MCAD's Creative Leaders Creative Leadership unleashes the power of all art and design practitioners to change society by imagining what’s possible through new ideas, creative expression, experimentation, collaboration, and action. Image Image Laura Fulk ’07 Laura Fulk is an advocate for sustainability and inclusiveness in fashion, both as a technical designer at Target and as an independent fashion designer. Her volunteer work with the blind community influenced her creative practice as she learned about the ways blindness can influence an individual’s approach to and experience with clothing. “With any kind of volunteering, you kind of end up getting more out of it than you put in. I feel like everyone should be doing that, or using what they know to make change, to do good.” Laura is currently working on a project to develop apparel that functions comfortably with adaptive equipment, such as wheelchairs. laurafulk.com Roshan Ganu ’20, MFA Roshan Ganu is a comic artist and mixed media storyteller who investigates themes of identity, immigration, and isolation. She regularly engages the Minneapolis community with public art projects, including Aapli Library, a zine library that prioritizes personal narratives, as well as the Banyan Tree Project, an ongoing storytelling and listening project. With her work in miniatures, Roshan encourages the viewer to imagine and associate what they see with how they feel; an attempt to find answers to the human condition in a fast-paced, globalized world. She is currently working on a multimedia composition for the Minnesota Opera, titled Who are you? roshanganu.com Image Piotr Szyhalski, Professor Polish-born, US-based multimedia artist Piotr Szyhalski’s works move between installation, performance, moving image, painting, photography, drawing, sound, and design to explore issues related to human ecology and extreme historical phenomena. Szyhalski’s ongoing Labor Camp project (1998–) celebrates the beauty and dignity of labor through visual art, music, posters, printed ephemera, performance, and public actions. In March 2020, he embarked on a daily drawing practice, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic as it unfolded in real time. What began as a way for the artist to share observations of life in lockdown and the pain caused by the pandemic, soon became an exercise in chronicling his thoughts and feelings, reconciling them with the changes being wrought in the world. @laborcamp Amit Tishler ’12, MFA Animator Amit Tishler spent his early career writing, animating, and producing for shows on Cartoon Network, HBO, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon, and directed a variety of projects for clients such as Pfizer and Lifeguard Games. In 2017, he co-founded Pop Base, a gamified platform that teaches kids how to maintain a healthy lifestyle. PopBase was recently acquired by Pure Imagination Studios, leading to Amit’s current role as a creative director in the company’s interactive entertainment division. amittishler.com Andres Guzman ’09 In the summer of 2020, illustrator Andres Guzman created a heartfelt illustration of George Floyd, an attempt to restore much-needed humanity to the suddenly famous figure. Andres then shared a transparent file of the drawing on social media, making it available to download for anyone who wanted to use it—which spread across the globe as far as Berlin, Nairobi, and Syria. “People have been remixing the image, and appropriating it in their own way, which has taken on its own life,” Andres says. “For me, visuals are my communication language, and my goal is always to triangulate messages—to try and be a megaphone for something.” @andresitoguzman Julie Buffalohead ’95 Julia Buffalohead is a painter whose work explores the Indian cultural experience through personal metaphor and narrative, drawing from traditional stories while contextualizing motifs of cultural identity. Her paintings juxtapose evolving representations of animal spirit, deer, and coyote forms—who are caught within the human condition, often tragic and comedic—and speak to issues of commercialization of Native culture. juliebuffalohead.com