RTKL AWARD

RTKL FELLOWSHIP

Rogers, Taliaferro, Kostritsky, & Lamb [ RTKL ] Fellowship is made possible through the generosity of RTKL Associates Incorporated. RTKL was founded in Baltimore in 1946 and has since become one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive architecture and design firms in the world, with expanded offices throughout most continents. IMDA and the Department of Visual Arts are grateful that RTKL is determined to support emerging, creative leaders in the field of art.

Each year upon achieving their MFA Candidacy, typically after their third semester, one IMDA graduate student is awarded the RTKL Fellowship based solely on the merit of their presentation on Graduate Review Day. The goal of RTKL is to award an emerging artist of creative and scholarly excellence who has demonstrated a promise to make an impact on the field. Therefore, through a competitive process, the RTKL award seeks to propel that promising graduate student into their future career by financially contributing toward their thesis exhibition. Award recipients offer an artist lecture typical of an academic job interview or gallery talk around the time of their thesis exhibition.

Past Winners:

2023-2024: ELLY KALANTARI

M.F.A Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2024

2022-2023:

LIZA

ALEINIKOVA

M.F.A. Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2023

Project: “The Chapel of Imagination”

The Chapel of Imagination, is a multimedia installation and an artist’s self-portrait subverting and reimagining the layout of the traditional Eastern Orthodox Church and Russian folktales through a mix of animation, projection mapping, and sculptural objects.
Liza Aleinikova is a Siberian animator and multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores topics of imagination, humor, ideology, and Russian culture.
Liza’s RTKL presentation took place at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture on UMBC campus on Friday, April 21st, 2023.

2021-2022

FOSTER

SANTIAGO

M.F.A. Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2022

Project: Transgender Euphoria: Puerto Rico’s Queer Exaltation

Foster Reynolds-Santiago is a visual artist working with video projection, painting, and fiber sculpture to reference Latinx and Transgender futurism. By exploring this combination, he imagines his body in new worlds and extraordinary relationships, visualizing invisible energies of love toward the island of Puerto Rico and Transgender narratives into colorful installations.

 

 

2020-2021

JASON

CHARNEY

 

 

 

M.F.A. Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2021

Project: “Equivocation: Noisy Drawings”

My work explores how our psyches shape and are shaped by the tools we use, both consciously and subconsciously. How do we adjust our interpersonal relationships, our modes of perception, and even our bodies in order to communicate with and through the digital medium? How can the errors and failures of technologies expose the limits of its abilities – and our trust in its rendering of our intentions?

In my process, I investigate the human interface with technology, and especially the unreliable translations between the natural and artificial, the physical and digital, and the embodied and electronic. These themes manifest in multimedia installations and performances, often employing custom software and digital/physical hybrids to create sound, animation, and light in real-time generative systems.

2019-2020

Danielle D’Amico

M.F.A. Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2020

Danielle D’Amico is a multimedia artist whose work explores transgression, technologically mediated intimacy and climate change. She received her B.S. in Film, Video & Theatre from Stevenson University. Her works have screened at venues in and around Baltimore including 2640 Space, Mercury Theater, Red Room and Washington ArtWorks. Music videos have premiered in PunkNews, Baltimore City Paper and through numerous independent music blogs. Her immersive projection installation, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, was awarded the Johns Hopkins Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in 2019. Danielle is currently pursuing her MFA in Intermedia & Digital Art at the UMBC and hopes to exhibit her work internationally.

2018-2019

Chinen Aimi Bouillon

M.F.A. Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2019

Bouilon’s thesis exhibition “Theater of Tacit Operations” observes the forces at play within U.S. military occupation in Okinawa, Japan.

Bouillon works as a detective investigating matrilineal and patrilineal histories. She is an artist born in Okinawa, Japan, former Ryukyu Kingdom, to a native mother and a United States Marine father. Through framing territories of contradiction she analyzes the duality of everyday gender, power and war. Her art is the process of discovery and findings of matrilineal histories colonized by patriarchal narratives. The gallery displays images of Okinawa taken on a 35mm black and white film with photograms of signs and symbols transliterating the Ryukyu oral language and a table top with geographic outline of Okinawa island. The installation plays with the assumed hierarchy of knowledge.

 

Other previous winners: Chris Kojzar (2017-18), Ghazaleh Keshavarz (2016-17), Elena De Bold (2015-16), Jason Hughes (2014-15)