Commencement

Rose B. Simpson MFA 11 CR belongs to a long lineage of women from Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh (Santa Clara Pueblo) famous for producing blackware and redware pottery that dates back hundreds of years. In 2024, she debuted a public sculpture project at Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York, and was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Her work reflects on the multilayered history of her home in New Mexico, exploring modes of empowerment and resilience that connect past and present, express experience and identity, and contemplate freedom and strength.

Simpson earned an MFA in ceramics from RISD and an MA in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work is part of numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She has mounted solo shows at the Norton Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Fabric Workshop and Museum and elsewhere.

Simpson continues to live and work in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico and is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

MacArthur Fellow María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a multidisciplinary artist exploring how memory, spirituality and identity are entangled with personal and collective histories across time and geographies. Her artistic practice spans photography, performance, sculpture, drawing, painting and video, and her works often take the form of richly layered, multimedia installations.

Campos-Pons earned degrees from the National School of Art, Havana and the Higher Institute of Art, Havana and attended the MFA program at the Massachusetts College of Art. She held the Bunting Fellowship in Visual Arts at Harvard University from 1993–94 and currently serves as the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair and Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University, where she founded the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice Program in 2018. She also launched Intermittent Rivers, a multi-artist initiative in Matanzas, Cuba in 2019 and GASP Gallery Artist Studio Projects in Boston in 2003, and served as consulting curator and ambassador for the inaugural Tennessee Triennial Re-Pair in 2023.

Campos-Pons’ work has been presented at a wide variety of venues, including Tate Modern, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Peabody Essex Museum, Documenta14, Venice Biennale, National Portrait Gallery, Frist Museum and the Havana Biennial. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Before RISD alum Grace Lin 96 IL became an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author/illustrator, she was the only Asian girl (other than her sisters) at her elementary school in upstate New York. That experience, good and bad, has influenced all of her books—including Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which won a Newbery Honor; Ling & Ting, which was awarded a Geisel Honor; the National Book Awards finalist A Big Mooncake for Little Star, which was awarded a Caldecott Honor; and When the Sea Turned to Silver, a National Book Award finalist.

The experience also led Lin to serve as an occasional New England Public Radio commentator, present a TEDx talk called The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf, and contribute a video essay titled What to Do When You Realize Classic Books from Your Childhood Are Racist to PBS NewsHour. In 2016, Lin’s art was displayed at the White House, and she was recognized by President Obama’s office as a champion of change for Asian American and Pacific Islander art and storytelling. In 2022, she was awarded the Children’s Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association.

Graduating with a BFA in Painting, Valerie Mirra paints animal subjects, anthropogenic structures and ecological systems. She is also a naturalist who works extensively with animals—from lab and wildlife rehabilitation settings to caretaking. Merging art, research and travel, she seeks to kindle empathy and devotion for the protection of the natural world.

Selina Wu is a graphic designer, artist and researcher graduating with an MFA in Graphic Design. Born and raised in Nanjing, China, she came to the US to pursue a BFA in Communication Design from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work bridges editorial design, material experimentation and philosophical inquiry, engaging themes of time, memory and nostalgia.