RTKL Fellowship

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:

2025-2026

TAYLOR GOAD

M.F.A Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2026

Project: “My Doohd”

Taylor Goad is a multimedia artist, animator, and graphic designer whose work explores illness, care, and the experience of inhabiting a sick body. 
Their project My Doohd reflects on their time navigating cancer treatment while developing their identity as an artist in an MFA program. Through a guardian-like character called the Doohd, the work uses humor and the abject to communicate the discomfort, vulnerability, and absurdity of medical experiences. Composed largely of colorful tufted rugs, the work draws connections between commercial graphic design, craft traditions, and the aesthetics of both clinical environments and “white cube” gallery spaces. By introducing playful, handmade objects into spaces often defined by sterility and distance, Taylor’s work reflects on the lack of humanization in medical settings while inviting broader audiences to engage with conversations around illness, care, and the body.

 

 

 

 

A separate room in an exhibition space that shows a projection in a dark room. There are ivy like objects decorating the doorway.

2024-2025

ALEXI SCHEIBER

M.F.A Candidate, Intermedia + Digital Arts Graduate Program, 2025

Project: “Awake/Dreaming”

Awake/Dreaming is a body of work that includes animation, poetry, papermaking, and installation. This work explores climate consciousness by breaking emotional responses into a loose binary of the Awake (anxious, grieving, conscious of systems of harm and oppression) and Dreaming (imaginative, radical possibility) modes. Artistic research started with an exploration of invasive species as a subtle and nefarious visual marker of the climate crisis in the Mid-Atlantic region. Visual research expanded into practical intersectional climate solutions that would make a tangible difference in the average person’s life. Much of the iconography of this work traces back to the Mid-Atlantic region and Baltimore specifically, though many of the solutions depicted can and are being applied elsewhere. Poetry functions as a scaffold where art and traditional essay writing felt inadequate to wholly express an idea. My original poem “The Dreaming Manifesto” is scattered throughout the work– as narration in the animation The Dreaming World, and as isolated lines on the seed paper installation of the same name.

 

2023-2024

ELLY KALANTARI

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

Project: “In Praise of the Unknown”

The sculptural works presented in Kalantari’s thesis show, whose production was supported by the RTKL fellowship, are inspired by her experiences growing up and living in Iran. Through multiple material processes, Kalantari works to strip away societal rigidity towards women. The unraveling fabric woven by her mother in “My Weft, Her Warp” stands as a metaphor for empowering women as she aims to deconstruct the taboos and sexualized perceptions surrounding the female form, highlighting its inherent strength and resilience through sculptural metamorphosis. In her written thesis titled In Praise of the Unknown Kalantari writes:

By “navigating the fluid boundaries between individual subjectivity and societal  structures, my art serves as a platform to dissect and reimagine these cultural influences, acknowledging their profound impact on the construction of personal and collective identities”

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.

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)