Artist Bios

Romina Bonomi is an Uruguayan visual artist and poet born in Montevideo. She studied the International Baccalaureate for two years in New Mexico, USA, and is currently completing her BFA at Ringling College of Art and Design with a minor in Graphic Design. Her work explores the coexistence of guilt and desire within contemporary femininity, through performances, edible materials, and reggaeton culture.

Anasofia Diaz, born in Yaroslavl, Russia and later adopted by a Mexican family, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, memory, and the emotional landscapes shaped by personal history. Through a wide range of mediums, including metal, casting, installation, performance, video, and printmaking, she examines the ways mental health and lived experience intertwine with the natural world and dreamlike imagery. Her work serves as a dialogue about the human mind, its struggles, and the ways it reflects in life.

Stephanie Katsnelson, born in Brooklyn, New York and now based in Sarasota, Florida, is a visual artist whose practice explores themes of family, culture, and memory. Working primarily in oil paint, with recent explorations in printmaking and mixed media installation, Katsnelson’s work is deeply informed by her upbringing in a Soviet household. With a mother from Uzbekistan and a father from Belarus, her inspiration draws from the different layers of cultural heritage and the warmth of familial rituals that shaped her earliest memories and sense of identity. Katsnelson began taking art lessons at the age of five and went on to assist in teaching at the same private art studio by fourteen. She continued her artistic education through specialized middle and high school art programs and is now completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Ringling College of Art and Design. Alongside her studio practice, she teaches art history to young students (K-3rd grade) in a homeschool co-op program and offers private art lessons to children ages 6-12. Her current body of work reflects not only on the memories of her own upbringing but also adds new cultural narrative within her own family. Drawing from her Soviet background and her husband’s Nicaraguan heritage, Katsnelson envisions how future generations might carry forward the nostalgia, peace, and identity rooted in these intersecting worlds. Through her paintings, prints, and installations, she invites viewers to revisit their own memories of home, culture, identity, and childhood.

Ariella H. Melendez is a contemporary artist born in the Bronx, New York, and currently resides and works in Sarasota, Florida. Melendez’s practice navigates the interrelation between nature and human experience, examining how a sense of place emerges through representation and suggestion. Her current works are rooted in the recurring motifs of natural and figurative silhouettes to merge environmental and human narratives, with a concentration on painting and printmaking.

Keithlyn Steter Alves is a multidisciplinary artist whose initial work investigates the fragile boundary between reality and perception through the interplay of light, darkness, and memory. Drawing from personal experiences with sleep disorders and the blurred states between waking and dreaming, their practice explores how comfort can shift into fear and how the familiar can become uncanny. Their current thesis centers on a copper-based world of their own creation, using oxidized copper, patina processes, and sculptural forms to build a mythological society defined by ritual, power, and transformation. In this world, copper becomes both sacred and authoritarian like an object of devotion that binds individuals to systems of control, revealing how reverence can be weaponized into quiet forms of oppression. Through sculpture, film, and mixed-media installations, Keithlyn constructs immersive environments that feel both sacred and oppressive, revealing copper not only as material but as metaphor for an embodiment of the human desire for control through society and religion.

Jaden Sullivan is a multimedia artist who is currently pursuing their BFA at the Ringling College of Art and Design and is based in Sarasota, Florida. Interdisciplinary, they work in a variety of different mediums, combining traditional materials, found-object sculptures, and video. As a fine artist, they have exhibited in Sarasota, Florida, with works in private collections in Sarasota, Florida and Canton, Georgia. Sullivan finds themself navigating the blurred line between the digital and the physical, addressing the human behavior surrounding technology, touching on identity, sentience, and digital ethics in an increasingly virtual world.

Anastasia Theofanous is a mixed-media artist from New York City whose work explores the relationship between architecture, nature, and time. She draws inspiration from transitional spaces such as abandoned buildings, weathered walls, and overgrown structures, using layered materials like oil, dirt, and found objects to reimagine decay as a living, transformative process.