Career Outcomes
Your Success Story is Waiting… The program in studio art serves as a foundation for a wide range of careers that value visual art, creativity, and visual communication. An important goal of the Department of Art is to help students become lifelong interpreters of the rich visual environment in our culture as well as proponents of the creative approach in their selected professions.
Alumni Stories
Alexis Jackson, BA‘15
“My roles have required me to communicate visually with millions of people every day, and my education at Vanderbilt , particularly in the art department, laid the foundation for me to be successful in my career today.”
In 2015, I graduated from Vanderbilt University with majors in studio art and creative writing. After receiving the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award, I moved to New York City where I participated in the New York Arts Practicum, a summer arts institute where participants experientially learn to bridge their lives as art students into lives as artists in the world. My art practice focused on social justice and racial inequality, which led me to travel to South Africa to research this from a global perspective.
I currently work in social media and have worked for global and national brands including AOL, The Nielsen Corporation, People Magazine, Essence Magazine, and Stitch Fix. My roles have required me to communicate visually with millions of people every day, and my education at Vanderbilt, particularly in the Art department, laid the foundation for me to be successful in my career today.
Lauren Richman, BA’11
“My studio art minor at VU was instrumental to the ways in which I think about photography’s materiality. I believe it’s essential for art historians/critics/curators to have some experience making.”
Lauren Richman graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in art history and French and a minor in studio art. After her time at Vanderbilt, Lauren received a master’s degree in art history from Southern Methodist University in 2013, followed by a Ph.D. in art history from SMU in 2019.
While on campus, Lauren worked as a curatorial research assistant within the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. After graduation, in addition to pursuing her advanced degrees she worked as a curatorial research assistant at The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.
In 2019, Lauren accepted a position as the assistant curator of photography with the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Liz Clayton Scofield, BA’10
“The Vanderbilt Department of Art was the beginning of my pursuit of a sustainable creative life, and I am grateful to experience the unfolding of this journey thus far.”
I graduated in 2010 with an interdisciplinary major and a minor in studio art. I was (and still am) interested in too many things, and am stubborn–I resist conventional structures. An interdisciplinary major was a great opportunity for me to explore a breadth of ideas and have agency in my scholarship. In my minor, I used these ideas as a foundation for creative work.
Showing a cohesive body of work in the Hamblet Exhibition was a highlight of my experience. I worked with the Curb Center, which continues to influence my pedagogy, and I lived in McGill Hall, a community rooted in creative thinking and making.
After Vanderbilt, I earned an MFA in digital art from Indiana University, Bloomington, where I studied video, performance, interactive media, and sculpture. I continue to perform, exhibit multimedia work, publish essays and poems, curate, collaborate, and teach. I joined the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to study poetry in the fall of 2021. My education at Vanderbilt fostered critical and independent thinking, endless curiosity, and confidence in my creative practice. Somehow at Vanderbilt, I managed to exist at the in-betweens; I continue to do so and keep learning about the advantages and challenges in the liminality.