Meet our Graduate Students
Department of Art
Do you have a question or need help?
Give us a call or send us an email at:
Department of Art
3229 Art Culture and Technology
(949) 824-4917
StuArt@uci.edu
Headed by an internationally distinguished faculty, the Graduate Program offers a rigorous, interdisciplinary environment for training in the visual arts. The three-year M.F.A. program comprises a series of core and elective classes in production, theory, and contemporary issues. Graduate students may also take advantage of the academic excellence UCI provides as a leading research university by taking courses in other departments and programs. Through a combination of faculty mentorship, seminars, and regular comprehensive peer critiques, the Department of Art affords an optimal intellectual setting for fostering creative and critical development. In addition to faculty dedicated to facilitating students' understanding of visual art and its cultural contexts, graduate students have access to visiting artists through lectures, studio visits, and colloquia.
Learn more about our current cohorts of M.F.A. candidates below.
Meet our graduate students
Beatrice Schleyer, '27
Beatrice Schleyer is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work explores themes of distributive agency, corrosion, and the vulnerability of the human body within the built environment.
Christina Graland Joseph, 'xx
Joseph was born in Los Angeles in 1990. She earned her undergraduate degree from MICA in Baltimore, MD. She now lives in LA and works interdisciplinarily with ceramics, performance, and sculpture.
Simon Klein, '26
Simon Klein is concerned with the relationship and reception of images. Rhythm, generosity, and grace are defining modalities to escape contemporary breathlessness. “No!…Wait!”
Jacob Lenc, '26
Untitled (Buster), 2025
18 x 204 x 3 inches
poplar, Varathane “Early American” stain, wax, holes
Detail of upper portion
Yuzhe (Cecil) Zhang, '26
I am a photographer drawn to themes of disappearance and what remains. Through quiet, deliberate imagery, I explore the fragile space between life and extinction.
Kayla Ephros, '27
Kayla Ephros is moved by (found) language and its overlap with visual information. Also: mystery, glitch, and the edges of legibility.
Janeth Aparicio Vazquez, ‘28
Janeth creates tender offerings to her communities; past, present, and future, with a penchant for ballpoint pen, and a focus on proletariat, indigenous, and ecological alegre rebeldia.
Loren Yuehan Wang, 'XX
Mediating the hypermilitarized subject-subject relational dynamics, Loren takes social positions of militant researcher and relational practitioner, often misidentified as transdisciplinary artist.
Max Lofano, 'XX
Max Lofano is an artist living in Southern California. Based in installation, his practice is an ongoing response to space and material.
Solita Montoya, 'XX
Solita Montoya works with drawing and painting, exploring gesture and shadow, tracing skittish movements and silhouettes. Transmissions from geo-occurances, ecological portents, and subsurface murmurs.
Xavier Cázares Cortéz, 'XX
XCC is an artist reconciled to the contradictory nature of information and its rhizomatic networks. His work acknowledges this paradox as an inescapable condition of the 21st-Century.
