Oakland Art Murmur’s Emerging Artist Program supports early-career visual artists at a pivotal moment in their practice.
Through networking opportunities, professional development, and public exhibition during East Bay Open Studios, the program provides access, visibility, and community—helping artists grow sustainable creative lives and shape the future of East Bay visual culture. Designed for artists at the beginning of their careers with limited experience exhibiting and selling their work, the program reduces barriers to participation and opens pathways into the local arts ecosystem.
Meet Our Emerging Artists
Finn Jordan was born in Portland, Oregon and lives in Oakland, California. He is an artist coming back to his practice after undergoing a variety of life transitions in 2020.
In Fall 2024, Finn took his first printmaking and painting classes at Laney College. He has been focused on drawing for a number of years. He feels painting and printmaking has brought his drawings to life. He draws all of his line work by hand even in his digital work, so there was a natural translation of his illustrations to etching. For painting, Finn has been enjoying playing with ink in mixed media to incorporate his line work. They also make “mini zines,” which intersect their poems and short form essays with illustrations. This year they also had the pleasure of finishing their first paper animation short, parts of which you can find on their website portfolio.
Donny Phan’s craft is a love letter to his nonhumans: past and present. The dried plant is central to his practice as it holds memory, transformation, and temporality. He is influenced by the concepts of otherness and universal impermanence.
Plant-tecture is his experimental playground to arrange, edit, add, subtract, cut, paste, and illustrate an otherworldly utopia of metamorphosed flora and fauna. Freed from anthropocentrism, they reclaim agency over their environments. His work explores a reversal of power (not as revenge but as rebalancing) and process is through play, unexpected materials, juxtapositions, and subtle absurdity.
Hanah Goldov began working with clay as a college student in 2010, drawn to the medium as a meditative outlet. It wasn’t until studying landscape architecture and working in the design profession that she was inspired to develop a more consistent art practice, one that allowed for creative freedom. Her design training has deeply influenced her work, providing structure, vision, and follow-through, as well as confidence in her creative process. As a lifelong dancer and mover, for Hanah, working with clay is as much about the embodied experience as it is about the finished piece.
Mark Romero is a first-generation Nicaraguan-American artist and educator based in the Bay Area, California. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and later a Master of Arts in Teaching from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. His formal training in fine art, combined with years of experience in education, deeply informs his creative practice.
Based in the East Bay, Qi Han is a primarily self-taught oil painter whose practice is rooted in observation, curiosity, and a deep respect for craftsmanship. Her artistic journey has unfolded alongside a professional background in public relations and service-oriented work—a career that profoundly shaped how she reads people, stories, and the subtle shifts in human connection.
Niko Alexander has always gravitated towards the arts. But it took him a long time to fully accept himself as an artist. A lot of insecurity and doubt had to be overcome before he felt his art was not only worth sharing, but worth devoting his entire being to. The summer before Niko went away to college is where everything clicked, his passion for art and interest in his subject matter finally merged and he was proud of what he was painting like never before. Niko studied painting at the College of Creative Studies within UCSB. There he began to refine his talent and learn about what it meant to make a great painting, studying the great artists that came before him and trying to mold himself in their likeness.
Laura Wasserman is a fiber artist and narrative weaver based in Alameda, CA, whose bold, abstract weavings and notably feminist compositions explore the power of fiber to both comfort and evoke. Her mixed media pieces are maximalist in nature, use explosive color, experiment with found and recycled materials, and incorporate her own small-batch handspun yarns. Personal narratives highlighted in her work include loss and healing, motherhood, the female experience, disability visibility, and meditations on family history. With formal degrees in creative writing, her weavings are mostly self-taught explorations.
Pam Jue is a Berkeley based artist whose work explores the thoughts and emotions that manifest in the body as we grapple with impermanence, uncertainty, and acceptance. She was inspired to create this body of work as a way to sit with the many emotions that arose from the COVID pandemic. From this process, her intricate, abstract technique started to emerge when she started to listen to her internal state to help guide her drawings.
Derick Davies (he/him) is an 18 year old African American Visual Artist from Oakland, California. Graduating this summer, Derick attends Oakland School for the Arts, where he expands his skills and artistic voice. Derick is a painter and his work focuses on self reflection and stories. In the fall he will be attending California College of the Arts on a full scholarship. He wants to become a known painter from the bay and will continue to work towards his dreams and goals.
Trisha Mah is a Chinese-Japanese American artist born and raised in the East Bay whose work as a collagist is a reflection of their identities, emotions, and dreams.
Drawing from their work as a youth worker and lifelong learner, Trisha sees creativity as a transformative tool—one that weaves through living, loving, laughing, and healing. The artist strives to create art that not only reflects my own journey but also affirms the creative potential within all of us.
Cameron Redd is a studio artist with an Associate’s degree in Ceramics from Laney College and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Redd has built a body of work surrounding his love of nature and science on the wheel and through hand-built sculpture. In 2024, Redd resumed living in Oakland and working at Laney College’s Art Department.
Michela Colognese is a textile and fiber artist inspired by nature, movement, and mindfulness. Her work is experimental and intuitive, blending softness and intention to create pieces that invite connection and presence
Noah Johnson is an artist new to Berkeley, working with pen and watercolor, and nudging us to ponder the magnificence of our surroundings. Their work reflects on relationships to land and celebrates wonder. He creates imagined landscapes of the past, present, and future, rich in detail, color, and playful perspectives to re-elicit awe. Noah aspires to transform awareness of landscape change into intentional relationships with land, so we may blossom into uncertain futures.
Chloe Wanaselja (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring how to build relationship with land on which they are a guest. Through sitting with trees, painting with the rain, and drawing on bark she seeks to situate herself within her ecology, embodying alternatives to capitalist hierarchy.
Roland Martin (he/they) is a painter and mixed media artist who has exhibited artwork around the Bay Area including Worth Ryder Art Gallery, the De Young Museum and the San Francisco Art Fair. Roland has a BA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an assistant at Micki Meng Gallery. They are excited to participate in East Bay Open Studios.
Shreya Shankar’s practice is where ancestral forms and futurisms meet across the mediums of design, place-keeping, production, policy, myth-making and meaning-making.
Their work engages collective memory and the radical imagination, seamlessly prototyping across diverse mediums and forms to create functional ritual sculptural art objects, sets, and visual art.
Ngoc Nguyen is a gay Vietnamese American multidisciplinary artist based in Alameda. Working primarily in painting, he blends representation and abstraction through portraiture and figurative imagery to explore themes of identity, intimacy, and belonging. His practice centers on uplifting LGBTIQ AAPI experiences and creating spaces of visibility and empathy for marginalized voices. Through his work, Ngoc seeks to foster healing and connection by reclaiming narratives that celebrate community and the complexity of human experience.
Nadir Wright is a visual artist based in Oakland, California, whose acrylic and mixed media work explores color, whimsy, emotion, and alternate realities. Their layered compositions feature human-like characters and fantastical landscapes that challenge perceptions and invite imaginative freedom. Nadir’s process is rooted in sketching and intuition, often shaped by time spent near Bay Area waters with his partner and dog.
Ren Chanel Patrick is a Bay Area-based multidisciplinary artist working primarily in fiber and installation. Originally trained in visual storytelling through comics and photography, their work weaves together narrative, historical research, and textile traditions. Rooted in a positive obsession, their current work employs embroidery as a form of painterly expression to question the boundaries between art and craft, as well as the relationship between the fragmented and the whole.
Sheilby Macena is a Haitian-American photographer and visual storyteller based in Oakland, California. Rooted in the traditions of her family’s photo albums and the contrast between her upbringing in the United States and her family’s life in Haiti, her practice explores themes of memory, identity, and belonging. Through photography—particularly portraiture—she seeks to preserve, reimagine, and reclaim narratives within the Black diaspora.
Laurie Caird is an Oakland-based artist and designer. Her work explores our relationship to time, celebrating the Japanese concept of ichigo ichie – cherishing the present moment, as it will never be replicated – as well as themes of connection to nature, humanity, and joy through food. Caird enjoys collaborating with the materials she uses, responding to the behaviors of watercolor and paper in a way that amplifies their unique characteristics.
Guillermo Navarrete Davis is a self-taught painter born and raised in Santiago de Chile, and has lived in the Bay Area since 1998. Navarrete uses an ancient technique of mixing colors by painting the oils over wet layers on the canvas. As an indigenous Latino who has always been drawn to marginalized peoples, his work focuses on their often overlooked stories. The realism, the purity, and the sincerity of the sentiment expressed in the faces of his subjects are his source of inspiration. Navarrete’s paintings reflect life’s realities; suffering, love, struggle, joy, loneliness, tenderness and vulnerability.