What Are Our Students Up To After Graduation? Watch Our Alumni Panel Recording To Find Out!
We are thrilled to invite Morgan Sawyer, Jac Kirby, Laura Catherine Brown, Alex Barsky, Diana Poon, and Melissa Malzkuhn to speak to us on a virtual panel. Watch the recording now to hear about our program’s impact on the discovery and development of their personal voices, and how they use storytelling every day in their work.
Meet the Panelists
Class of 2015
Melissa is an an activist, academic, artist, and digital strategist with a love for language play, immersive experiences, and community-based change. Among many other projects, Melissa is the Director of Motion Light Lab, an award-winning creative lab focusing on creating an equitable world through immersive content, literacy-based activities, and other initiatives that advances Deaf representation and competency across different sectors of society. She is an Obama Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and a 2024 Elevate Prize Winner. She was an art fellow with the CripTech Metaverse Lab with Leonardo, where she built the first Deaf Club in the metaverse.
Class of 2018
Alex Barsky is an animator, cartoonist, and educator who co-founded Zine Hug, a riso micropress based in Seattle.
Class of 2021
Jacquelyn Kirby is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is driven by a deep commitment to exploration and expression. Guided by the core values of love and weirdness, she seeks to visually articulate the world as she experiences it, always striving to create work that resonates on a personal and universal level. Her art is a continuous dialogue between the internal and external, where each project is an invitation to reflect, question, and connect.
Class of 2022
Laura Catherine Brown is a writer, comics maker and visual storyteller. Her first novel
Quickening was a Barnes and Noble Discover pick and her second Made By Mary received an Independent Publisher Silver Medal award. Her shorter work has appeared in numerous literary journals. Her comics have been published in Solstice Literary Magazine, World War 3 Illustrated Anthology and HAD Magazine.
Class of 2022
Morgan is an illustrator, cartoonist, and educator whose voice as a visual storyteller uses a combination of technical skill and introspection, displayed through a use of humor, direct commentary and just a smidge of sarcasm, with the goal of circumventing expectations. He has been published by Scout Comics, Gaffe, set to be published by Iron Circus Comics, The Hall of Taxidermied Presidents for MSCF Magazine and more.
Class of 2024
Diana Poon is a writer, artist, and creative director who approaches serious topics unseriously through illustration, interactive media, and video essays. Her projects examine themes of perception vs self-perception, mental health in a mental world, and the healing power of all things cozy and cute.
