Born and raised in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, I have always been surrounded by a rich cultural heritage and a deep appreciation for art. After completing my studies, I embarked on a career in a start-up HR and educational company in Prague. However, life took an unexpected turn when I experienced a personal loss, prompting me to embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery.  Seeking solace and new perspectives, I made the decision to travel for a year, eventually finding myself in the United Kingdom. Emigrating and settling in the UK, I now consider both countries my home, feeling fortunate to have connections and loved ones in both places. Though this dual identity brings me great joy, I also grapple with a constant longing for the other half of my heart.  My passion for art has been ingrained in me since my school days, where I studied art at grammar school. Later, I pursued my artistic education at a university in London. Through my artistic journey, I have had the privilege of showcasing my work at prestigious venues. Exhibitions with Saatchi, including The Other Art Fair, and being selected by the Cambrian Royal Academy of Art to exhibit at their HQ/Gallery have been significant milestones. Additionally, my artwork has been displayed at the Base Gallery in Greenham, while also finding a place in the collection of Ben Heath Interiors in Newbury.  Recognition from art curator Rebecca Wilson and features by Saatchi have further contributed to my artistic development. However, it was a pivotal moment when I visited a dear friend's art studio that sparked a profound sense of urgency within me—a calling to create, to leave behind a legacy, and to tell a story through my art.  Today, I embrace the opportunity to immerse myself fully in the creation of art. It is a journey of self-expression and a testament to the transformative power of creativity. Through my work, I strive to leave a lasting impact, to evoke emotions, and to weave narratives that resonate with viewers, ultimately creating a visual legacy that reflects my unique perspective on the world.

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Margot Dermody (b. Takoma Park, MD) is an artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. Her current solo exhibition, The Way of Peace, Forward and Back, is in the Pittsburgh Federal Courthouse lobby, Art in the Courthouse, through May 15, 2023. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, Chromatic, PxP Contemporary Gallery, (2022); Stronger Together, Art Mum’s (2022); Alone, Together, the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh (2021); Full Circle, Concept Art Gallery (2021); and the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh 107th Annual Exhibition at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, (2019-2020). She has also shown in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust Gallery, William Pitt Union, Gallery One | Collective Works, and the Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media. Recently, she was awarded Idea Furnace sessions in the Artist Residency Program at the Pittsburgh Glass Center, where she continues to work as a studio artist. Bringing together elements of the natural world with human emotion in painting, sculpture, and photography, her works span a wide range from a neutral monochromatic palette to a more explicitly vivid and affective narrative. 

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Laura Ecsi was born in Budapest, Hungary. Her life is full of travels, discovering new places and life of people who live in various countries. Traveller´s lifestyle since early childhood has made her look at the world with amazement and childish curiosity.

Her life was surrounded by creating artworks from the moment she was given her first crayons and a stack of paper. Although she finished City University of Bellevue with a Degree of Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, art was so part of her being, that she never stopped painting, drawing, going to different art schools and dreaming of having art as a full-time job. She did not regret graduating with different degree than art – as later it helped her to implement all the knowledge gained in managerial skills in starting and running her art business.

It was during maternity leave she started to look for something unique, unusual, but still using natural materials, „coincidence“ led her to encaustic – wax painting. It was love at first sight. After gaining basic knowledge as a self-taught encaustic artist through trial and error, she visited various masters in this field like Elizabeth van Uden in Holland and John Buckland from England. The main breakthrough came when Laura studied at Anna-Marie Aigner from Austria, who introduced her to the possibility to work with encaustic in 3D. Since then, Laura´s imagination knew no boundaries it sprang out into infinity.

Another element that made Laura absolutely fall in love with this technique, is the use of fire. She sees this principal element as creator of light, without which there would not be life. And in her case, there would be no artwork

Laura also finds that encaustic is an unbelievably colourful and live art. Her attention was caught by the possibility to change the structures and practically the whole painting endlessly, always getting something new and unexpected. There is always a way to change the shapes, structures, patterns, colours, and the whole artwork into something new.

Recently, Laura dwelled even more into the possibility of bringing beauty of a moment seen in nature, closer to us in this more hectic and more technical world. She achieved this by combining randomly found stone and wood with encaustic.

Inspiration confronts Laura in every step she takes, it is all around her. Laura cannot describe how the creative process starts and goes on until she steps away from the ready painting. She comes to the clean surface and just start painting. It is like meditating, a different state of mind.

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Frequent trips to stay with family in Mexico exposed Marianna Jimenez Edwards to the roots of her Mexican culture. Curiosity to investigate and create was nourished by her family. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving a BFA in Painting. Further awareness of her indigenous heritage and Chicano culture blossomed during art school. Also, during that time, visiting her grandmother’s village in Oaxaca and various archaeological sites in Central Mexico and Chiapas on separate occasions transformed that awareness into the passion and central ideas for her work. After art school, Marianna taught drawing and painting at two separate private studios. One of those studios belonged to classically trained, Venezuelan artist, Conchita Firgau, which led Marianna to want to explore a blend of Western realism and Pre-Columbian themes and subject matter. The drips, lines, and marks explore ideas of the fraying of time woven into a sense of existing within two different and distinct cultures. In 2019 Marianna received an Alexa Rose Foundation Grant to travel to the Museo Textil in Oaxaca, Mexico (postponed due to COVID). In 2020 she created Ancestral Steering for the City of Boise Traffic Box Project. In 2021 she was again awarded with an Alexa Rose Foundation Grant to purchase a camera for quality reference photos and documenting her portfolio through photographs and videos. Marianna teaches art at the high school level and is a Boise resident. She draws and paints in oil, acrylic, and mixed media, incorporating cultural objects, collage, portraits, animals, textiles, and patterns into her visual language.

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Ilze Egle is a contemporary artist based in Latvia. MA of Fine Arts, member of the Latvian Union of Artists, she works in oil and mixed media with artwork ranging from small illustrations and landscapes to large scale paintings focusing on nature, light, female form and abstract marks. She often incorporates drawing in her paintings. Recently she teaches visual art, experiments with AI and creates NFTs. Her art is between abstract and representational, color and black/white. Ilze grew up in the art world, in a family of two artists, studied fine arts, art management and theology, and spent a year living with nuns. After working as an art curator for many years, she returned to art making and since then her studio practice has become her main focus. Ilze’s paintings have been exhibited internationally, have been included in numerous publications, have held in number of collections and have received several art awards.

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Andrea Ehret's ethereal paintings draw on her studies of Art and Art Therapy practice, using intuition, expression and gesture as tools for self-transformation. Each of Ehret's paintings follows the flow of energetic light and shade to create a balanced, harmonious, meditative whole. In this way Ehret considers the act of painting to be a healing process. Her intuitive approach is influenced by Eastern philosophy.  Ehret considers each painting an expression of an inner world – a meditative process in which the paint is layered with her own internal charges depicting her emotions and feelings. These conflicting emotions coalesce in painterly abstract creating cosmic dreamscapes. Each painting offering a dream-like experience. Andrea Ehret studied at Prešovská Univerzita in Slovakia and Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, in the Czech Republic. She has been included in numerous exhibitions in US, NYC,  UK, London, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Prague and Italy and collected heavily internationally. Ehret has also been the recipient of awards including The Red Dot Miami Award , GlobalArt Awards Tokyo, Caravaggio International Prize Master of Art, Milan , etc. In 2021 & 2022 she was selected as an artist-in-residence at Chateau d'Orquevaux, France as part of the Denis Diderot Grant Award. 20 solo shows, international exposure. Her art works are part of private collections all around the world; e.g. Netherlands, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Russia, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany, USA, etc.

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Silvia Felizia is a contemporary abstract artist born and raised in Argentina and currently resides in the United States. She studied Graphic Design in Buenos Aires and worked in the industry as a freelance artist until moving abroad in the mid 1990s. During the first years away from her home country, Felizia started self-educating in the visual arts and painting. Later, while living in Thailand, she learned the ancient techniques of mosaic art, which she mastered after years of practice and continues to apply to some of her paintings. Abstract and emotive, strong and vulnerable, Felizia’s body of work is drawn from her life story and the many places she has lived, including Kyiv, Bangkok, London and Houston. Felizia has been selected for exhibitions in galleries and art platforms in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including the University of North Texas UNT Gallery, Galería Azur Miami, AAPG Image 2022/23 Houston, Artly Mix - São Paulo, Roseum Arte Contemporáneo - Buenos Aires, Florence Contemporary, U1 Gallery Tokyo, Envision Arts Show, Visionary Art Collective, Visionary Projects New York. Her work is published internationally, including the Contemporary Celebrity Masters, A Like Artist by Al-Tiba9, Art Folio 2022, Art Anthology V Madrid Edition.

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Shannon Rae Fincke was born in New Brighton, Pennsylvania in 1974. Raised in an artistic and academic home she naturally gravitated to both creating and teaching. In high school Shannon was selected to attend the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in visual arts, and then completed her undergraduate work in Studio Art at Washington & Jefferson College and Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania and The Marchutz School of Fine Arts in France. She earned her master’s in painting and art education at New York University, where she was the recipient of a Gallatin Dean’s Graduate Scholarship and studied intensively with Arnold Mesches. Shannon has instructed art for over twenty years in a wide variety of capacities, and in 2011 founded the Institute for Visual Arts in Los Angeles— where she currently lives with her husband and three daughters. Her work is in private and public collections throughout the U.S., has been exhibited in solo and group shows at museums and galleries internationally, and has been featured in print, film, and television. Notable past exhibits include shows at Brand Library and Art Center and Angeles Gate Cultural Center in Los Angeles. 

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Leila Angelina Freiburg is a self-taught visual artist, who concentrates on female character studies and the theme of personal growth, emotional wellbeing, and mental health. She was born in Berlin, near the National Gallery, where she spent a lot of time admiring the old masters paintings and dreaming of a creative career. Nevertheless, she studied law and became a lawyer. She believed it was an either-or decision and stopped making art until her first child was born. The experience of being a mother renewed the urge to lean more into creativity, empathy, and intuition. She started taking art classes again and found a unique way of expressing emotions and stories of personal development in acrylic portraits. She lives in Düsseldorf, Germany with her husband and two kids and balances family life, working for an NGO and painting.

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Kat Furtado is a contemporary mixed-media artist from San Diego, California. Kat is a certified and licensed Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) with a Master's of Art in Communication Science and Disorders. Her background as an SLP informs her creative endeavors. Storytelling, emotions, and recurrent themes of humanity are woven with care into her ethereal, abstract artwork. To Furtado, art is an extension of non-verbal communication and validation of the human experience. Furtado creates art as an essential communicative endeavor because communication continues to be the only true link between sentient beings. 

Furtado became a mother in 2015. The transformation within motherhood was the catalyst for her third career (SLP, motherhood, artist), wherein she realized that parenting two small children required her to do the bravest thing she could imagine: something new. She became a full-time artist in December of 2020.

Furtado has sold out multiple self-released collections of original small works and print releases. She has collectors worldwide. Her artwork has been featured in multiple virtual juried exhibitions and in publications, and her first solo show was hosted through the Women United Art Movement in October 2022. As part of the “Taking.Up.Space” Initiative, Furtado coordinated, co-created, and participated in "Attachment; Abbreviated.” – a virtual exhibition featuring shared, swapped, and changed materials between artists on opposite ends of the world and their respective children. Furtado also completed an artist residency through the Artist Mother Podcast Community in March of 2022. Since October of 2021, she has successfully self-released product lines featuring her illustrative work, sold through her website.

When she isn’t creating art, she can be found cuddling with any combination of her two kids and two rescued pets. True to motherhood, there's almost always someone on her lap. true to being an artist, there's always paint in her hair and on her clothes.

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