Summer Camp Instructor Bios
David Anyanwu
David Anyanwu is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer, specializing in anime/Japanese cartoon illustration style. He currently runs a brand with his two elder brothers, creating products and accessories featuring his artwork. David recently discovered a passion for teaching and traditional and digital art with young eager artists!
Colleen Bee
Colleen Bee fell in love with sewing immediately upon making her first terrycloth tank top in middle school many years ago. Since then she has worked in Costume Shops in New York City, Los Angeles, and Raleigh. She spent thirteen years as a Bridal Seamstress, altering and constructing dresses for brides in Denver, CO and in Raleigh. Now she creates meticulously hand sewn Art Dolls made from old fabric, found objects and clay. She also enjoys processing plant fibers like flax and hemp, and spinning them into yarn on her old spinning wheel.
Colleen is an elementary school art teacher and enjoys teaching students of all ages in various art camps and workshops.
She graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1990.
Aliyah Bonnette
Aliyah Bonnette is a multidisciplinary artist working out of NC. Working using a variety of materials, she creates painted quilts as her medium. Her work focuses mainly on the black femme experience in America and pulls inspiration from various topics in the African American Diaspora.
Aliyah is also one of our current Regional Emerging Artists in Residence in Studio 215.
Sonya Drum
Sonya Leigh Drum is an arts educator, artist, and theatrical designer. For the past 22 years, she has taught visual arts in the NC Public School System and designed scenery and costumes for both professional and university theatres throughout the Triangle. Sonya currently teaches visual art electives at Washington GT Magnet Elementary School in Wake County, where she was selected as the 2017 Magnet Schools of America region IV finalist for National Magnet Teacher of the Year. Sonya has worked as a teaching artist for the ASAP program for the last 18 years and has also taught summer arts programs at the Holly Springs School of Dance and Discover Arts Academy.
Maria Frati
Maria is a printmaker and painter with a studio at Artspace. Her work is inspired by natural elements and forces. Maria taught Art for six years in schools including four in New York City. She currently teaches printmaking workshops out of her studio (Studio 108 at Artspace).
Ana Galizes
Ana Teresa Galizes is a portrait photographer as well as a visual art and design instructor. Originally, she is from Lisbon, Portugal but has called North Carolina home for the last twenty years. She graduated from William Peace University and North Carolina State University with degrees in visual communication and has spent the last ten years concentrating on freelance photography, mixed media art, and design.
Eric Gibbons
Eric Gibbons is a highly qualified, award-winning, Nationally Board Certified art teacher, with over 30+ years of experience and a second certification in elementary education. He is also a published author, speaker, publisher, award-winning inventor, and gallery owner with more than 20 years of experience. His novel inter curricular, choice-based, STEM/STEAM approach to art education can be found on his blog at ArtEdGuru.com.
Skully Gustafson
Skully Gustafson is a multi media artist currently living in Hillsborough North Carolina. Her work explores many mediums from painting and collage to sculpture and performance. She also co-runs a gallery called Slug Space in Chapel Hill.
Sheila Hall
SJ Hall paints and creates from experiences and surroundings, crafting the colors to speak and evoke emotions of the viewer. She enjoys pattern and colors that easily translates into textile designs.
Hall studied art at East Carolina University and has over 30 years of experience with the various public school districts in the United States, as an Art Educator, a Principal and District Supervisor. Hall is now concentrating on her art in her Raleigh NC studio, “Color Speaks Art Studio.” SJ Hall’s colorful artwork is among many private art collections from Anchorage, Alaska to North Carolina.
SJ Hall has been a longtime advocate for the arts. She believes creating art is fulfilling and builds self esteem in young and old. Hall states, “Art allows expression of emotions and tells stories of one’s environment.” Every child should see artists that look like them and feel free to express themselves through the arts.
Tara Kernan
Tara Kernan holds a BS in Art Education from Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She has taught Visual Arts for grades K-12 in New Jersey and North Carolina schools for many years and is currently the visual art teacher at Hunter GT/AIG Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh. Tara uses the links between visual art, cultural anthropology, and art history to help her students make real-world connections through art and interdisciplinary study.
Linette Knight
Linette Knight, originally from Newburgh, NY, moved to Raleigh in 1985.
Linette has always been drawn to fashion design and textiles. She started her creative journey when she married my husband, a graffiti artist – they wanted their community to see graffiti as more than just vandalism, so they started knocking on gallery doors to see if they could take the streets to the established gallery floor. Their first exhibit was at VAE Raleigh, which led to being involved with SparkCon.
Linette began to explore textiles and has crocheted for 15 years now. She started with simple hats and scarves, and then moved into crochet fashion. As she explored different perspectives of her new found outlet, she discovered the connection to meditation through counting stitches.
Linette worked with Polish Crochet artist Olek, to help create and teach workshops dedicated to creating a billboard size mural in honor of Nina Simone here in Raleigh. She later traveled with Olek to create other murals across the United States.
Linette also worked alongside Angela Lombardi, in association, with the NC Museum of Art to host twin artists Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute for Figuring. The goal: to create an artistic response to global warming and oceanic pollution, through hyperbolic crochet.
She is now officially a yarn bomber, which she says suits her well, as she wanted to take graffiti to a new level.
Svetlana Kurkalova
Svetlana majored in sequential art and minored in storyboarding at SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design). She has been both a part-time swim team coach and an art instructor. Svetlana has planned, developed, and delivered eight custom classes at Greensboro’s Center for Visual Arts (CVA): Drawing and Inking, Intro to Photoshop, Winter Art, Digital ArtLAB, and How to Draw the Hard Stuff. She has taught both in person and online. Svetlana wants to share her knowledge of visual storytelling to all who are interested.
Natalia Lopes
Natalia Lopes is a queer Latinx illustrator and indie comics artist with an affinity for the eerie and nightmarish. Her retro line work and alluringly horrifying subjects pays a loving nod to horror, anime, and science fiction. She successfully crowdfunded the first volume of an independent horror anthology in October of 2019 and has since produced several comics and zines. When she is not working on freelance projects, she is teaching classes to teens and adults in non-profit art centers around North Carolina. You can find her illustration and comics at mystopress.com.
Virginia Maier
Virginia Maier is an artist and art teacher living here in NC. She and her family moved here from Arizona in 2011.
In 2008, she graduated with a degree in Art Education from the University of Arizona. She has worked in the art field ever since, producing her own artwork, showing her work locally, and teaching art to a variety of age groups, from infants up to the elderly.
In 2016, she started an art business called Artistic Adventures of North Carolina. She provides paint and crafting parties for adults and children for social gatherings, corporate team building, and birthday parties. She teaches art classes at various locations in the Triangle area. Until 2019, she coordinated the annual community art event in Garner NC, the Picket Fence Project, which received the Arts and Humanities Award from the NC Recreation and Park Association for 2017. In 2019, she was hired for the United Arts Council Artist in Residence Program to do the Picket Fence Project with schools in Wake and Johnson County.
Michael McCue
Michael McCue is in his seventh year teaching elementary art in Wake County Schools. This will be his fourth summer at Artspace. Originally from Long Island, New York, he received both his bachelor’s (Molloy College) and master’s (Hofstra University) in Art Education K-12 there before relocating to NC in 2015.
His goal is for students to impress themselves with what they can create as he mentors them to uncover their hidden talents. He would like students to enjoy creating artwork as much as he enjoys teaching it. Michael is also a practicing artist and showcases his paintings in cafe galleries in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro.
Aleix Murphy
Aleix Murphy is an artist and art teacher. She fell in love with her creative side at a very young age which is why she enjoys teaching other young artist how to foster that new creative energy. Her favorite thing about art making is that no matter the medium, you are able to express yourself without words. While teaching Summer Camps at Artspace, she hopes to inspire her students to push their creative capabilities in order to make some amazing art!
Kathryn J. Smith
Kathryn is an artist, character actor, teacher and a Raleigh native. She works in acrylics creating whimsical barnscapes, florals and abstracts. Kathryn enjoys the process of art and enjoys encouraging young artist to have FUN and to be FEARLESS in their personal art journey.
Emily Thomas
Emily Hobgood Thomas is an artist working in Cary, NC. Emily makes photographs with varying degrees of manipulation that investigate the socioeconomic impact of tourism. At this time, Thomas’ work focuses on the Outer Banks region of North Carolina.
Emily graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2018 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Studio Art with a Concentration in Painting. In 2020, Emily earned her Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.