Employee Bios

Keith Benjamin

Keith Benjamin is a sculptor and professor living and working in Cincinnati. His creative work involves repurposing, re-valuing, and rearranging items and materials from the home that he shares with his wife and two children. He has shown his work regionally and internationally. In 2011 he was awarded a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Mark Thomas

Mark is Associate Dean and a Professor of courses in design, senior capstone, first year experience and design history. He is a published author of internationally distributed textbooks on design and design methodology. He has designed numerous exhibitions, murals, catalogs, books and posters. An award-winning designer of educational board game design, he also holds a U.S. Patent for a color demonstration device for teaching color theory. He is a past President of AIGA Cincinnati and serves as Faculty Advisor for the AAC AIGA student group.

Emily Hanako Momohara

Momohara has served as visiting artist in many residency programs including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Red Gate Gallery Beijing. She received a 2011 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Grant. Recently, she exhibited in the Chongqing Photography and Video Biennial, Japanese American National Museum and the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center.

Emily Everhart

Emily specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European art. She has presented in national conferences and received grants and fellowships for research in the U.S. and abroad. A portion of her doctoral thesis will appear in a forthcoming publication by the Georgia Museum of Art. Her current research interest is in manifestations of eighteenth-century sociability in landscape architecture.

Jimmy Baker

Baker has taught in the Studio Department at the AAC since 2004. He has exhibited work in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Basel, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, and other American cities. His work has been featured in many publications, private collections, as well as permanent collections at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Zabludowicz Art Trust, Taschen Foundation, Cincinnati Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, Progressive Insurance Collection, and JP Morgan Chase Collection.

Matt Hart

Matt Hart is the author of Radiant Action, Radiant Companion, and six previous collections of poetry. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and several fellowships. Additionally, he is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety. He plays guitar and shouts in the bands TRAVEL and THE LOUDEST SOUNDER.

Matthew Dayler

Matthew Dayler’s work has been exhibited at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, The Brooks Museum in Memphis Tennessee, and Galerie Edition Schedler in Zurich, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Australia, Miami, NYC and LA. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio and currently faculty at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and is one of the founders of Higher Level Art.

Kate Tepe

Kate Tepe is a multi-media artist who creates work related to group and personal identities, interpersonal relationships, and community networks. She has over a decade of experience working with brand identity and development, communications, marketing, and art education and programming. Kate has a socially engaged practice but has also worked with brands such as Massimo Zanetti, Target, and Pepsi, and creative partners such as the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Public Schools, University of Dayton, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stephen Kenny

Stephen Kenny is a painter, illustrator and educator living and working in Cincinnati, OH

Matt Coors

Matt is an artist who has worked in a wide variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, and digital processes. He earned an MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2009. He is also the co-founder of two former art galleries: Publico in Cincinnati and Double Break in San Diego.

Ian Hersko

Ian Hersko is an artist, educator, and curator living in Cincinnati, Ohio.  He currently teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in both the studio and liberal arts and has a personal interest in critical theory.  Hersko is also the founder and operator of Rainbow, a queer and trans focused gallery and project space in Cincinnati.  In his own artistic practice, Hersko creates multimedia installations and objects that contemplate touch, loss and anti-monumentalism.  Before becoming an educator, Hersko worked in social work, which informed his approach to teaching and community building.   

Terence Hammonds

Lindsey Whittle

Lindsey M Whittle, a fashion/performance artist, with a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MDES from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She taught English in Japan, was Artbin Director for Kiki Magazine and free-lanced as art director/costume director for Yellowhaus videos and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Whittle makes colorful, transformable/wearable objects and also co-runs PIQUE gallery/Airbnb.

Thomas Osorio

Thomas is a digital artist who works at the intersection of drawing, painting, and technology. He makes artworks which react to the complex digital worlds being built around us as well as reflections on the idea of a blurred or unstable reality. He moved to Cincinnati in high school and later moved to NYC to study art. He is influenced by digital art-making software, various historical periods, and movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism Cubism, and Internet Art.

Chelsea Whitton

Chelsea Whitton (she/her) is an internationally published poet and essayist. She is the author of BEAR TRAP (Dancing Girl Press, 2018) and holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Her poetry and prose have appeared in all sorts of print and online publications, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Cream City Review, Poetry Ireland, The Atlanta Review, and Forklift-Ohio. She has also been a finalist for the Frost Place and Adrienne Richard awards for poetry, and won the 2018 Sandy Crimmins National Poetry Prize. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the AAC.

Kelly Kroener

Kelly Kroener lives, works and collaborates in the Midwest and abroad. She works in textiles, installation and site specific works that investigates place and the human relation to the natural world. Her work has been noted in Art in America, and The Economist. She completed her BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2022. Her solo exhibition A Place in Space opens in June 2023 at the Weston.

Rebecca Nava

Rebecca Nava Soto, a Xicanx-Latinx artist and educator born in Chicago, IL, explores writing, landscape, and Art as Ritual through mixed media installations. Holding a BFA from the University of Cincinnati, she addresses her identity within a eurocentric art canon, researching PreColumbian Art History and indigenous Mesoamerican Glyphic writing systems. Through independent travel, fellowships and artist residencies, she researches Maya, Nahuas, and present day U.S. indigenous land history. Her current projects advocate for contemporary indigenous regeneration in the U.S. and Mexico.

Karl Zuelke

Karl’s education includes an MFA in fiction from Indiana University, a PhD from the University of Cincinnati, and various life lessons along the way, some of them quite painful. He is a writer who has published works of literary criticism, personal essays, stories, and poems, and he has a book of poems titled Petting the Bumblebees. He has just finished the draft of a huge novel and is struggling now to make it less huge. He play classical guitar which led him to want to begin building classical guitars, which he now does as well. He loves and understands cats.

Alison Taylor

Alison Taylor is a teacher and fiction writer. She is the managing editor of the Art Academy’s literary magazine, This is WAAC.

Katrina Dienno

Katrina Dienno is an illustrator and printmaker based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her BFA in printmaking at Miami University in 2010 and her MFA in printmaking at the University of Cincinnati, D.A.A.P., in 2022. She creates large-scale relief woodblock prints that are inspired by how women are depicted in mythology, folklore, and fairytales.

Rachel Linnemann

Rachel utilizes ordinary materials and sentimental found objects to construct a visual language centered around mental health, growth, resilience, and the enduring presence of joy in the face of hardship. Rooted in her rural Appalachian upbringing, Linnemann draws inspiration from the resourcefulness and gratitude instilled by her ancestors. Through her transformative practice, she invites viewers to challenge preconceptions and contemplate the value of labor, while embracing gratitude as a guiding force during challenging times. Linnemann received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati in 2021.

Erika NJ Allen

Erika is a Guatemalan-born artist and first generation college graduate. The attained a BFA in photography from the AAC in 2020 and an MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023, following a non-traditional path.