Meet our incoming Art MFAs!

We are pleased to announce the University of Minnesota's incoming MFA Class of 2025: eight outstanding artists who bring a range of skills and interests to our Department this semester. Please join us in welcoming them to the University of Minnesota and Regis Center for Art, and in the meantime, enjoy a peek into each of their practices:

Sarah Abdel-Jelil (she/her)

Above: Still from one video in Okay Overall: What if we just sit here?, 7:33, 2021

I am a Mauritanian American filmmaker, dancer, and choreographer. Inspired by my nomadic upbringing, living in eight countries in a multicultural/interfaith household, my work explores the relational aspects of home, movement, and liminal space. My creative practice centers somatic intelligence, which involves instinctually trusting one’s body in space and time, which subsequently allows me to interrogate the embodied nature of the lived experience.

Since 2015, I have grown my personal practice of “dance time-lapse.” Influenced by botanical time-lapse imagery and early stop-motion animation, such as Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion,” I’ve combined durational performance with time-lapse photography to create works that invite participants and audiences to move in tandem with the natural cycles around them.

Consider a gesture like lifting an arm. In my dance time-lapse work, a dancer will break this movement down into tiny increments, over the course of an hour. During this time, the intervalometer connected to my camera will take a photo every twenty seconds to document the granular shift in movement. As the dancer moves, the natural world around them changes, so their movements align with clouds passing, shadows forming, and more. Once played back as a video, this gradual, incremental arm movement, which lasted one hour in “real” time, will look continuous and last but a few seconds on screen. Through this practice, I collapse time and appreciate the physical effort connected to actions performed in everyday life- drawing attention to that which we cannot plainly see. It’s only after each photo is assembled into a time-lapse video that we are able to see the synchronicity between the human dancer and the natural world around them.

My work is inherently collaborative, and I am passionate about community-based education that leverages guided improvisation to facilitate dialogue, deepen relationships, and increase a sense of groundedness in one’s body. I look forward to deepening my visual arts practice and hosting more creative movement workshops across age groups.

Still from Detroit Lakes, OR, 00:47, 2019

Instagram: @sarahajklmnop • Website: sarahabdeljelil.com

Justin Allen (he/they)

I am a photographer and book artist living in Maplewood, MN. I received my BFA from the University of Northern Iowa in the Spring of 2016. I am passionate about the medium of the artbook and I have self-published four major photobooks of my long-term projects. Recently, I started Make Do Books; taking on the role of book designer, editor, and publisher. Make Do Books was created to provide the opportunity for talented local artists to produce high quality, small editioned artbooks of their work, regardless of technical/educational background or privilege.

I use humor and playful absurdity to make relatable entry points into my work. Using my own life experiences, I use photography to make connections to the lives of others throughout history. As these stories weave together, they create new narratives which recall forgotten or overlooked facets of the collective human experience. 

I often photograph objects in the outdoor landscape that strangers construct or leave behind. Each of these artifacts tell a story. They are the aftermath of an intentional action. As the viewer, we can’t help but attach our own narrative to these artifacts in order to contextualize the actions of the stranger. I use this idea to create image sequences with loose narratives that encourage the viewer to use their imagination and contemplate the complexity of human nature and morality.

Untitled, Palermo, Inkjet on newsprint, 10 x 7", 2021 

Instagram: @justin_d_allen • Website: justin-d-allen.com

Anna Clowser (she/her)

Born and raised in Iowa, I received a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Social Justice with an emphasis in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Iowa. I am particularly interested in systems of violence and care in the Midwest within the context of colonialism, agriculture, and their effects on land and culture. 

As part of my practice, I use textiles, paper, electronics, and performance as tools to create a variety of installation, print, and video work. My work is typically grounded in natural spaces in the Midwest and utilizes labor intensive processes as a way to imbue the objects I create with meaning. The techniques I employ are often skills that have been passed down to me through the women in my family. Sewing, beading, dyeing, and collecting have ancestral significance to me and connect to the history of women’s work and globalized systems of labor. During the process of creating work, I focus on my bodily actions as a method of connecting directly to the experiences and knowledge of women and laborers.

Still from Can I Hold Your Hand?, 5:00, 2021

Instagram: @anna.clowser • Website: annaclowser.com

Alter Hajek (he/they/she)

Alter Hajek writes about devotion and transsexual inter-dimensional embodiment in several mediums, including sculpture, bookmaking and letterpress, analog photography, sound, illustration, and translation. He studied at Simon's Rock College and St. John's College, and received a BA in Literature from Mills College. His favorite drug is general anesthesia. 

spine\yield, Letterpress book, 2.5' x 5", 2019

Twitter: @sin_offering •  soundcloud.com/allsups

Sarah Hubner-Burns (she/her)

I make drawings, paintings, and assemblage. My work uses collage as a foundation for creating images and forms that contain both abstraction and representation, drawing on themes related to mirroring both conceptually and through process. I use found images, personal photographs, and other ephemera in my work and I am very interested in symbolism and metaphysics. My work uses soft interventions and disruptions in recognition, alluding both to the seen and unseen in a visibly constructed and sometimes constrained sense of space.

Instagram: @sk.burns • Website: burnthestudio.com

Roya Nazari Najafabadi (she/her)

I want to start introducing myself with a quote from Edward Hopper: “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."
I was inspired by this since my artworks are empowered by my innermost emotions. Perhaps color is only one of the stuff with which I have been grown up, and recognize and define it in other artworks.
I find my artwork unfinished. They are spontaneous artworks that I try to discover in my proximity and among people I see routinely. By juxtaposing colors, shapes, and things, I translate an inner emotion into an outer one. Color, volume, and emotion are the most relevant properties of my creativity.
My paintings are replete with emotions, and like an enigma, require viewers to contemplate and to explore in their emotional environment. Why color and its mixture with stuff?
As color has a significant impact on our spirit and emotions, viewpoints, and identity, it is very important how we see our environment. In addition, colors and volumes have enabled us to get connected to a specific subject.
The quality that helps us to discover our environment helped me to achieve what I was looking for since childhood.
In the beginning, an artwork has to come into existence with the artist’s heartfelt fire – the way that my artworks are created. As always, in my artworks, I am looking for the true nature of human beings, and I am looking forward to picturing their embedded inside, and their environmental problems. So, from this perspective, I strive as an artist to transform them into a scene full of emotions.
My artworks are technically demanding in order to invite viewers to come into my intellectual space and contemplate their meaning. I am not only interested in colors and shapes relationships, but also eager to show the primary feelings and emotions of human beings, e.g., tragedy, anger, pain, chaos, and depression. In fact, I try to push the viewers into the turbulent waters of my feelings through art.
Human degeneration, one of my collections created in 2015 and still continuing, is about the environmental problems of human beings, showing the degeneration of contemporary humans. Shapes and colors are the identifying characteristics of this collection, illustrating chaos, contrast, and turbulence to involve viewers in my feelings. Almost half of the people around the world suffer from depression, which is the natural response of a human to their environmental pushes and pressures. Similarly, bipolar disorder stems from depression where people suffer behavioral variation, and during this period experienced many characters and feelings.
Therefore, as an artist, I am inspired to add this thought to my works of art with a different materials approach. These works are used by combining different materials such as plaster, paste, plastic wires, wood, and finally paint. The least I can do as an artist is to demonstrate my emotions with creating artworks and get the reciprocal feelings of the environment.

Strangulation, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas and wood, 70 x 50cm, 2021

Instagram: @royanazari1992 • Website: missroyarn.wixsite.com/portfolio

Marcus Rothering (he/him)

I am a ceramic and fiber artist living in downtown Minneapolis with my poodle Pansy. Being black and queer is a large theme throughout my work expressing the joys and difficulties navigating these identities. My ceramic forms are inspired by the occult as well as African and Haitian folklore, and my rugs are self portraits.

I received my B.A. in Studio Art and minor in Digital Media from Metropolitan State University focusing on ceramics and fiber. Hand-built techniques are incorporated with my ceramics, and I use a tufting gun to create my rugs.

Always Through You, Earthenware and glaze,13" x 12" x 12", 2021

Instagram: @marcusrothering • Artist interview via SooVAC: https://youtu.be/CMNOIuAaV_g

Mincheng Wang (he/him)

Mincheng Wang is a Chinese ceramic artist now based in Alfred, New York. After completing his BA in Ceramics from Jingdezhen Ceramic University in 2014, he founded his own studio dedicated to expanding his ceramics practice. His practice is informed by his skills as a graphic designer experienced with numerous production softwares and 3D modeling. Wang also studied at Alfred University in New York where he was the recipient of the Miller Portfolio Fellowship. As his practice grows, he continues to rethink and challenge our perceptions of shape and materiality.

Weightlessness, Porcelain, 18 x 2 x 23", 2021

Instagram @wangmincheng • Website: minchengwang.com