MFA Guest Artist Lecture Series: Fall 2025
All Visiting Artist Lectures will take place
at *11:00 a.m. in Room 144
Visual & Performing Arts Center
Westside Campus: 43 Lake Avenue Extension, Danbury, CT
*unless noted otherwise
RSVP to the Lectures via Eventbrite HERE
Will Hutnick
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Wed, Sept 17, 2025
Will Hutnick is an artist and curator based in Sharon, CT. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute and his BA from Providence College. He is a 2021 Artist Fellow in Painting from the NY Foundation for the Arts and a recipient of grants from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Will’s work has been featured in The New York Times, New American Paintings, and Hyperallergic. He has had solo exhibitions at McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University, Geary Contemporary, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Standard Space, and Providence College Galleries. Group exhibitions include: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, High Noon, Hollis Taggart, 1969 Gallery, and Heaven Gallery.
Will has been awarded artist-in-residencies at Yaddo, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and others. He has also been a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte and Trestle Projects, and has curated exhibitions at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Pratt Institute, and the Wassaic Project. From 2015 to 2020, Hutnick was one of the Co-Directors of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run collective and exhibition space in Brooklyn. He is currently the Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a nonprofit organization that uses art and art education to foster positive social change.
Guy Billout
ILLUSTRATOR
Tue, Sept 30, 2025, 10:30am
Guy Billout has been called the Buster Keaton of the illustration world. His works are funny, acrobatic feats of mental agility that challenge the laws of logic. His characters retain composure no matter what; impending doom does not unnerve them; and under the dark humor, optimism prevails. In 2015, Billout received the highest honor; he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
Guy was born and educated in France and moved to Paris in the 1960s to work in advertising graphic design. He came to the U.S. in 1969 as an inexperienced illustrator with an improvised, unique portfolio, presented to Milton Glaser at New York magazine. Glaser loved his work and published it in its entirety.
For 24 years, Billout created a stand-alone page in The Atlantic magazine, in full color, with total editorial freedom. From 2001 to 2011, he illustrated articles in The New Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His client list includes Esquire, Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among others. He is the recipient of many awards, among them the Hamilton King Award and The New York Times “Ten Best Illustrated Children’s Books” for five years. At his Hall of Fame induction, Billout was described as “more than an illustrator, a compassionate poet of the absurd.”
Todd Bartel
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Mon, October 13, 2025
Todd Bartel is a collage-based artist. His works are assembled forms of painting, drawing and sculpture that examine the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture. He received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and also studied in Rome through RISD’s European Honors Program. He received his MFA in Painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993.
Bartel was a 1990 recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.). In 2000, he was awarded a Connecticut Council on the Arts Fellowship Grant in support of the continuation of his related drawing series entitled, “Garden Studies” and “Terra Reverentia”. His work has been exhibited at Palo Alto Art Center, Brockton Art Museum, and Katonah Museum of Art, among others.
A passionate teacher, Bartel has taught at Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Manhattanville College, and Vermont College. He has been a guest critic at Rhode Island School of Design and has lectured at Alfred University, Chatham College, and The New England Teaching Conference. Currently, Bartel teaches drawing, painting, sculpture, installation art, and conceptual art at the Cambridge School of Weston in MA. He is the founder of IS (Installation Space), a proposal-based installation gallery, as well as the founder and Gallery Director of the Cambridge School’s Thompson Gallery, a teaching gallery dedicated to thematic inquiry.
Phoebe Jane Hart
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Mon, October 27, 2025
Phoebe Jane Hart is a filmmaker, fabricator, and stop-motion animator based in NYC. She is an alumna of WCSU, graduating Summa Cum Laude in the Kathwari Honors Program with a BA degree in Studio Art. Since 2018, she has created work across a range of mediums, exploring the awkward, tender, and often absurd dimensions of human psychology and relationships through dark humor and surreal, hand-crafted visuals.
Phoebe’s short film Bug Diner received the Jury Award for Animation at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It also received a Special Jury Award at SXSW and premiered internationally on MUBI in 2025. Her first short film, JamieSonShine, is an experimental mixed-media documentary exploring her relationship with her brother following his diagnosis of schizophrenia. It screened at Slamdance 2022 and won Director's Choice at the Thomas Edison Film Festival.
Phoebe earned her MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts in 2023. She was awarded a post-graduate Teaching Fellowship for her proposed course Compositing in Claymation, which she taught at CalArts in 2024. She continues to create both personal films and freelance work for studios, including Little Monster Films, BentoBox, Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, and Bix Pix Entertainment. She takes puppets very, very seriously.
Josephine Halvorson
INTERDISCIPLINARY ARTIST
Wed, Nov 12, 2025
Josephine Halvorson makes art from direct observation, foregrounding the firsthand experience of noticing, describing, and learning from the physical world. She works primarily in painting, but also in sculpture and printmaking. She received her BFA at The Cooper Union and her MFA at Columbia University, with additional studies at Yale Norfolk. Since 2016, she has been Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.
In 2021, Josephine was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also the recipient of international residencies and fellowships, including the U.S. Fulbright to Vienna, Austria, and the Harriet Hale Woolley Award at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France. In 2014-15, she was the first American “pensionnaire” at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici.
Josephine’s work has been exhibited internationally and is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, NY, and Peter Freeman, Paris. Selected recent exhibitions include: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, North Carolina; Storm King Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the 2019 Havana Biennial. In 2021-22, she had a solo exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM, where she was the inaugural artist in residence. Halvorson’s work and practice have been written about extensively, and she is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up.