Book Arts

Markus Baenziger is a Swiss born artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. After receiving his BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City, he attended the graduate program at Yale University, where he received his MFA in sculpture. He is a full-time professor at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. He had several one-person exhibitions at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City, and additional solo exhibitions at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College; the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College; the Louise Jones Brown Gallery at Duke University; Bonakdar Jancou Gallery, NYC; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC; and Cohen Gallery, NYC. His work has also been featured in select group exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum; the Walker Art Center; the Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa FL; the Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, NY; the Florida Atlantic University Gallery; the Swiss Institute; Zabriskie Gallery; the Baer Art Center and the LÁ Art Museum in Iceland; WithSpace Gallery in Beijing, China; and C/O Gallery in Oslo, Norway, among others.

Markus Baenziger is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship award. He also received the State of Connecticut Commission on the Arts artist fellowship, and a Yale Norfolk Fellowship in sculpture. He was awarded an artist residency fellowship at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and he received the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Summer ’14 Open Studio Residency award, and the Weir Farm Artist Residency award at the Weir Farm National Historic Site in Wilton, CT. Most recently he received a Ucross Foundation residency award, a Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences Artist Residency award and fellowship, and he was awarded a residency at the Baer Art Center in Iceland and at the La Napoule Art Foundation Residency Program in Mandelieu La Napoule, France.

Website: markusbaenziger.com

Instagram: @markusbaenziger

Katie Christensen (she/her) spent 20 years working in the arts in various capacities, including as a working artist, and for the Wyoming Arts Council, founder of Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the University of Wyoming Art Museum. Motivated by working with Veterans and women who were incarcerated, she recently transitioned to the mental health counseling field. Integrating expressive arts in counseling, Katie provides a nurturing environment to help people explore and move toward the best versions of Self. Katie holds an MS in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Wyoming (UW), MFA from Bowling Green State University, and a BFA from UW. She is the owner of Gem City Art and Wellness and was recently selected for the Wyoming Women to Watch program. She resides in Laramie with her husband and daughter. Together they enjoy spending time outside, soaking up sunshine and cultural events.

Website: katiechristensenart.com

Instagram: @GemCityWellness

January Yoon Cho is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in New York City, working with drawing, photography, video, and performance. She has exhibited at venues including the Hammond Museum (NY), Islip Art Museum, Korean Consulate General (NY), Ely Center of Contemporary Art (CT), Austin Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts (Tallahassee), Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, Penn State University, Centro de Cultura Contemporanea (Barcelona), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), and Fondazione Querini Stampalia (Venice).

Her “The Walk” photo-video project received grants from the New York Council on the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund in Feminist Art, and the Puffin Foundation in Environmental Art. Reviews of her work include Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and the Dallas Morning News. Cho was a visiting artist at the Ringling College of Art and has taught at Parsons School of Design (NY), New School University (NY), and Hanyang University (Seoul, Korea).
Born in Seoul, Korea, Cho earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Parsons School of Design. In 2020, Yoon Cho incorporated the name “January” into her artistic identity.

Website: yooncho.com

Instagram: @january_yoon_cho_art

Kayla is an maker and educator specializing in letterpress printing, community-engaged workshops, participatory design and the applied juxtaposition of historical and modern visual communication and printing technologies at the University of Wyoming as a faculty member in the Communication & Journalism Department and Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources. Kayla enjoys creating experimental and iterative work and creating interactive design-based experiences.

She can often be found lugging her 250lb, 120-year-old Poco ‘0’ letterpress around the country for workshops and exhibitions. She was recently selected as a 2026–2027 Wyoming Woman to Watch with the National Museum for Women in the Arts for her work in printmaking, typography and book arts.

Website: kisscutstudio.com

Instagram: @kaylaclar.k

Diana Blain Fine is an interdisciplinary artist from The Gambia whose works on paper incorporate photography, collage, painting and instillation. Diana employs the body as both material and visual landscape to explore the hierarchical nature, complexity, absurdity and innumerable contradictions that exist between empire, borders, and the diasporic communities that straddle them all.

Her work often fuses her sociological background with the intimate and introspective practice of self-portraiture to interrogate prescribed norms and aesthetic ideals, exploring the ways in which they frame blackness and power. Diana places herself in much of her work as both the objectified and objectifier, the ill-favored and the aspiration to create a visual portal for baring witness to and engaging with practices and messaging around purity, power, beauty, and the body.

Diana spent her formative years across continents and has lived in The Gambia, the U.K., Pakistan, Liberia, Indonesia and the U.S. Her personal experiences living under state-sanctioned military dictatorship in South Asia as a child, as a young teen witnessing the dawn of a bloody military coup in Liberia, and as an immigrant temporarily transplanted to the suburbs New York, all continue to inspire the subversive nature of her work. She currently lives on a farm in rural upstate New York.

Website: dianablainfine.com

Instagram: @dianablainfine

Leah Hardy completed a BFA in Art at the University of Kansas in 1987, including a year abroad at Howard Gardens Art School in Cardiff, Wales, UK (1986-87) and earned her MFA from the University of Indiana, Bloomington in 1990. Exhibited nationally and internationally, Hardy’s intimately scaled mixed media sculpture has garnered numerous awards and inclusions in books, periodicals, juried and invitational exhibitions. Residencies have taken Hardy to Australia, New Zealand, China, and India. Hardy’s work is in public and private collections in the US, China, Czech Republic, New Zealand, Australia, Europe and India. Hardy retired as Professor Emerita from the University of Wyoming in 2023 where she established the Metalsmithing Program in 2009 in the Visual Arts Department and cotaught a UW International Art course in India for five summers. In 2017 Hardy was invited to be a Visiting Artist for three months at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, during which time she directed a collaborative project, In Camels’ Footsteps. The project began with a weeklong camel trek with artists in South Australia culminating in exhibitions in Adelaide and Sydney in 2018 highlighting artwork in response to the experience. Hardy was one of five finalists for the 2024 Women to Watch International Exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Currently Hardy resides in Abiquiu, New Mexico with her artist spouse, Mark Ritchie, and maintains a joyful studio practice in the desert environment.

Website: leahmhardy.com

Sarah Ortegon HighWalking was born in Denver, CO into a family of 12 children. Ortegon HighWalking graduated with her BFA from the Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2013. Ortegon HighWalking studied art history in Italy during the summer of 2012. The main theme in Ortegon High Walking’s work is her Indigenous Heritage and her relationship to the land.
In 2013 Ortegon HighWalking was titled Miss Native American, USA and the focus of her platform was healthy living. She then traveled to Moldova in Europe, Guatemala, and throughout the U.S. performing the jingle dress dance with the Native Pride Dance Troupe.

Ortegon HighWalking was the artist for the MALCS conference in Laramie, WY at the University of Wyoming and had a solo art exhibition.

Ortegon HighWalking is also featured in PBS’s, “The Art of Home; A Wind River Story” which was nominated for an Emmy in August of 2020. She was an extra in NBC’s TV series, “Jamestown”, as well as Paramount TV series, “1923”.

In March of 2020, Ortegon HighWalking collaborated with Choctaw artist Jeffery Gibson and performed in Times Square, NY for the Midnight Moment titled, “She Never Dances Alone.” This was featured on over 60 monitors in Times Square, NY from March 1, 2020 – July 31, 2020 at 11:57-Midnight each night. The in-person jingle dress dance performance was March 7, 2020.
Ortegon HighWalking has recently been accepted into the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Women to Watch” Exhibit, happening in Washington, D.C. in 2024.

She performed and danced in collaboration with Gibson at the Venice Biennale along with 26 other dancers in April of 2024 as well as October of 2024. Sarah Ortegon HighWalking participated in the Ucross Artist Residency in Ucross, WY May 26th – June 6th, 2025. She collaborated with Robert Tully, a metal sculpturist, and she submitted designs to be added to the 40 foot high ‘Leaf Riders’ which can be seen from I-80 in Lafayette. She also assisted with a design for 5 foot Yucca pod sculpture in Golden, CO. In December of 2025-Jan 2026 Ortegon-Highwalking created a mural with inspiration from writer ZBassSpeaks in Lafayette, which also touched on numerology. She is currently the Assistant Director of Human Resources at the Native American Rights Fund and continues to dedicate her life to her various forms of expression and her family.

Website: sarahortegon.com

Instagram: @nonookeiht_bee3eisei

Mauriah Donegan Kraker is a midwesterner, a choreographer, a long-distance walker invested in slow travel. She walks place as a means of attending to the choreographic unfolding of time cycles in body + land. This walking practice is a driver in the creation of photographs, writing and dance works that live somewhere in the realms of heightened states of physicality, dreaming and walking.

Mauriah has led folks on walks through the Italian alps, sound walks in southern France, outings to rivers, prairies and highway underpasses in the Midwest. Her dance work has been presented in the Midwest, South Korea, Italy, and New York, in galleries and outdoor spaces in Taiwan and Thailand. Her teaching work includes creating and facilitating creative dance for children’s programming, Parkinson’s, memory care + intergenerational movement programming. She currently co-directs Dance at Lawrence University (Appleton, Wisconsin) developing practices of care for the performing artist, athlete. This summer, she is rereading her favorite science fiction books: The Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer.

Website: mapsformaking.com

Instagram: @mauriah.k

Connie Norman is known for her painstaking and beautiful pottery. Armed with pieces of movable type she presses each letter individually into the clay. She constructs each piece with a combination of handbuilt techniques, including slab building, coiling, and press and slump molding. Norman’s glazing process continues the meticulous process by cutting out each design from masking tape.

Connie is a graduate of the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and concentrated in ceramics and ceramics sculpture. She has also studied ceramics in Tokoname, Japan. Her work has been shown nationally and has been published in Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, 500 Vases and The Best of 500 Ceramics.

Website: connienorman.com

Instagram: @connienormanceramics

The high plains of Wyoming have been my home for more than two decades. Originally from rural southeastern Colorado, I’ve lived most of my life in the American West with a few short years on the East Coast. A lifetime of exploring places on road trips across the North American continent has enhanced my love of wide-open spaces and vast skies. The natural and built environments I’ve seen along the way provide endless references for my ephemeral land installations.

I earned my BFA in the History of Art with Highest Distinction at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, concentrating in clay for my studio work. I’ve exhibited my work throughout the United States; have had my work featured in books and articles; have won a Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship along with a Wyoming Arts Council Visual Arts Honorable Mention; and I was the inaugural recipient of the Al and Ann Simpson Fellowship at the Ucross Foundation Residency. An avid visitor of museums, land art sites, and petroglyphs, I find ideas in a variety of art forms but am most inspired by work in its original location that transcends time and place.

Website: artinthemiddleofnowhere.com

Instagram: @artinthemiddleofnowhere

Mark Ritchie received the BFA from the University of Kansas, studied in Scotland and Wales, and received the MFA from Indiana University. He spent much of his professional life teaching at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming. He currently lives and works in Abiquiu, NM.

Website: markeritchie.com

Instagram: @printritchie

Born on a farm in Wyoming, Tawni Shuler was enticed to paint and draw early on by the art of western painters Frederick Remington and Charlie Russell. She attended the University of Montana, Missoula to complete her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and Arizona State University to complete Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing in 2008. She has since served as the Programming Director for the Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, an Assistant Professor in Watermedia at Utah Valley University, an Instructor of Art at Sheridan College, Media Specialist for the Arizona Natural History Association, and Illustrator for Crystal Publishing. Currently, Shuler serves as the Program Director for the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

Her work has been shown at the Edward A. Whitney Gallery, Sheridan, WY; Taos Center for the Arts, NM; Oates Park Art Center, Fallon, NV; Northwest Art Center, Minot, ND; Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Augusta, GA; g2 Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Harry Wood Gallery, Tempe, AZ; Zane Bennett Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Missoula Art Museum, MT; Woodbury Art Museum, Orem, UT; Tucker Cooke Gallery, Asheville, NC; Smith Theatre Gallery, Farmington Hills, MI; Firehouse Gallery, Grants Pass, OR and was published in Southwest Art’s 2005 Annual Emerging Artist Issue. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Jentel Artist Residency Program, the former Brush Creek Ranch Artist Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

Website: tawnishuler.com

Instagram: @tawnishuler

Sue Sommers came to Wyoming in 1989 and began making artist’s books a few years later. She holds a BFA in Printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Wyoming. Sommers lives on a cattle ranch in Sublette County.

Website: suesommers.com

Instagram: @suejuanita

A near-death experience reshaped how I understand time and
consciousness. It confirmed for me what ancient image-makers knew: our incarnation of this brief lifetime is precious. This understanding lives at the heart of my practice. As a professional researcher, I document rock art objectively as artifact, but as an artist, I engage with it as living communication, a visual metaphor for the continuity of human spirit across millennia. The hand that pressed pigment to stone and the eye behind my camera lens are separated by thousands of years and united by the same reaching.

Website: whitelightimage.com