Field of Study USA: Arts

Julia Wintner

Ms. Julia Wintner is the director of the Art Gallery at Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she curates exhibitions, manages the visiting artist program, and teaches courses in curatorial practice. Previously, she was the director of the University of Central Florida Art Gallery, Orlando, where she developed a solid record of multidisciplinary curating and promoted the fine arts as a central and highly visible part of academic and cocurricular campus life. She graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Her academic studies are supported by a two decades-long immigrant journey through four continents, beginning in Russia, continuing through South East Asia and the South Pacific, and concluding in North America. Her immigrant journey inspired her interest in diasporic art making. In her curatorial work, Ms. Wintner highlights the artist’s role as a cultural ambassador of the divided contemporary world; she also focuses on the development of a constituent-based curatorial model. Her research has been presented and featured in academic conferences and publications.

Ms. Wintner’s Fulbright-Nehru project is researching contemporary curatorial practices in India and how the curator’s role there has evolved over the past 30 years. She is instructing Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology students in their curatorial MA program regarding contemporary curatorial practices within U.S. cultural institutions. Her award will result in exhibitions showcasing contemporary Indian artists, curatorial exchanges, and joint classroom sessions between her home and host institutions. The project will also contribute to creating a cohort of curators who will be intermediaries between countries, cultural policies, and diverse audiences.

Colette Copeland

Ms. Colette Copeland’s artistic and pedagogical practice is critically engaged with a symbiotic, diverse range of aesthetic and cultural values which emphasize interdisciplinary and collaborative work. As an established visual artist, her work has been featured in 28 solo exhibitions and 155 group exhibitions/festivals spanning 35 countries over the past 30 years. Her work as a visual artist and cultural critic/writer examines issues surrounding gender, identity, death, and contemporary culture. She sources personal narratives, historical texts, and popular media, utilizing video, photography, printmaking, performance, dance, text, audio, sculptural installation, and community activism to question societal roles, gendered violence, and the pervasive influence of media and technology on communal enculturation. She is interested in artists, including the conceptual kind, whose work deviates from traditional disciplines and training and who use non-traditional materials and processes in their work, such as in sculptural installation, performance, video, relational aesthetics, and social practice/collaborative activism.

Ms. Copeland received her BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and her MFA from Syracuse University. She has taught at six institutions over the past 20 years, each with diverse, global student populations. At the University of Pennsylvania, she developed and taught a new interdisciplinary visual studies major that incorporated visual arts, critical theory, humanities, and social sciences. Currently at the University of Texas at Dallas, she teaches an interdisciplinary “Fluxus-inspired” contemporary practices studio course, digital photography, and performance art.

Since 2001, Ms. Copeland has been writing for a variety of art publications and institutions like The Photo Review, Fotophile, Afterimage, Exposure, Ceramics: Art and Perception, Arteidolia, Glasstire, and Eutopia. She has 116 published articles to her credit. Most recently, she published two catalog essays – “Avery, A Family Legacy” and “Re-emergence: Women AbEx and Color Field Artists”. She is a long-time member of AICA-International Association of Art Critics.

Ms. Copeland’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on qualitative research about underrepresented female visual artists from India, whose work explores themes of boundaries – physical, emotional, real, imagined, geographical, virtual, convergent, divergent, and transformative – using conceptual and contemporary multimedia art practices.

Shira Singer

Ms. Shira Singer is a textile artist, art educator, and art therapist living in Bar Harbor, Maine. She has been applying color and pattern to cloth for several decades, while also focusing on the historical, social, and cultural contexts of different textile traditions and mediums. For the past six years, she has been using locally grown or foraged vegetation and plant materials to make fabric dyes.

Ms. Singer has been a teaching artist in a wide variety of settings, including schools, community arts programs for children and adults, senior colleges, and art festivals. She taught elementary school art for 15 years in multi-age classrooms on islands off the coast of Maine.

Ms. Singer has also had the privilege of leading art education workshops and making art with people of all ages: in Bengaluru, India, with the Parikrma Humanity Foundation; in Ambon, Indonesia, with the Heka Leka Education Foundation; and in Muscat, Oman, with the Sidab Women’s Sewing Center. Her textile pieces have been exhibited in galleries and shows throughout the U.S. and her recent work appeared in the Fall 2023 journal of the Surface Design Association, International Exhibition in Print.

Moreover, as an art therapist, she has over 35 years of experience in facilitating therapeutic art expression in psychiatric hospitals, counseling centers, and schools, as well as through private practice. Ms. Singer received her BS in elementary education from Northwestern University and her MA in art therapy from The George Washington University.

Ms. Singer’s Fulbright-Nehru project is focusing on understanding how natural dyeing traditions in India are evolving in response to rapid environmental change and societal impacts in the post-COVID scenario. As part of her project, she is creating a body of expressive artwork on cloth informed by conversations, research, and training with individuals who are engaged in preserving traditional practices of natural dyeing and design.

M.J. Levy Dickson

Ms. M.J. Levy Dickson is an artist and educator. She explores global interconnectedness through her artwork and discovers common denominators in the natural world. She finds in nature patterns of color, light, mood, subject, texture, and sound that transcend conventional boundaries, such as those between sight and sound, land and water, or time and space. These discoveries are reflected both in her artwork and her teaching.

Ms. Dickson’s body of work is deep and varied, and questions the boundaries between abstract, representational, and expressionist art forms. It was while illustrating the book Wildflowers of Nantucket, as well as many brochures for conservation organizations, that Ms. Dickson became aware of the global similarity between flowers and plants in nature and textile patterns. She has exhibited her installations with New York Parks and Recreation Art in the Parks Program, as well as with the Historic House Trust of New York. She has also worked with poets and musicians to foster combined sensory communication.

Ms. Dickson has held teaching positions as artist-in-residence in Tangier and with The Farm in Jaipur. She has designed and taught in the art studio at Michael Graves College, Wenzhou-Kean University, in China. She has also taught at MIT and the Boston Architectural Center, and was the first artist-in-residence at the Perkins School for the Blind. She is currently teaching in the Studio One Program of Fountain House in New York. She has always welcomed opportunities to work with people who have special needs.

Ms. Dickson received a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; her BFA from Tufts University; and her MFA from Boston University.

In her Fulbright-Nehru project, Ms. Dickson is illustrating how people can be brought together through nature and art. Beginning her project from a woodblock printing studio in Jaipur, she is preparing a catalog of its design motifs by identifying each plant species and where it grows. She is also working with artists in India to create sculptures inspired by wildflowers using repurposed materials.