Commencement

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, Julie Mehretu MFA 97 PR/PT creates paintings, drawings, and prints that articulate the contemporary social experience and explore palimpsests of history, from geological time to modern-day phenomenology. After earning her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from RISD, she moved to New York City, where she continues to live and work.

Mehretu has received many prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Award (2005) and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture (2025). Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2020, and she recently created Uprising of the Sun, an 85x25' glass mural for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, IL.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); the High Museum, Atlanta (2020); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); the Palazzo Grassi Pinault Collection, Venice (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2024); K21 in Dusseldorf, Germany (2025); and MSN Warsaw (2026).

Read more about Julie Mehretu, our Commencement 2026 speaker

Roz Chast 77 PT is known for turning everyday anxieties into sharply funny, unmistakably personal cartoons. She has earned many honors, including the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 2015 and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024.

Born in Brooklyn, the only child of public school teachers, Chast discovered Charles Addams’ work at the age of nine, sparking a fascination with cartooning that never left her. After earning a BFA in Painting from RISD in 1977, Chast returned to New York and to her initial love of cartooning. Her work began appearing in The Village Voice and National Lampoon, and in 1978 she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker, where her work has been featured ever since.

Her 2014 memoir about caring for her aging parents, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, became a critical and commercial success, winning multiple awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her latest book is The Two Saddest Kitchens, which will be published by Bloomsbury later this year.

Stephen A. Metcalf, long-serving RISD board member and descendant of RISD’s founding family, was named chair of the Emeriti Trustees in 2018. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute, from which he received his BFA in 1972, Metcalf sailed a schooner around southeast Asia before returning to the US. He has explored the concept of “tensegrity” in his kinetic sculptures, which adorn the fields around his farm in Exeter, RI.

Over the years, Metcalf has worked in management for both television and marine construction but currently spends his time investigating the connections between the physical world and his geometrical forms. Metcalf is active in the Attleboro Arts Museum, the Newport Art Museum, and Art League of Rhode Island, and earned the RISD President’s Medal of Honor in 2021.

Metcalf is currently on the RISD Museum’s Board of Governors and the Fine Arts Committee. In 2025 he and his wife A. Ewa Metcalf established the Frank Robinson Curatorship of Painting and Sculpture at the RISD Museum, an endowed position that ensures permanent support for the curatorial leadership of one of the museum’s most significant collections.

David Wiseman 03 FD produces sculpture, furniture, lighting, and site-specific installations that bring his awe of nature to the built environment. He also draws inspiration from global decorative arts traditions and timeless craft techniques, while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility for pattern and form. The result is delightful, handcrafted interventions: from porcelain cherry blossom ceilings to terrazzo-inlaid furniture and illuminated branch and bud chandeliers.

With his brother, Ari, he has built a unique studio environment in Los Angeles that includes viewing rooms, gardens, and extensive purpose-built production spaces. Wiseman has also created site-specific installations for public institutions, international brands, and private collections, including RISD’s President’s House.

A 2003 graduate of RISD’s Furniture Design department, Wiseman has made work included in the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Barack Obama Presidential Center, and the RISD Museum and has been featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The World of Interiors, and Architectural Digest. His recent monograph, The Four Seasons of Flower Fruit Mountain, was published by August Editions in 2024.

A faculty member in the Literary Arts and Studies department, Sage Gerson exemplifies a critical awareness of an educator’s positionality to foster openness and trust in the classroom. In her teaching, she reflects a richness of different instructional materials, media, and entry points for students that resonates with their interests and lived experiences.

Sage’s pedagogy combines the clarity of advocacy for a liberal arts education—especially for artists and designers—with a commitment to forms of learning that engage with land and communities beyond formal institutional settings. Through her grounded and relational style of teaching, Sage profoundly impacts student growth as thinkers and makers. 

In his teaching, Graphic Design critic Anther Kiley balances structures and productive uncertainty, encouraging students to challenge themselves while maintaining clarity about the end goal of their work. This approach is reflected in Anther’s meticulous course organization and carefully structured syllabi, offering students easy access to a wide range of materials.

Anther’s transparency regarding learning goals is matched by his care and attention to individual student growth, thus supporting students in their journey to become independent creative practitioners.

Alayka Seputra 26 ID is an Indonesian designer, artist, and writer receiving a BFA in Industrial Design. Moving between woodworking, painting, writing, and object-making, hew work explores how memories, labor, touch, and cultural identity can be translated into physical form. Alayka’s thesis project, ASMARA, reclaims and reframes the phrase “Made in Indonesia” as “Designed by an Indonesian,” centering Indonesian authorship, intimacy, and material culture within contemporary design.

Shrishti Chatterjee MFA 26 GD practiced social design in India before coming to RISD to pursue a graduate degree in Graphic Design. Her thesis, Seeking Ground, proposes a design method that pays attention to the natural world as a pathway to belonging. Her work features close and deep observations of subjects from something as small as the night blooming jasmine to as planetary as sprawling internet cables. If she weren’t a designer, Shrishti notes, she would be a private investigator.