Faculty Profiles
Jeannie Hulen
Professor of Ceramics and Program Director of Studio Art
Professor Jeannie Hulen is the Studio Art Program Director in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. Her past leadership roleshave been Associate Dean in Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences from 2017-2023, and chair of the Department of Art. During her administrative leadership, she stewarded historic gifts for the School of Art, including $120 Million from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation and over $72 Million from the Windgate Charitable Foundation, for the establishment of an endowed world-class School of Art and new state of the art facilities. Her first appointment to the University of Arkansas as ceramics faculty was in 2002. She received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1995, and MFA from Louisiana State University in 2000. She has exhibited internationally including many exhibitions in conjunction with the National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts. In 2009 she was a Resident Visiting Artist at the Tainan National University of The Arts in Tainan, Taiwan. She currently has ongoing research in West Africa following her 2018-2019 US Fulbright Scholar post at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
Mathew McConnell
Associate Professor of Ceramics
Mathew McConnell (he/him) holds an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a BFA from Valdosta State University in Georgia. He has held numerous solo exhibitions including at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami and the Jane Hartsook Gallery at Greenwich House Pottery in NYC. His works have been included in over 70 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Mathew has lectured widely, and has been subject of feature-length articles in Ceramics Art and Perception, Ceramics Monthly, and New Ceramics. He has received an Emerging Artist Award from the National Council on Education in Ceramic Art, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Archie Bray Foundation, Greenwich House Pottery, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Linda Nguyen Lopez
Associate Professor of Ceramics and Foundations Director of Studio Art Foundations
Linda Nguyen Lopez (b. 1981, Visalia, California) is an American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her abstract works explore the poetic potential of the everyday by imagining and articulating a vast emotional range embedded in the mundane objects that surround us. Lopez received a BFA from California State University of Chico and an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, New Zealand, England and throughout United States including the Renwick Gallery at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach; Springfield Art Museum, The Hole, New York; David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville; and Museum of Art and Design, New York.
Adam Posnak
Instructor, Ceramics and Foundations
Adam holds a BA from Macalester College in 1995, and an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1999. Adam has exhibited in nearly every corner of the United States, both in group and solo exhibitions. He has been featured in Ceramics Monthly and is the author of "To Serve the Divine: Making Pottery for African-Atlantic Religions" in Studio Potter magazine. Adam writes of his work, "I have been greatly inspired by West and Central-African traditions and the various African-inspired, syncretic religious-cultural practices of North, Central and South America, particularly those of Cuba and Haiti. Within the Afro-Cuban cosmological view specifically, the concept of “El Monte,” which in this context roughly translates as “The Wild,” has complex and deep significance." His work is currently available at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana, and Lillstreet Gallery in Chicago, among others.
Renata Cassiano Alvarez
Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics
Renata Cassiano Alvarez is a Mexican-Italian artist born in Mexico City and currently the Visiting Assistant Professor in ceramics at the University of Arkansas School of Art. Cassiano Alvarez works predominantly in the medium of clay, in a search for developing an intimate collaborative relationship with material and material language. Influenced by archeology and history, she is interested in the power of the object as survival - objects with a sense of permanence and timelessness, and language as transformation; specially how adopting a different language can affect the physicality of the human body, and how this translates into material. Educated in Mexico, Italy, Denmark and the US, she has had the opportunity to work in different artistic environments, a cross-cultural and multimedia experience which has lead to the belief that craft is an evolving field and something that exists in motion. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in public and private collections in Mexico, Estonia, Italy, Taiwan, Germany, Denmark, Latvia, China, USA and Slovenia. She works between her studio in Veracruz, Mexico and Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Qwist Joseph
Resident Artist, Instructor, Technician
After years working alongside his dad at the family bronze foundry, Qwist Joseph received a BFA from Colorado State University and an MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has completed residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program and the University of Denver. In 2019 Qwist received an emerging artist award from the National Council on Education in Ceramics Art. Qwist shows nationally and internationally, most recently in the Officine Saffi exhibition in Milan, Italy. He has taught at Chaffey College, the University of Redlands, the University of Denver and Pitzer College.
