Current MFA Students
Education: Bowling Green State University, Bachelor of Science Technology, 2013
Website: www.markanthonybrownjr.us
Instagram: @markanthonybrownjr
Mark Anthony Brown Jr. is a current MFA student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He primarily works in photography and with photo-based materials although he plans to explore and expand mediums during his time at UNC. His work primarily engages with first-hand experiences as a Black American with interests as it pertains to lineage, aesthetics, vernacular, and modes of expression. In 2022 Mark was an Emerging Lens Fellow at ARTWORKS Projects, through his fellowship he worked on a long-form documentary photo story about a community in Atlanta, Georgia called Forest Cove. From 2021 to 2022 he was an artist-in-residence at Remerge, a community-centered nonprofit in the historically black neighborhood of Sweet Auburn. While in service of his residency he completed a public art project called the ‘Sweet Auburn Family Photo Album.’
Education: Columbia College Chicago, BA in Fine Art, Minor in Poetry
Website: www.mollyenglish.art
Instagram: @englishbrekfast
Before entering the MFA program at UNC, Molly spent several years in dedication to autonomous organizing around abolition, housing justice, and trans-domesticity in Austin, Texas. Her fiber-based studio practice is influenced in part by the dreams she shared with the unhoused community during that time. Through delighting in color, texture, and materiality, Molly creates narratives that investigate the interrelation between sacrifice and consumption in the domestic imaginary. Her work seeks to articulate a spiritual relationship connecting queer, feminine, and non-human animals as custodians of a flourishing future.
Education: Ringling College of Art and Design, Bachelor of Fine Art, Photography and Imaging, 2022
Website: www.matthewtroyerphotography.com
Instagram: @matthewtroyer
Matthew Troyer is a documentary and fine art photographer from Sarasota, Florida. Troyer spent nine years as a combat photographer in the United States Marine Corps, documenting combat operations and training in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. In 2013 Troyer was selected for and taught photography as the faculty supervisor at the Defense Information School on Fort Meade, Maryland. Creative Quarterly recognized him as one of their top 100 artists (top 25 photographers) in 2018 and 2020. In 2021 he was awarded the Trustee Scholarship in Photography and Imaging at Ringling College of Art and Design. Troyer has recently shown work in galleries in Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Florida, Wisconsin, and multiple publications. His work serves to inform bridging the military-civilian divide by exploring the military experience, combat trauma, and their representations and perceptions in our culture.
Education: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting, 2014
Website: www.veraweinfield.com
Before entering the MFA program at UNC, Vera worked in New York City as a community artist with Los Muralistas de El Puente, an intergenerational collective that designs and creates community murals, theater sets, protest banners and puppets which tackle social justice issues within the Brooklyn communities of South Williamsburg and Bushwick. At UNC Vera is using many of the skills she learned with Los Muralistas, working with mixed media drawings and installations, puppetry and experimentations in performance, to investigate hierarchies of age and gender, human agency, and the submission and resistance to internal and external forms of control, specifically within the orthodox Jewish community.