2026 MAAD Virtual Capstone Exhibition

This systematic inquiry explored how a storytelling-based mask-making unit supported identity development and social-emotional learning (SEL) in a middle school art classroom. Students created stories based on a dream, fear, or fascination and turned those ideas into three-dimensional masks using a variety of art materials. Through classroom observations, student reflections, and student artwork, this project examined how visual storytelling encouraged self-expression, engagement, and personal meaning-making. The findings showed that while students had different levels of confidence with writing, many were able to express complex emotions and ideas more effectively through art. The project also highlighted the importance of providing structure for open-ended assignments, offering different ways for students to share their ideas, and creating a safe, supportive environment that respects student choice. Students became more invested in their work, collaborated with classmates, and reflected on their own growth throughout the process. Overall, this project suggests that combining storytelling and visual art can support identity exploration, reflection, and social-emotional learning while helping students express themselves in meaningful ways. 

"Reigniting the Creative Self " 

This project explores my journey to reconnect with my identity as an artist. After years of creative stagnation brought on by the demands of teaching and motherhood, I wanted to reignite my personal passion. Through iterative artmaking, reflective journaling, and engagement with research on creativity, mindfulness, environment, and artistic process, I investigated practical strategies for rebuilding a sustainable creative practice.  

My inquiry centered on four approaches: intentionally restructuring my creative environment, developing a regular mindfulness practice, incorporating intuitive artmaking exercises, and embracing structured iteration. Throughout the project, reflection served as both a research method and a tool for understanding how these practices influenced my creative process. In my research, I found that creative renewal does not depend on inspiration to return, but more on intentionally creating conditions that allow creativity to flourish.  

As I reestablished my own artistic practice, I also observed meaningful changes in my classroom, where modeling authentic creative work strengthened student engagement and artistic community. This project ultimately demonstrates that creative identity can be reclaimed through purposeful, research-informed practice and offers encouragement for art educators seeking to sustain both their personal artistry and professional lives.

In the Making: Where Art Happens is an exploration of what unfolds when the pressure to create something meaningful is replaced with the willingness to simply begin. Through my ongoing practice, Color Ugly, I approach art-making as a space of presence, uncertainty, and self-discovery rather than a pursuit of fixed outcomes. Each painting session becomes an act of inquiry, paired with reflective visual journaling that captures not only what was made, but what surfaced through the process.  
 
Throughout this body of work, three recurring states, The Shadow, The In-Between, and The Light, surfaced organically over time. Rather than stages to move through, they became ways of understanding the shifting emotional and psychological landscapes that accompany creative practice. Together, they form the conceptual foundation of the exhibition.  
 
This project invites viewers to reconsider where art truly happens. Instead of finding meaning in the finished artwork, it proposes that transformation occurs through sustained engagement with the act of making itself. By embracing intuition, vulnerability, and curiosity, the work offers creativity not as something to perfect, but as a way of paying attention to ourselves and the worlds we carry within. 

• Instagram

This capstone project developed ArtBot, a custom AI chatbot built on one behavioral rule: help students spark ideas instead of supplying them. ArtBot runs on DEEP*TWEAK, a framework that positions AI as a reflective partner in art-making, and the Four Checkpoints to maintain autonomy from AI. When a student is stuck, ArtBot uses the Socratic method to ask and listen, helping them form the idea in their head. After that, ArtBot opens the doors to artists, techniques, and art history in support of their vision. Refined across five versions and four student cohorts, with every revision driven by real session transcripts, the project treats the chatbot prompt itself as the research instrument. The guiding rule of thumb: the more human the reflection, the stronger the art. The less reflection, the weaker the authorship. 

In recent years I have noticed along with other educators, a notable difference in students' fine motor skills (FMS). This has led to increased discussion about how to ensure students are meeting developmental milestones and developing the competencies necessary for academic success. To personally investigate this change in students' FMS, I arranged a mixed group of 40 students aged 8–9 years who completed two assessments. These assessments were designed to evaluate students' abilities against established FMS milestones.

The first assessment required students to write a paragraph without fatigue while examining stamina, control, and accuracy. The second required students to cut a series of complex shapes with minimal errors to assess precision, control, and ability. Observations around student work samples revealed a mixed range of abilities. While some students demonstrated reduced handwriting endurance, diminished control, and difficulty accurately cutting complex shapes, others displayed age-appropriate fine motor skills and met expected developmental milestones.

Overall, the student work samples suggested that fine motor skill development has become more varied among students versus consistent mastery. This highlights the importance of providing regular and guided opportunities for hand-strengthening and fine motor activities throughout the elementary years to support the continued development of essential skills. 

"Embodiment" is a studio-based research project that investigates how human experience, shaped by lived experience, emotional growth, and spiritual reflection, can be expressed through contemporary mixed-media painting. Centered on the symbolic life cycle of the banana tree, the project explores themes of resilience, vulnerability, renewal, and interconnectedness through a series of sixteen paintings.

Drawing upon symbolism, visual language, and creativity as spiritual practice, the research positions botanical imagery as a universal metaphor for transformation and personal becoming. The creative process integrated historical and theoretical research with reflective practices, including journaling, meditation, observational drawing, and experimental mixed-media techniques using acrylic ink, acrylic paint, graphite, collage, and textured surfaces. Each work interprets a stage of the banana tree’s life cycle as a symbol for the cyclical nature of human experience.

Ultimately, "Embodiment" demonstrates the capacity of symbolic imagery and contemplative artistic practice to communicate complex emotional and spiritual realities, inviting viewers to recognize renewal as an enduring process within both the natural world and the human experience. 

• Website
• Instagram

The photographs of the abandoned structures in my exhibition compel us to look at the past in terms of the testament of their edifices along with the embodiment of a sublime beauty in the senescence through time and the elements.  When studying the fine arts, we have the same opportunity to appreciate how enduring practices and techniques along with the visible evidence of past endeavors serve as a living record of history itself.   
 
I came into the graduate program knowing that I wanted to share this same type of vision as I had with these photographs. I had envisioned creating a space where people of all ages could come together to make, speak to, and learn about ancient, classical, modern and contemporary art works.  My conclusion was to design a plan to start a maker space where these concepts can become a reality.  To me, this space is more than just a place where artists can come together and make art.  It is a part of a larger, crucial endeavor to help keep the fine arts alive and relevant.  Even if this effort is within my own community.  

**Playful Art Experiences in 3rd–5th Grade** 
 
This reflective inquiry explores how playful, process-based art experiences influenced creativity, engagement, and teaching practice in my 3rd–5th grade elementary art classroom. Throughout the project, I implemented and documented lessons involving tactile materials, three-dimensional construction, mixed media, and creative warm-up activities. Selected images represent examples from the broader project documentation, including toilet paper mâché pumpkins, creative warm-ups, and active observational drawing experiences designed to encourage exploration and creative risk-taking. 
 
Through teacher reflection notes, lesson documentation, and classroom observations, I noticed that playful art experiences often helped students become more willing to experiment, revise, collaborate, and work through mistakes. This project may offer other educators a reminder that meaningful art learning does not always come from polished final products. It can also happen through messy materials, unexpected solutions, laughter, revision, and student choice. Ultimately, this inquiry strengthened my belief that elementary art lessons should balance structure with opportunities for exploration, imagination, and creative growth. 

West Virginia does not have an abundance of information accessible about the fine arts or the fine artists working in the state. As a public-school educator, it is difficult to teach about West Virginia fine artists or to give the students independent study work on these artists. For my project, I created a resource, via a website, for students to learn about the nationally and internationally recognized West Virginia visual fine artists working outside of traditional homesteading and craftsmen artforms. Part of this project included assembling existing resources into one site via external links, but also, I generated original content from interviews with Dr. Gina Puzzuoli and Paula Clendenin. I believe that over the past 50 years, West Virginian fine artists, mostly centered around Charleston, have contributed to the culture of our state just as much as the craftsmen of old. To neglect promoting our state as a place where intellectually interesting and important fine artwork is taking place is a great disservice to the totality of our state's image. It is also a disservice to our residents and students to not include the fine arts and fine artists in the cultural narrative of our state.    

• Website
• Interview with Gina
• Interview with Paula
• West Virginia Website Example

Proof (of Self) is a visual arts-based capstone project that investigates identity through photographic practice, reflective inquiry, and curriculum development. Through the creation of a self-portrait photography series, this project explores how identity shifts across personal, professional, and everyday contexts rather than existing as a fixed or singular construct. The photographic inquiry evolved from an initial framework of “Good, Bad, and Ugly” into the themes of “Certain,” “Internal,” and “Raw,” demonstrating how artistic understanding emerged through the creative process rather than through a predetermined outcome. Alongside the studio work, a secondary visual arts curriculum was developed to translate this process of inquiry into classroom practice, encouraging students to examine their own identities through photography, reflection, and critique. Throughout the project, photography functioned not only as a means of image-making but also as a method of research, revealing the interconnected roles of artist, teacher, and researcher. Ultimately, this project demonstrates that artistic inquiry is a process of discovery that informs both creative practice and art education, positioning photography as a powerful tool for reflection, meaning-making, and teaching. 

This project investigated the potential benefits and drawbacks of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies used in creative processes and workflows and its impact on cognitive biases. In this project, I integrated GenAI within iterative workflow stages of illustration by presenting multiple GenAI programs with conceptual rough sketches and allowing AI to create iterations of the work. The initial concepts and final renders were left to the artist’s discretion. The programs fluently and flexibly generated numerous ideas and solutions. The GenAI, however, lacked novelty as it relied heavily on user inputs. GenAI was unable to effectively elaborate on its generations without producing hallucinations, errors, and misinterpretations. Thus, GenAI users should be aware of the unreliable nature of generated information. The incorrect information can be a detriment to an artist’s creative process as I identified the presence of cognitive biases throughout the GenAI use including prompt bias, overconfidence, priming bias, sunk-cost bias, and availability bias. These findings suggest that when using GenAI, it is necessary to maintain basic domain knowledge over the topics for which the program is supplying input to avoid the implementation of false or hallucinated information. Other sources should be consulted rather than trusting solely in GenAI’s productions.

The Teacher They Built is an arts-based narrative inquiry exploring how relationships with eight former students shaped my identity as an early-career teacher. Through reflective writing, recommendation letters, classroom artifacts, photographs, and visual storytelling, I examine teaching as a reciprocal process in which educators are influenced by the very students they seek to guide. Rather than documenting student growth alone, this project reveals how trust, leadership, kindness, collaboration, and everyday classroom interactions transformed my own understanding of teaching. Presented as a zine, the project combines design and narrative to communicate research through both written reflection and visual expression, demonstrating how arts-based inquiry can honor lived experience while inviting readers to reflect on the relational nature of education. 

Much of the past decade of my life has been hallmarked by conflict, trauma, and grief pertaining to interpersonal relationships. Considering my experiences in relation to the paradigm of interpretivism, I wondered if I can intentionally shape my reality by thoughtfully re-contextualizing unhealed emotional wounds into something I can more effectively process—stories. I created a folk narrative in which I ended up accidentally cursed. In my narrative, this curse causes my repeated conflicts with others. I created a series of wall-hanging quilts representing seven people I have experienced conflict with. I assigned each person a title and characterized them by comparing them to an animal that has traits related to the nature of our conflict. When displayed together, my quilts resemble a spread of tarot cards, representing the fortune I drew as my life has played out. The process of creating this body of work helped me to gain an enlightened understanding of the role I played in each of these situations—I played roles of both victim and villain in each. I conclude my narrative by accepting that I was never cursed. All along, it was my own poor choices and the luck of the draw. 

• Website

Over the last 3 years, I embarked on an inquiry journey into my experience of aging  
as a woman in our culture. When I started this journey, I was in a midlife crisis, moving from Mother to Queen, entering a new chapter of Womanhood, which at the time felt scary as I saw my face, body, and mind literally changing before my eyes. For this project, I explored factors that were pivotal in forming and fragmenting my identity as a woman across different archetypal stages. From Maiden and the conditioning surrounding me, to Mother who raised a daughter and son working towards their own individuation. Now, moving to Queen, I see firsthand the discrepancies between the sexes, as well as ageism and gaps in care I have walked through. Doing my art is a way for me to cope and navigate difficult times. The hope in doing this work has been to come to terms, if not embrace, moving from Mother to Queen to Wise Woman.  And through it all, I have found myself. I have found my strength to pioneer, to conquer, and to sit in peace and wisdom. This is my journey… 

• Website
• Facebook
• Instagram

This action research project explores how elementary art education can support fine motor skill development while fostering student engagement through culturally responsive teaching practices. Conducted at KIPP WAYS Primary School, where approximately 99% of students identify as African American, the study emerged from concerns about students’ decreasing proficiency with hands-on tasks that require hand strength, coordination, precision, and control of art tools. The project investigates how meaningful art experiences can strengthen fine motor abilities while also honoring students’ cultural identities and lived experiences. 
 
Data were collected through teacher observations, student reflections, informal assessments, and analysis of student artwork from kindergarten through fourth grade. Student work samples were evaluated for evidence of growth in cutting accuracy, line quality, craftsmanship, attention to detail, and overall tool manipulation. Art projects were intentionally designed to incorporate culturally relevant themes, allowing students to make personal connections between their artwork, families, communities, and cultural backgrounds. 
 
The findings indicate that consistent participation in artmaking activities such as printmaking, drawing, collage, and sculpture contributed to noticeable improvements in fine motor skills, artistic confidence, and task persistence. Students also demonstrated increased engagement when lessons reflected their identities and experiences. This study underscores the value of elementary art education as a space for developing essential motor skills, promoting cultural affirmation, and supporting meaningful, creative learning experiences for young students. 

• Instagram

My project focused on developing an introductory high school graphic design curriculum that emphasizes design thinking, creativity, and processing rather than software proficiency. I examined the challenges of introducing graphic design in a resource-limited environment where students relied heavily on digital tools, instant gratification, and personal preference rather than audience-centered problem solving. Through classroom observation and reflection, I discovered that students struggled not only with technical software skills but also with slowing down, embracing iteration, conducting research, and designing with purpose. Thus, I redesigned the curriculum incorporating technology-free projects, structured process documentation, multiple rounds of critique, and audience-driven design assignments. These instructional shifts encouraged deeper creative thinking, stronger communication skills, and a greater appreciation for craftsmanship and design process. Throughout, I also explored the powerful influence of classroom culture, recognizing that peer motivation and healthy creative competition significantly impacted student growth. Ultimately, this work reinforced my belief that successful design education is not about teaching software alone, but about cultivating curiosity, critical thinking, resilience, and the confidence to challenge conventions. The curriculum serves as a foundation for preparing students to become thoughtful, innovative designers who understand that meaningful creativity emerges through intentional process, collaboration, and continual refinement rather than speed alone. 

This arts-based research project explores how creativity can support identity, wellness, healing, and empowerment. Rooted in my experiences as an Afro Latina artist, mother, educator, and researcher, this project reflects on the ways art has helped me process life, connect with my culture, and better understand myself. Using arts-based research and practitioner inquiry, I explored my creative process through reflective journaling and selected works in mixed media, digital design, curriculum development, resin, and functional art. The project is guided by the idea that meaning is shaped through lived experiences, culture, and personal interpretation. The selected works, including Identity in Pattern, The Global Kitchen: Recipes of Identity, Layered Love, and Royalty Inside My DNA, use color, pattern, layering, and materials to explore identity, care, ancestry, resilience, and connection. Together, these works show that art is more than a finished product. It can be a space to reflect, heal, ask questions, and grow. In the classroom, projects like these can help illuminate the magic within students who are still figuring out who they are by giving them creative ways to explore their stories, strengths, cultures, and possibilities. 

• Instagram

As students enter adolescence, many begin to question their creative abilities due to increased self-awareness and heightened sensitivity to perceived mistakes. This critical developmental stage can contribute to negative attitudes toward art and creativity, relationships that may persist into adulthood. Additionally, students often develop a narrow understanding of creativity, viewing it primarily as innate talent rather than a skill that can be developed through exploration and practice. This paper examines the implementation of a sixth-grade visual arts curriculum designed to foster creative confidence, develop technical artistic skills, and encourage positive, lasting connections to artmaking. Through reflective analysis, the study explores how exposure to diverse artistic processes and opportunities for individual expression can support students in developing both artistic competence and creative self-efficacy. The appendix includes the complete curriculum and lesson plans used in this study, providing educators with resources and insights for cultivating meaningful artistic experiences and positive relationships with creativity in their own classrooms. 

For my final project I created a virtual reference guide in the form of a flipbook, featuring contemporary African American artists who are on the rise. When I was in school, black artists and their artwork were rarely discussed. Black art in the curriculum was non-existent. A virtual flipbook could change that dynamic. The flipbook will provide a broader perspective and a deeper understanding into contemporary African American art. This digital book will be accessible and available to everyone at any time.  
 
I believe the flipbook reference guide will help students broaden their artistic knowledge. Students will discover a wide range of artists, artistic styles, techniques and perspectives. Students will also learn that African Americans artists are not just painters, they are photographers, jewelry designers, textile designers and sculptors. The flipbook can also help students develop critical thinking skills. Students will be able to analyze how art reflects historical events, personal experiences and social issues. This observation will lead to deeper discussions and stronger analytical skills. 

• Website

In my five years as an art educator, I have both observed and personally experienced how sustained stress and burnout can quietly erode one’s sense of self. The emotional fatigue is not always dramatic or visible; more often, it accumulates gradually, appearing as exhaustion, creative depletion, and the feeling of being constantly “on” without adequate space to recover. Art educators frequently face chronic stressors, including inadequate funding, limited classroom space, large student caseloads, and minimal institutional support compared to core academic disciplines. We are expected to nurture creativity and emotional expression while simultaneously meeting rigid standards, administrative demands, and accountability measures that often conflict with the open-ended nature of artistic practice. This project emerged from my growing recognition that loving and supporting my students was no longer enough; I needed to learn how to care for myself with the same intentionality. As I became more emotionally drained, it grew increasingly difficult to show up with the curiosity, patience, and presence that are foundational to meaningful art education. What follows reflects my personal search for solace: a deliberate exploration of creative and contemplative practices that foster grounding, balance, resilience, and emotional sustainability for educators navigating the challenges of teaching and creating. 

• Website
• Instagram

"Reclaimed Faith: Artistic Explorations of Queer Christian Identity in the Southeastern United States" examines the intersection of queer identity and Christian faith through a practice-based art research project grounded in queer theory and queer theology. Drawing from the author's lived experience as a queer, nonbinary Christian raised in the American South, the paper investigates how painting can function as both artistic inquiry and personal reconciliation. The project consists of a series of acrylic paintings that visualize a spiritual journey from conflict and division toward acceptance, using symbolic imagery to challenge the perceived incompatibility of queerness and Christianity. Through reflective journaling, theological research, and studio practice, the work explores themes of identity, grace, belonging, and resilience while documenting the evolving creative process. Rather than resolving tensions between faith and sexuality, the project embraces complexity and ambiguity as meaningful sites of transformation. Ultimately, the series argues that artistic practice can serve as a form of visual theology, creating space for healing, dialogue, and affirmation for queer Christians while inviting broader audiences to reconsider dominant assumptions about religion, identity, and inclusion. 

For my project, I combined my experience in digital arts with my teaching aspiration. From 3-D modeling to video game design, I want to encourage schools to see how a digital arts curriculum aligns with STEM, thus making it STEAM. My project focused on building basic learning tools intended for a high school curriculum that teaches students how to do 3-D modeling while designing city buildings. Further, my research focused on the benefits of hands-on digital arts as well as lesson plans for a 15-week semester where students learn Autodesk Maya. With these basic skills, students can apply them to future design purposes and careers in digital media. This project mirrors my personal experience of learning what digital arts have to offer in the current creative fields. With a strong portfolio in the digital arts, students have a means to explore careers in competitive creative fields where their skills can support a promising future.