practice within an interdisciplinary program. When she isn’t in her studio, she is probably playing video games or billiards at various locations around town.

Gwen Olmos holding painting surrounded by other paintings.

Artist statement

I have been exploring the concept of artificial still lifes and their place within the simulacra. Mimicry of the natural environment while taking into account the audience’s role in the experience is a theme I am invested in creating within atypical spaces. I am experimenting with painting and fiber to convey this theme and discovering how this relates to traditional gallery spaces in general. My ultimate goal is to question artificial space and environment in relation to how we experience the world through our bodies. From unique features to the surrounding subjective space, I continue to search for the components of natural essence through the art I create.

 

Bekah Sullivan

Bekah Sullivan was born and raised in San Diego, California. As a graduate of San Diego State University with a B.A. in painting and printmaking and a minor in art history, she was the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate of the School of Art and Design Award at SDSU as well as the Art Council Ambassadors Award (2021). After her undergraduate work, she studied under Bill Kelly and Michele Burgess at Brighton Press in San Diego, where she developed her skills and art practice within the realm of book arts, printmaking and more broadly, mark making. She has taken her experience and love of book arts to the 夜色视频’s Black Rock Press where she currently works while pursuing an MFA in Art.

Bekah Sullivan in art studio with artwork on walls.

Artist statement

I’m a drawing-based artist interested in the distorted recall of memory and expressing universal experiences such as vulnerability, discomfort, violence and solitude. The mutability, alteration, and shifting of memory and experience is innately tethered to the passage of time and for me translates into a longing for something I can never fully know again. In my work I reflect this reality by conveying realism and accuracy while imbedding subtle or more obvious disturbances throughout - be it the way I alter the placement of shadows or how I distill the environments to a black and grey palette. When I use a ballpoint pen, a non-archival medium, I am articulating this gradual obscured remembrance. As time passes, the fragility and impermanence of the pen marks become progressively more noticeable and less resistant. This medium becomes an embodiment of the transmutation of memory, emotion, and myself as I move through this life.

 

Cody Breese Thomas

Cody Breese Thomas is a ceramicist, sculptor and designer from Muskegon, Michigan. In an effort to understand the fidelity of relationships and the metamorphosis of value, he works with clay, bronze, neon, and found objects as a means of exploring concepts such as nostalgia and morality. Currently pursuing an MFA at the 夜色视频, Thomas also serves as Board President of Tuscarora Pottery School, where he endeavors in perpetuating the communal nature of ceramics and the arts.

Cody Breese Thomas in room with neon lights.

Artist statement

My studio practice examines the threshold between functionalism and failure, and how our bodies are most certainly vessels. It's about that hole we throw pieces of ourselves into, inevitably flattening the marbling of the stories we tell. Or that opaque veil that separates us from one another, and the ethereal gravity of watching it unravel. And how so many things have a beginning and an end, but the middle often gets so murky. It's the irony of freezing movement with fire, and how maybe muscle memory is a gesture towards a future, preemptively apologizing for spilling the milk.

 

Trent Woolley

Trent Woolley was born and lived most of his meaningless existence in Sacramento, California. He is the son of an anonymous sperm donor and a single mother who worked tirelessly to take care of her 6 kids. Before becoming an artist later in life he spent most of his time as a blue collar worker trying to figure out the meaning of it all. His hobbies include napping, whistling, and hiking.

Trent Woolley in art studio with white sculpture on display

Artist statement

I am constantly reinventing what it means to be a living artist while everything around me dies. Branching connections between despair and the medium of ceramic invigorates my practice through purposeful destruction and reluctant cleanliness with my ceramic sculptures. I further explore my timid nature with relief-cut printmaking trying to pack as much information into a single square inch as I put into a 216-pound sculpture. Pray for me.

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