NMC Presents
"V 25:4 Emerging Artists 2025
+ Art Fair After Party"
UNDERGRAD — MASTERS — RECENT POST GRADUATES
CUTTING EDGE NORTH TEXAS BASED ARTISTS
WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF TECHNOLOGY + ART
FEATURING
Mckee Frazier
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Mckee Frazior was born in 1979 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and has yet to reach his life expectancy. While working towards that goal, he attended the University of Texas at Austin (BFA 2002) and Southern Methodist University(CMA 2005), receiving some papers from both. He has exhibited himself and others across Texas, never receiving a citation for doing so. Under professional guidance, Mckee is currently pursuing an MFA in New Media at Texas Christian University(expected 2025). He exists geographically, mainly in Arlington, Texas, playing with drawing, software, sound, video, text, interactivity, stickers, arrays, and the space between wards.
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LTTXT
2025
canvas
36 × 36
Mckee Frazior is a hypermedia artist whose work explores technology’s role in our culture, focusing on the ephemeral artifacts and interactions spawned by digital systems. His practice highlights themes of awkwardness, confusion, play, laughter, and mild anxiety—emotions that emerge from our constant entwinement with electronic devices and the Internet. Mckee Frazior is momentarily obsessed with QR codes and his personal devices.
Colin Stokes
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Colin Stokes is a cellist, composer, visual artist, and researcher focused on artificial intelligence in computer music systems design. Colin is a PhD candidate at The University of North Texas, where he works with Jon Nelson, Marco Buongiorno Nardelli, David Stout, and Panayiotis Kokoras. He also holds degrees in cello performance from The Juilliard School and the Eastman School of Music. As a cellist, Colin tours actively with the Berlin-based electronic group Symphoniacs, and the American based contemporary music ensemble Zohn Collective. His music can be heard on more than 20 albums released by Universal Music/Polydor, Warner Music Japan, EMI, Neuma Records, and others. Colin’s visual work will also be shown at Currents Festival 2025 in Santa Fe, NM.
He has shared the stage with artists ranging from Yo-Yo Ma, Gidon Kremer, and John Williams, to Lady Gaga and Chaka Khan and his performances, broadcasts, and streams have been seen and heard by tens of millions of people worldwide.
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mond (flicker)
2025
live, interactive audio and video, resonating box
dimensions are variable
❝ mond (flicker) has developed from my work in recursive audio-visual systems, in which audio and video both respond to, and effect change on each other. The system is performed with controllers, and a capacitive, touch-sensitive resonating box. ❞
Kristen Duong
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Kristen Duong is a multidisciplinary artist and visual art performer pursuing an MFA in Creative Practice at the University of Texas at Dallas. With a background in communication design, she specializes in graphic and motion design, illustration, and photography. Her work explores the intersection of time, space, emotion, and technology through interactive systems, generative visuals, and sound. Through immersive and poetic experiences, she reflects on the unspoken layers of consciousness, the shifting nature of perception, and the challenge of expressing what often feels too complex to articulate.
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Quiet Drift, Endless Time
2024
digital video and monitors
03:16 minutes; 640x480 resolution
PoemWhat does it mean to live a full life?
Such wisdom escapes me still.
My desire to grasp the world’s beauty
So much more, so little time left.
How much longer will this body hold my spirit?
I envy the jellyfish,
Living for ages in quiet drift—
Will they witness what we never will?
History, future, endless time to fill.
Here, I drown
In fear, anxiety, and grief
I long to be free-floating like a jellyfish
Not knowing its loneliness for eternity.
❝ Kristen Duong is a multidisciplinary artist who explores memory, connection, and embodiment through interactive and digital media. Grounded in a human-centered approach, Duong uses technology not as a tool for data or control, but as a poetic medium—capable of expressing the intangible and emotionally resonant.Their practice incorporates generative systems, audiovisual installations, and sensory-based interactions to create contemplative spaces that evoke stillness, slowness, and intimacy. Duong’s work often transforms inner emotional landscapes into shared experiences, inviting viewers to reflect on the subtle textures of feeling and memory.
In Quiet Drift, Endless Time, Duong combines animation, ambient video, sound design, and poetry to reflect on the impermanence of life and the complexity of human emotion. Anchored by a meditative spoken poem, the piece explores themes of longing, fear, and wonder while asking what it means to live meaningfully in the face of time’s passage. The work offers a gentle, immersive space where personal reflection meets collective resonance—bridging solitude and shared understanding. ❞
Brenda Vega
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Ecuador, born in 1984.
Brenda (she/her) is a Visual Artist from the Andes.
In 2016, Brenda was awarded the Troika Photography Prize in London for her multimedia work 'Interfaced Nature.' She participated in artist residencies like SIM Residency Reykjavík (2019), Lumen in Italy (2018), and No Lugar in Quito (2017). Brenda completed her MA in Photography at the University of the Arts London in 2016. From 2019 to 2023, Brenda taught art full-time at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador. In 2022, Brenda was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Grant for Faculty Development in Ecuador before embarking on a Ph.D. in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas, which is her current pursuit. She now resides in Richardson, Texas, with her husband and dogs, Bruno and Dorita.
www.brendavega.com
https://www.instagram.com/brendavegaphoto/ -
Dimensional Bodies, Drawing Air, Painting on Paper, Automated Version
2024live performance, computer, arduino, TouchDesigner, CNC Plotter, photographic developer, brush, black and white photographic paper
dimensions variable
As a migrant artist weaving through different cultural and technological spaces, her work bridges the analog, the digital, and the organic by merging media such as alternative photography with live performance. Through direct engagement with cybernetics, she encourages a dynamic interplay between her presence and computational processes, interfacing directly with the machine via physical movement, personifying a concept called ‘the mestiza cyborg.’This exploration materializes through a CNC plotter as a photo-developing machine. Her real-time hand movements are converted into XY coordinates and sent to an Arduino-controlled mechanism that dispenses photographic developer into a brush with a dripping system that pours the chemical onto light-sensitive paper. During her performance, she moves her hands in ways that reflect her memories—distant landscapes intertwined with the possibilities and limitations of her body, her site of resistance.
How do we translate the body as a site of existential and political emergence? The answer lies in an ongoing negotiation of social identities that are fluid, continuously shaped by lived experiences, enacting what Latinx philosopher Mariana Ortega describes as the “being-between-worlds”; a multiplicitous self that found a method of survival by navigating the different environments that art and technology provide—exploring telepresence by pushing the corporeal boundaries, rethinking the definition of a human who experiences marginalization in the 21st century.
Shahrzad Talebi
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Shahrzad Talebi is a composer, sound artist, and educator from Tehran, Iran. Her music draws inspiration from a wide range of human experiences, from personal to political, and poetry. Characterized by dense and complex textures, her work is focused on timbre as a means for exploring new soundscapes, color, time, space, and concepts. Her compositions has been recognized and performed at the Electronic Music Midwest Festival, Splice Festival, Taproot New Music Festival,
Toledo Symphony Orchestra reading session, BGSU MicroOpera, Fifteen Minutes-of-Fame (Drew Hosler), the electroacoustic music competition “Reza Korourian Awards”; and has been performed by Unheard-of//Ensemble as part of the Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency, Splinter Reeds and The _____ Experiment Ensemble.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in composition from Tehran University of Art and a master of music from Bowling Green State University. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at the University of North Texas as a teaching fellow.
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A Detour, Invalid Light by Mistake
2025❝ In creating “A Detour, Invalid Light by Mistake”, I used Stable Diffusion and Stable Audio models as expressive tools to convey the personal emotions I was experiencing during that time. Integrating Stable Diffusion into TouchDesigner allowed me to interact with the model in real time, giving me control over prompts as well as the nuanced manipulation of input and output. I found this dynamic collaborative AI-artist workflow thrilling, as the model expanded my vision in unexpected ways and enabled me to bring my abstract imagination into my work. Another aim of this composition was to explore the abstract realm with models that are underexplored in typical AI usage. As I see a lot of potential for this workflow I plan to compose more pieces using this process. ❞
Alicia Parham
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The objective of my body of work has been to explore the intersectionality of fine art and neuroscience. This work explores questions such as how our brains react to stimuli, and where these two entities complement and contrast one another, via interdisciplinary methods.
Using a Neurofeedback machine, I am able to draw information from Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Theta brainwaves to use as catalysts to propel movement, color, and form via the program Touch Designer. This information can be adapted to include applications such as new media and video, including live projections of neurofeedback in tandem with a practice in painting to offer alternative documentation processes of neurological artifacts found within these processes. These paintings can exist as artifacts of a moment, capturing emotion or physical response to stimuli. Utilizing clear acrylic with multiple thin layers of oil paint, this process allows me to create the visual illusion of movement, mirroring the shapes, and colors from the neurofeedback visualizer.
My work intends to discuss my embodied experience navigating neurological conditions that have affected my perception of reality and touched many aspects of my day-to-day life. A formative moment in my practice occurred in 2021 when I was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition during a routine eye exam. As I navigated vision loss and experienced the phenomena of eye “floaters” that distorted my perception, I realized that these challenges could be embraced rather than fought. I began incorporating these “eye floaters,” introducing vibrant colors and chaotic visuals into my work.
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Aries
2025
Video & EEG Feedback
Butterfly Fever
2025
Video & EEG Feedback
Alicia Parham (American b1998) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She holds a BFA in drawing and painting from the University of North Texas and is currently an MFA 26’ candidate at Southern Methodist University.
Connor Ewart
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Connor Ewart is an undergraduate student at Southern Methodist University studying Creative Computing and Computer Science with a minor in Graphic Design. He explores the evolving intersection between technology and visual art, drawing from his experience in both fields. With a background in back-end programming and graphic design, he brings a nuanced, multidisciplinary perspective to create sensory-rich and technically refined digital experiences. Leveraging his technical expertise alongside visual and audio programming tools, such as TouchDesigner and Audacity, he develops immersive and interactive visual and audio experiences that blend design with computational thinking. In an ever-progressing digital field, he remains committed to continuous learning and exposure to innovations and emergent media. He aims to continue exploring new media and collaborating with other artists and programmers to craft powerful, engaging digital experiences.
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Sound Pollution: An Audio Experience
2025digital audio soundscape, edited in Audacity
3 minutes 8 seconds
This aural piece is an acoustic ecology soundscape composition exploring the tension between natural and man-made environments. Utilizing field recordings captured throughout Dallas, the piece weaves together sounds from organic and inorganic landscapes, from parks, lakes, and trails to streets and construction zones. Edited using Audacity, the work employs multi-channel audio manipulation and mixing to examine the contrast between organic and industrial sounds. Through this sonic amalgamation, the work underscores the growing issue of sound pollution, where the sounds of natural and man-made elements are directly competing with one another. The composition highlights the ways in which human activity increasingly disrupts and dominates the acoustic presence of nature.
❝ My work focuses on the tensions between natural and constructed systems, using digital media to prompt reflection on how our environment interacts with and is shaped by human activity. With a background in both programming and design, I approach my work through a multidisciplinary lens, blending technical precision with visual and experiential storytelling to craft immersive and engaging pieces. Much of my practice is rooted in exploring how technology intersects with the natural world, using immersive and interactive experiences to uncover how natural and artificial systems influence and coexist with each other.In Sound Pollution: An Audio Experience, I explore the growing imbalance between the natural world and the constructed soundscape of modern life. The piece combines field recordings captured across Dallas from both organic and inorganic landscapes to build a layered composition that reflects the encroaching dominance of man-made noise. It exemplifies the process by which the noise of the unnatural world drowns out the natural acoustics of the environment. Through such auditory tension, the piece invites listeners to consider the constant opposition between nature and man's continuous and exponential industrial advancements as many organic environments struggle to survive. ❞
Julia Caswell Freund
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Julia Caswell Freund (b. 1994) earned her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. She is currently studying in the MFA New Media program at the University of North Texas and is expected to graduate in 2026. Taking hybrid forms—video sculpture, intermedia performance art, and sound installation—Freund’s work reflects the simultaneity of digital and physical experiences symptomatic of post-internet life. Through an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, she fuses sensory information with the fever-dream aesthetics of advertising. In keeping with post-war performance art traditions of corporality, Freund incorporates not only the body but also cognition into her work, recontextualizing early performance art within a contemporary attention economy.
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On The Clock, 2024
4K video, Bilateral sound, found umbrella,
NFS
An umbrella is suspended 10 feet in the air. At its center, a 3-inch-diameter digital video plays. Inside, a woman’s face turns clockwise, her expressions—ranging from confusion to apprehension—illuminated by shifting party lights. Foley of a ticking clock, the distant sound of an arriving train in Japan, and birdsong emanate from the center. On The Clock examines the complexities of our relationship with time, a concept that deeply influences our daily lives yet remains intangible.
Xia Garcia
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Xia Garcia is a multimedia artist whose work explores themes of the surreal and grotesque found within the subconscious. Intrigued by the frequent nightmares they have experienced since childhood along with the effects of being raised by the internet, Xia’s work exists to fulfill an insatiable itch to share these uncomfortable experiences with others through a combination of as many digital mediums they can get their hands on.
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meatlocker
2024
Roblox (LUA programming)
This piece serves as a reflection of an experience I had in my dorm during my Freshman year of college in which I would store ground beef in my mini-fridge. This led to me feeling a bit uneasy at times feeling as though I am disrespecting the origins of the beef and as though I was being mocked by the cow I was eating from each time I would peer into my mini-fridge.
❝ I am a Texas based multimedia artist best known for creating what I like to call digital adventures. These adventures are either time-based media art or interactive pieces, however I am best known for my video art. I use a combination of any and all digital mediums I can get my hands on such as video, 3D modeling, image manipulation, sound, and creative coding. Stylistically, my pieces are surreal and grotesque, reflecting a sense of dissociation.My work experiments with ideas of dreams, nostalgia, and the subconscious with hints of early internet influence. I combine these ideas as means to reflect my personal experiences with frequent nightmares and paranoia, of which I have been in contact with since my childhood. These experiences narrate the stories that unfold in my pieces and allow the viewer to take a step into my mind and share these moments. I have also found great interest in the subtle subconscious hints that lead our perception of the world around us. Because of this, I also enjoy playing with the contrast that exists between horror and silliness to create a sense of harmony within that dissonance.
For me, my creative process is obsessive. I have found myself growing more interest in these odd experiences over the years which has caused a sense of necessity to be understood. I hope to recreate the uncanny realm I visit each night along with the unexpected disappointment I feel as I wake up each morning. With each piece I create, I hope to give the viewer the same blend of disgust and engrossment that I chase. ❞
Narong Tintamusik
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Narong Tintamusik (ณรงค์ตนิตมสุ กิ) is an artist and curator based in Dallas, TX. His work is autobiographical, mining elements from his second-generation Thai-American upbringing, Queer identity, Buddhist spirituality, and previous career in the biological sciences. Working within the painting and its iterations, he uses his Thai heritage to imagine an ancestral future to survive against society's current biopolitics. His works ask us to reconsider and revise the infrastructure surrounding contemporary modes of living, such as the overconsumption of ultra-processed food, waste colonialism, and cultural assimilation.
Born in Dallas, TX, he lived in Bangkok, Thailand, for ten years. His parents firmly persuaded him not to major in art in college, so he obtained his undergraduate biology degree from the University of Texas at Dallas with a minor in visual arts in 2014. After working in the environmental science industry for seven years, he decided to follow his dreams of studying art thoroughly. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas. He is grateful to have studied and worked in a different field like science since it encouraged him to find new variables to enter his work continually.
He has exhibited in group shows locally in Dallas, TX, and beyond, including Chicago, New York, Canada, and Germany. Solo exhibitions include 500X (Dallas, TX), Plush Gallery (Dallas, TX), Tarleton State University (Stephenville, TX), Angelina College (Lufkin, TX), and Daisha Board Gallery (Dallas, TX). He is the recipient of the DeGoyler Memorial Fund (Dallas Museum of Art 2015), Art Walk West Microgrant (West Dallas Chamber of Commerce 2021), and the Puffin Foundation Grant (Puffin Foundation 2022). He was a part of the artist-run gallery 500X from 2019-2022.
His curatorial focus often lies in identity, queerness, sexuality, diaspora, figuration, abstraction, fashion, love, and nature. His curatorial projects include To Remember to Speak our Mother Tongue (2022) at Goldmark Cultural Center, Human/Nature (2021) at Fort Worth Community Arts Center, Tree With Half a Root (2021) at Mountain View College, and Queer Me Now: The Queer Body and Gaze (2020) at 500X Gallery and The MAC. He also started Musik, a virtual curatorial platform that offers solo exhibitions to artists without gallery representation through invitational and open calls from August 2020 - November 2021.
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Genetic Glyph ๑ - Spliced ๒-๓, ๕-๗
2024
Acrylic, aniline wood dye, laser etching on wood panel
106 x 7 inches
$3800I am captivated by the concept of the painted object and the transformative power of paint to elevate the unremarkable into something of perceived value through camouflage. This fascination reflects my complex journey between cultures. Born in the United States, raised in Thailand, and now residing here again, I feel both a connection to and separation from my Thai heritage. I carry a lingering sense of shame from existing between these worlds, feeling neither fully authentic nor entirely inauthentic within my cultural identity. Paint, with its layered and often illusory nature, mirrors this experience, allowing me to connect with my origins through abstraction and to imbue constructed forms with a sense of richness.
My queerness and the fragility of my body add further dimensions to the cultural dissonance I navigate, prompting me to question my value. Disconnected from Thailand’s more community-centered traditions, I reflect deeply on existence, mortality, and ways to transcend beyond this lifetime. Choosing not to have children, I seek alternative pathways to preserve and express my cultural heritage, imagining how it might endure in uncertain futures.
My research envisions a dystopian world shaped by human-induced environmental collapse, where survival depends on a return to cultural traditions. Through paintings, sculptures, and wearable art, I critique structures such as overconsumption, waste colonialism, and cultural assimilation. This intersection of culture, environment, and consumption is influenced by my experience in environmental testing, where I analyzed aqueous and solid samples for contamination. Waste, as an overlooked residue of society’s intake, became central to my practice, merging with craft-adjacent techniques such as dyed wood, woodworking joinery, Thai mural painting, fused single-use plastic films, Joomchi papermaking, wastewater, and Thai food ingredients. These materials accumulate into culturally inclined yet detached forms, evoking physical and spiritual preservation as I reflect on my experience as a second-generation Thai American.
By situating myself within this desolate vision, I find meaning and purpose. As an artist, I am committed to ensuring that our cultural memory, resilience, and spirit endure beyond this time.
Baotran Vo + Diamond Nguyen
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Baotran Vo is a multi-media artist who employs a range of mediums, including animation, virtual reality, painting, digital fabrication, and interactive installation, to create immersive environments that explore the intersection of identity, culture, and memory. Vo is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Design and Creative Practice and is a Teaching Associate at the University of Texas-Dallas. Vo was an art teacher at Zhang Yaowu Art Center- Houston from 2022- 2023. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Kinetic Imaging and a minor in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in May 2022. Her work, reflecting her journey as an international artist and her Vietnamese heritage, seeks to create a space for reflection where audiences can connect with their own experiences and emotions. By delving into themes of displacement, belonging, and cultural identity, Vo's art encourages viewers to reflect on their own experiences and find meaning in their journeys. Ultimately, her goal is to create a space for connection and understanding where audiences can find solace and a sense of belonging in their own identities and experiences.
Diamond Nguyen is a multimedia artist, researcher, and educator pursuing her PhD in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. She specializes in 3D graphics, character animation, and interactive installations, with a particular focus on creating immersive and engaging audience experiences through innovative animated environments and human-computer interaction.
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Talk to the Moon
A deep fascination with the intersection of art and technology drives our artistic practice. Talk to the Moon is an interactive art installation exploring this intersection, along with human experience and the natural world. Participants 'paint' on a projected moon surface using their fingers, creating a dynamic, ever-changing artwork through kinetic sensors and TouchDesigner software. The cool-toned color scheme enhances a meditative experience, inviting introspection, catharsis, and connection. This collaborative work by Baotran Vo and Diamond Nguyen aims to provide a moment of respite, encouraging self-discovery and creative exploration through meaningful engagement with technology. Talk to the Moon seeks to offer viewers a transformative and emotionally resonant experience, demonstrating the power of technology to facilitate introspection and connection.
Daniel Manning Pope
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Daniel Manning Pope Jr. is an interdisciplinary artist, professor, and researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of politics and aesthetics. This focus – on parapolitical aesthetics – is intended to emphasize both the prior and contemporary relationships which are known or not-known, recognized or not-recognized, between the power structures of political capital and aesthetic practices. While the theoretical inspiration for his project rests generally in the shadow of Deleuze and Guattari’s project of schizoanalysis and Baudrillard’s fatal strategies, Pope positions his work as a continuation of the anti-fascist praxis of Walter Benjamin, David McGowan, and Mark Lombardi. Working in various and ever-shifting mediums ranging from photography to installation work, and from digital art to large scale painting, the bedrock of
Pope’s work is centered on the sociopolitical responsibility of both aesthetics and education more broadly, and how the further development of parapolitics can lead to a form of socially liberatory praxis.
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The Abstraction did not take place...
2024-ongoingRisographic prints
16’ x12’
$400 (unframed)The questions I present with this group of work is as follows: Did a mass suicide at the behest of a hypnotic cult leader take place in Guyana in November of 1978 with a total death count of 918? On December 14th, 2012, did a mass shooter kill 28 people, 20 of which were between ages 6 and 7 in Newtown Connecticut? In 1989, did the United States Armed Forces invade the country of Panama in a brief yet brutal display of force, one of only multiple dozens of both ‘official’ and unofficial interventions in the continent during the 20th century?
Yes, in fact all of these things did take place. What I hope to bring to the forefront is our collective rapid detachment to said real events which are placed in direct conflict with the operating abstracting-machine that Baudrillard so accurately recognized over three decades ago.
These images are a collection of famous documentary photographs which through a pointillizing process have become increasingly abstracted into circles of cyan, magenta, and yellow. For each image the only reference to each historical tragedy is the title which gives the date and location of said violent event, intended to parallel Baudrillard’s abstraction of violence as presented in his understanding of the Gulf War which did not take place. If you search the location and date of each of these pieces, or perhaps recognize some of the more infamous dates (9/11, 4/19, etc.), it will take little time to find the referenced tragedy, and quickly the abstraction becomes much more clear. Yet the question remains, how quickly do we forget (or abstract) tragedy and violence? How terrifying is a reality in which these killings, operations, and tragedies are so quickly forgotten? Baudrillard was correct in his diagnosis of contemporary violence... it (the violence) does not in fact exist, nor does it take place, and the abstract-functioning of hegemonic capital has guaranteed this. The role of any artistic practice is not only to recognize this and emphasize the sociopolitical responsibility of aesthetic projects, but furthermore to recognize that said aesthetic projects of creative output are becoming increasingly the only methods which differentiates our production from non-human production. As capital increases to become speculated, crawling ever deeper into virtual cyberspace, labor becomes increasingly automated, removing humans from the processes of production, what remains is the human ability to participate in artistic creative processes with the goal of inspiring sociopolitical change. Situated within a reality which is oversaturated with violence and tragedy – both of the overt and parapolitical nature – any artistic project must undertake a ‘becoming-monstrously foreign’ process, one which challenges the apolitical, autistic, and defanged, status quo which has come to define contemporary ‘high art’ since the end of the Cold War. Baudrillard was correct in his analysis of an abstracting-function of violence, it is the role of artistic projects to challenge this reality, shedding a light on realized, yet quickly forgotten, tragedy and atrocity .
Linh Vu
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Linh Vu is a multidisciplinary creative student from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Dallas, Texas. Linh explores culture, memory, and storytelling through design, writing, and visual experiments.
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Youth (Egg series)
2024
video
The beauty of youth lies in its boundless ability to shift and transform, free from consequence. It is in this purity and curiosity that boundaries are pushed, and the unknown is embraced. The glowing light captures these sparks of innocence and potential, illuminating the fluidity of transformation and the raw energy of becoming.