In 1998, Randy Gaul joined Industrial Light & Magic as a concept designer. Prior to joining ILM, he worked for seven years as a freelance storyboard and concept artist for such companies as Wild Brain, MTV and Disney.
Désirée Sydow is a self portrait photographer based in London, UK. After a chronic injury forced her to give up drawing and painting, she decided to focus solely on the medium of photography. This background in traditional art has heavily shaped her current photography style, with her other main influence being fashion photography. As a self-portrait photographer, she is not just the photographer but also the model, portraying characters that represent different facets of herself and at the same time of all human beings.
Brian Hoang was born in Vietnam a few years after the war ended. Two years later, together with his parents they left the country and spent about 6 months in a refugee camp before relocating to Canada. When he was a young kid, his dad would often pose as action figures and draw them for him. Seeing how Brian was able to take a real-life object and turn it into a drawing was inspiring. Once he discovered comic books in grade 6, art became something Brian wanted to do for a living when he grew up.
Natasha Zraikat is a Gold Coast (Yugambeh Country) based artist uses a carefully constructed aesthetic vocabulary of fantastical elements and deliberately executed realism to visually rekindle man’s connection with the natural world. Born in California to Jordanian and Russian-Ukrainian parents, Natasha immigrated to Australia in 1990 where she has lived ever since.
Ramona Russu is a Romanian painter, graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and settled in Corsica in 2014 to pursue my creative journey. Her artistic work explores the complexity of women's emotions and experiences and highlights the idea of imperfect beauty through monochrome pieces enhanced with 24-carat gold leaf.
Rachel Romano is a New Surrealism Figurative Painter. Her connection to art began at age 7 with sojourns with her father, a poet, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which planted the seeds of storytelling. Rachel finds inspiration in personal myth and the stories of others. The laughter, love, and sorrow of our lives fills her creative well.
A Balkan mountain child and a young arts protege who grew up to become a world renown contemporary artist with a PhD in art history. Iva Troj grew up in the outskirts of Bulgaria’s Romani slums in the last decade of communism – a world full of sexual predators, communist propaganda, censorship and no path to artistic livelihood other than what she could imagine in her wildest dreams. Today, she is a Gerety Award winner and 3 times Cannes Lions nominee for her Halo Masterpiece [biggest ever launch in the Halo franchise’s history, with more than 20M players, 520M reach], Towry Best of England Award winner, and 2 times Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year award winner.
Andrea du Plessis (born 1980) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Cape Town, specialising primarily in the fields of traditional painting. She has studied Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria, completed a postgraduate diploma in Art Therapy in the UK, as well as a degree in Multimedia Digital Visual Arts through UNISA (Cum Laude). As the overall winner of the prestigious Sasol New Signatures award in 2021, Andrea showcased her first solo exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum in 2022.
Storöy is a contemporary graphic artist and illustrator based in Hamar, Norway. She thinks of herself as a visual storyteller; influenced and inspired by her background on the coast of Northern Norway, a region known for its many myths and folk tales.
Since moving to Australia from the UK textile sculptor Robyn Lees-West has become fascinated by the colourful & noisy birds. She has always hoarded retro fabric. As a child she used to love visiting the Victorian Taxidermy Museum of William Potter & The Booth Museum in Brighton. Robyn has now combined all of these passions in her work. She sculpts faux taxidermy birds from reclaimed retro fabric, some of which hats! Recently Robyn has become obsessed with recreating the internal anatomy of birds as well.
Alessandra Maria was born in 1989 in Seattle Washington, and resides in the Hudson Valley, New York. She graduated from Pratt Institute in 2012, and is represented by Galerie Fledermaus in Chicago.
Masa Zodros is a digital artist who offers portraits of black men and women with a militant pictorial approach. Inspired by Renaissance painting, she uses digital and composite art to create works that illustrate a world that has or could have existed.