Summer Studio/Critique Program

Neysa Grassi (Lead Critic)

Neysa Grassi is known for her gouache, mixed media, and oil paintings whose surfaces reveal the intense physicality of her creative process. Through multiple layers of paint that have been applied, manipulated, wiped out, and covered again, she creates a tactile quality that variously evinces spontaneous energy or calculated meditation.  Grassi is a recipient of a Pew Fellowship and has had solo exhibitions at several museums, including the Pensacola Art Museum in Florida and PAFA, as well as numerous one-person exhibitions in galleries in Philadelphia and New York. Her work is included in the permanent collections of PAFA, the Berman Museum of Art, the Palmer Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She is represented by Locks Gallery, Philadelphia. She is a critic in PAFA’s MFA program.

Jan Baltzell

Jan Baltzell’s painterly abstractions display a master’s control of contrasting mark-making and ecstatic color that transcends the viewer’s conventional vocabulary. During the past forty years, her drawings and vibrant paintings have appeared in numerous regional and national exhibitions, including more than twenty solo exhibitions. Known not only as a distinguished artist but also as an influential teacher and critic, Baltzell has taught in the BFA, Post-Baccalaureate, and MFA programs at PAFA, and served as a visiting instructor/critic other institutions, including Towson State University, Drexel University, the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and the Vermont Studio Center.  Baltzell’s work is included in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Woodmere Art Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., among other institutions.  She is currently represented by Schmidt Dean Gallery in New Jersey.    

Alex Conner

Alex Conner is a curator, educator, and entrepreneur who owns and operates Commonweal gallery in Rittenhouse. Commonweal exhibits artists from the Philadelphia community whose work actively engages with local, national, and global conversations. His passion for encouraging artists of all levels is reflected in his endeavors, from serving as a K-12 gallery educator at the Barnes Foundation to running Philly Stewards, an arts organization dedicated to the collection, support, and promotion of Philadelphia’s art and artists. Through Commonweal, Alex works with artists to help develop the commercial aspects of their practice.

Doah Lee

Doah Lee is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Philadelphia. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, she earned her MFA from University of Pennsylvania and her BFA with a concentration in Painting and Printmaking at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. In her work, she explores and exploits cultural symbols through repetition in a practice that mediates on cultural translation, immigration, otherness and femininity in focusing more specifically on issue of self-identification. She searches through the ways how children speak, listen, see, and draw and their relationships with the influencing points over a person’s identity under socio-political and cultural pressures. The work has been featured in various exhibitions in Virginia, Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Seoul, South Korea. She has been a resident-artist at Vermont Studio Center and Cheltenham Center of the Art. She is a curator and member of an artist-run exhibition space, FJORD gallery, and has been a visiting art critic and artist in residency at PAFA.

Bruce Samuelson

Bruce Samuelson is a faculty member of PAFA’s BFA and Graduate Programs. Informed by the principles of Old Master draftsmanship, Samuelson’s drawings and paintings expand beyond traditional methods of representation to arrive at elegant meditations on the human form. He has exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions and his work is represented in numerous public and private collections including PAFA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Woodmere Art Museum. Samuelson is represented by J. Cacciola Galleries, New York and Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia.

Sterling Shaw

Sterling Shaw is a product of Philadelphia’s public school system. He entered PAFA in 2000, where he earned a Certificate in 2004 and later an MFA degree in 2020.  Bible stories, nursery rhymes, and mythology influence his dreamlike narratives, which are marked by a painterly focus on the figure and the expressive immediacy of drawing elements. His work has been exhibited at the Painting Center in New York, the Woodmere Art Museum, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Rosenfeld Gallery, the Main Line Art Center, Seraphin Gallery, Artists House Gallery, and Gross McCleaf Gallery. His work belongs to numerous private and public collections, including the permanent collection of the Woodmere Art Museum, the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection. He currently maintains his studio practice in Philadelphia.