News

Josias Figueirido

"PAFA challenged me about was it meant to be a professional artist. PAFA gave me another level. PAFA gave me a professionalism that I didn’t have. It made me want to be competitive. It taught me that when I go to MOMA, when I go to the Whitney, I have to think about how to put my work here. I have…

Abigail Gray Swartz

When Abigail Gray Swartz’s illustration of a reimagined Rosie the Riveter graced the cover of The New Yorker in 2017, friends and family kept saying she had won the artist lottery.

Niloofar Gholamrezaei

"Cultural norms in Iran made it difficult to organize or participate in figure drawing clubs. I decided to join a program that gave me this possibility."

Jason Loebs

Jason Loebs creates work that is decidedly non-traditional, yet it was PAFA’s commitment to observational art-making that drew him to the school.

Kate Kaman

Kate Kaman came to PAFA with a passion for figurative painting. Early on, she started making stretcher bars out of found railroad ties, and a sculptor was born.

Joel Stanulonuis

Shortly after completing completing his MFA, Stanulonis' drawing That Little Plane -- first exhibited at the 113th Annual Student Exhibition -- was featured on the cover of New American Paintings.

Katherine Wirick

Katherine Wirick’s artistic exploration of sequential narratives and graphic novels runs the gamut from family tragedy and political protest to historical drama and baseball.

Dufala Brothers

Steven Dufala and Billy Blaise Dufala are prolific multidisciplinary artists whose work defies categorization and extends from sculpture and drawing to theater, music and performance art.

Emily Erb

Emily Erb [MFA '12] was a 2017 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Foundation Grant, which is awarded to emerging artists "who represent the highest artistic promise of the coming generation."

David Schutter

"The sustained attention that PAFA asked of its students prepared me for the kind of looking that is at the heart of what I do."

Ana María Gómez López

Ana María Gómez López left a career in forensic anthropology to become a visual artist, a journey that began at PAFA and continues in her current home of Berlin.

Evangelos Frudakis

“We are poets in clay. We capture something that has its own identity. My philosophy was poetry, it was excellence, and it was that the truth comes from nature.”

About PAFA

Founded in 1805, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is America's first school and museum of fine arts. A recipient of the National Medal of Arts, PAFA offers undergraduate and graduate programs in the fine arts, innovative exhibitions of historic and contemporary American art, and a world-class collection of American art. PAFA’s esteemed alumni include Mary Cassatt, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, William Glackens, Barkley L. Hendricks, Violet Oakley, Louis Kahn, David Lynch, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.