Aki Torii is a visual artist who resides and works in Wilmington’s Creative District. She was awarded an honorary award, the Justine Cretella Memorial Scholarship, from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was a Dadalus Foundation MFA Award Nominee as well. Her body of work is a theatrical reflection on social behavior through various media such as drawing, sculpture, video, and installation. She has participated in the Reel Venus Film Festival (New York, 2008), group shows such as “Instance, Instants and Distance” at Skybox Galley (Philadelphia, 2008) and Solitary Pleasure at Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, 2010). Currently, she teaches 4D Design at DCAD. In addition, she is a teaching artist at The Print Center and Family Arts Academy Workshops at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts School and Museum in Philadelphia. Torii was selected as one of the “10 Philadelphia female artists you need to know” by online magazine PhillyVoice in April 2015.

Žaneta Zubkova, a native of Lithuania, is a formerly Brooklyn-based artist and an educator. At DCAD, she specializes in color and design courses. Previous teaching experiences include Pratt Institute and Adelphi University.

Ellen Durkan grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, as the oldest of nine children. In addition to teaching at her alma mater, she travels around to teach blacksmith workshops. Her business, Iron Maiden Forge, has grown and evolved as she has worked on her “forged fashion” series and presented it through runway shows and performances pieces. Ellen also has a jewelry line to make her work more accessible to the public. After all, not everyone is in need of a metal corset.

Connie Simon teaches Two-Dimensional Design: Black and White and Two-Dimensional Design: Color. She has taught at many colleges and museums, including the University of Delaware, the L.A. County Museum of Art, and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1994, Connie was a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts. She has exhibited her paintings at the Berman Museum of Art as well as many other regional colleges, community art centers , and galleries. Connie’s work has been published in Artist’s Magazine, American Artist and Art Matters.

Rachel Bomze, a painter originally from Texas, received her bachelor of arts degree in studio art with an emphasis in painting at Brandeis University. She earned her master of fine arts degree in painting from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2004 and was appointed area coordinator of Fine Arts and Foundations at DCAD in Fall 2016. Rachel’s own work centers on the in-between spaces. This occurs in the work where imagery hovers between the process of painting itself and a recollection of an image. In those in-between places, sometimes the work is reminiscent of weaving. Many times, the work recalls a landscape quality, like the light reflecting across the ripples in a body of water or the sensations of being enveloped by a landscape space as if in a field or underwater. Her work has been shown throughout the Pennsylvania and South Jersey region as well as in New York City.