2026 Call for Entries

Design Austin is excited to announce an Open Call for WaterWork, a projection-mapped art and light show set to transform the historic Seaholm Intake Building along Lady Bird Lake. This event celebrates and showcases the vibrant culture and unique spirit of Austin, Texas, through a stunning visual experience that brings together the creative talents of local artists, designers, and innovators. Design Austin is seeking 10-15 visual artists or creative teams to participate in the third iteration of WaterWork. We are looking for short (2 min) original video art pieces that will be combined into a one-of-a-kind show after sunset on September 25 and 26. Artwork should consider the theme, and be created by artists local to Austin or with a connection to Austin. Please find more info in the Design Brief, and express interest by filling out this form before April 26, 11:59pm DEADLINE EXTENDED! Sunday, May 3, 11:59pm

WaterWork 2025

On September 26-27, 2025, the iconic façade of the historic Seaholm Intake Facility transformed into a vibrant canvas of art, light, and motion. WaterWork is a unique, immersive art experience co-created by The Trail Conservancy and Design Austin, that celebrates the dynamic relationship between Austin’s urban landscape and its cherished natural environment.

Check us out on Studio 512 and We Are Austin!

2025 PROGRAM CATALOG (Viewing Order) 

Sizzle Reel

2025 Artists

Jasna Boudard

Jasna Boudard

https://jasna-boudard.com

Jasna Boudard is a French-Bangladeshi new media artist based in Austin, Texas. She creates immersive visual experiences using photography, video, and projection to explore movement, light, and connection. Raised across three continents, her multicultural background deeply informs her creative work and her philosophy of unity in diversity. Jasna holds an MFA and has exhibited internationally. She was the first Artist in Residence at the Thinkery Museum and is the co-founder of MetaCaustics, a collaborative duo specializing in new media installations. She is also the founder of Travel Weddings, a photo and video brand serving multicultural couples around the world.

Luna Davis

Luna Davis

https://www.lunadavis.com/

Luna Davis (b. 1999, Austin, Texas) currently lives and works in Austin, TX primarily in mixed media ranging from acrylic sheeting, CRT TVs, video, stain glass, and sculpture. Her work encapsulates ideas of digital identity and traumas found in domestic spaces ranging from personal and universal experiences. Davis graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Studio Art in 2022. Recent projects include Inventory-ing, 2024, at the Contracommons Group in Bee Cave, TX, and GUTS+ 2024, as a part of an artist residency with the Museum of Human Achievement, in Austin, Texas. Davis has received grants from Austin Community College, including the Steve Kramer Scholarship in 2019, and has co-curated Facade, at the Visual Arts Center, and Portal Fishing, with Favored Channels in 2023.

Tova Katzman

Tova Katzman

https://www.tovakatzman.com/

Tova Katzman is a photo and video artist and educator. Using documentary and experimental approaches, her work stems from an interest in storytelling, the poetics of human geography and embodied research around bodies of water. In 2017, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to pursue an art and research project about the intersection of daily life and the Panama Canal. She remained based in Panama for six years working as a freelance photographer and community project facilitator, as well as the co-founder of La Junta, a collective for women photographers working in Panama. Her work has been shown internationally and she has participated in exhibitions and panels, including with Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, MassArt, Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Panama, TEOR/ética in Costa Rica, and the 46th National Artist’s Salon of Colombia. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin and a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art.

Leslie Kell

Leslie Kell

https://lesliekell.com/

Leslie Kell is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work explores the dynamic relationship between urban spaces and the natural world. Utilizing an original technique that synthesizes design, photography, and video, Kell creates has created a distinctive body of work that transcends conventional boundaries.

Her recent participation in the Apropos exhibit at the UMLAUF Sculpture Garden + Museum showcased a seven-minute cinemagraph that paid homage to Charles Umlauf’s legacy. This piece integrated her photographs and videos into the patterns of her drawings, celebrating Umlauf’s figurative sculptures within the tranquil surroundings of the sculpture garden.

Kell's cinemagraphs have also been featured on digital displays at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, where her moving art, based on photographic compositions remastered with video overlays, has captivated travelers since 2019.

Based in Austin, Texas, Kell actively contributes to the regional arts community. She serves on the boards of two nonprofit arts, all while maintaining an active schedule of her own shows. Her work continues to explore the intersections of memory, place, and perception through a digitally layered lens.

Faiza Kracheni

Faiza Kracheni

https://austinfilmschool.org/blog/meet-the-directors-faiza-kracheni

Faiza Kracheni (she/her) is a multidisciplinary media artist, musician, and cultural worker from East Austin, Texas. Self-taught and shaped by punk and DIY ethos, her work resists conventional definitions of artistic legitimacy and value. Working across film, sound, installation, and music, Faiza explores the complexities of memory, belonging, perception, and the human condition—often using art as a tool for resistance and reclamation.

She spent much of her twenties touring internationally with her bands, performing in underground venues and DIY spaces across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and beyond. It was during this time that she began making experimental films—developing an intuitive, process-based approach rooted in the immediacy of analog media and the collaborative spirit of DIY communities. That ethos continues to guide her work today.

Faiza actively challenges the notion that “more” equates to “better,” especially within an arts landscape where scarcity often reflects systemic inequity—not a lack of talent or drive. As an artist of color raised in a historically working-class community, her work embraces the resourcefulness born of necessity and finds meaning in limitation, improvisation, and self-determination.

She is currently developing a new installation titled I AM PRETENDING, which interrogates the word “prestigious” and the systems that determine who gets to make art—and what art is deemed worthy. Much of her work emerges from the lens of a “bad kid” artist: someone who exists outside institutional approval but remains deeply committed to the radical act of making.

Faiza has directed music videos for artists including Young Guv (Toronto), Vosh (Washington, D.C.), Mujeres Podridas (Austin), Holy Wire (Austin), Don’t Get Lemon (Houston), and Single Lash (Austin)—bringing her textured, emotionally resonant visual language to the world of alternative and underground music. She is also one-half of the electronic duo FLESH OF MORNING, where she fuses atmospheric soundscapes in both recorded work and live performance.

In addition to her artistic practice, Faiza serves as Executive Director of Motion Media Arts Center (home to Austin School of Film and Austin Cinemaker Space), where she has secured millions in funding to expand access to creative resources and build sustainable, equity-centered programs. She represents District 9 as a City of Austin Arts Commissioner and sits on the UNESCO Media Arts Steering Committee, championing community access, creative infrastructure, and cultural visibility for future generations.

Yuliya Lanina

Yuliya Lanina

https://www.yuliyalanina.com/

Yuliya Lanina is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges traditional media with new technologies.

Lanina has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH, 2013), MuseumsQuartier Wien (Vienna, Austria, 2021), Rabotaroom (Milan, Italy, 2023), Seoul Art Museum (Seoul, Korea, 2006), Patrick Heide Gallery (London, UK, 2011), SIGGRAPH Asia (Yokohama, Japan, 2009), Beijing Biennial (Beijing, China, 2009), Sara Nightingale Gallery (Sag Harbor, NY, 2024), Elizabet Ney Museum (Austin, TX, 2023), SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX, 2019), State Museum of Modern Art (Moscow, Russia, 2012). Her 2022 solo show at Xposed gallery on New York’s High Line was viewed by more than 1,000 people per day over four weeks.

Lanina performances have been featured in OUTSider Festival (Austin, TX 2021), Teatro Santa Ana (San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, 2019), Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX, 2019), Creative Tech Week (NYC, 2019), SEAMUS National Conference (Eugene, OH, 2018), and Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX, 2016).

The screening venues for her animations include Austrian Film Museum (Vienna, Austria, 2022), Project Arts Centre (Lithuania, 2019), Le Carreau du Temple (Paris, France, 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art (North Miami, FL, 2012), El Museo Cultural, (Santa Fe, NM, 2010), Museum Ludwig (Germany, 2007), and Global Art & Moving Images Awards, Strata Foundation, Pinsiö, Finland (2013). Lanina’s most recent animation Gefilte Fish won Best International Short Film at Tamuz Shomron Film Festival (2024) and an Honorable Mention at the Female Eye Film Festival (Toronto, Canada 2023).

Lanina’s professional honors include fellowships and scholarships from Artpace International Art Residency (San Antonio, 2023), Fulbright (Vienna, Austria, 2020), The Puffin Foundation (NJ, 2019), Yaddo (2011, 2022), Marble House Project (Vermont, 2017), Headlands Art Center (CA, 2013), and CORE Cultural Funding Program (Austin, TX, 2014-2022).

Recent speaking engagements include panel discussion on intergenerational trauma in collaboration with the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna, Austria, 2022), United Nations Human Rights Office (2021), The University of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria, 2021), GIFF (San Miguel De Allende, Mexico, 2022), SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX, 2019), Texas State University (San Marcos, TX 2024), and Pomona College (Claremont, CA, 2023).

Lanina’s work was featured on the cover of Austin Chronicle (2023) and reviewed in Feminist Studies (2024), The Forward (2022), Glasstire (2020), Houston Press (2016), Australian Art Review (2010), Brooklyn Rail (2006), Art ReView (2001), Bloomberg News (2007), Beijing Today (2006) and other publications. Yuliya was listed among the “top 10 artists in NYC now” by Revolt Magazine and received an honorable citation from the New York State Assembly in 2013.

Lanina’s collaborative projects, for which she created visuals to be displayed alongside performances by dancers or musicians, have been presented at Kronos Quartet’s Festival (2021), San Diego Museum of Art (CA, 2018), National Museum the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania (Lithuania, 2015), Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Series, National Sawdust (Brooklyn, NY, 2015) and the New Museum Festival (NY, 2010). Her collaborators included performers like Kronos Quartet and violinist Johnny Gandelsman; composers Nina C. Young, José Martínez, Vladimir Rannev, Russell Pinkston, Sam Lipman and Yevgeniy Sharlat; choreographers Caron Eule and Andrea Ariel. Lanina's latest collaboration, the interactive ballet MoonFall, for which she created projection design was nominated for a B. Iden Payne Award for Outstanding Media Design (2024).

Lanina holds an MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY Purchase College. She is currently Assistant Professor of Practice at the Department of Arts and Entertainment Technologies at The University of Texas at Austin.

Emily Lee

Emily Lee

https://leeemily.com/

Emily Lee is an artist, writer, and community organizer from the Texas Gulf Coast. Working across a wide range of media, including sculpture, painting, video, photography, and text, Lee explores the limitations of language and vision.

Emily Lee has exhibited in Texas and New York, including the Fort Worth Modern, Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Co-Lab Projects, and 5-50 Gallery. She has spoken on panels at The Contemporary (Austin), Gutterblood on the Wall, and for undergraduate courses at The University of Texas at Austin, Texas State, and Grand Valley State University. She is the founder of a neighborhood DIY space called All the Sudden (ATS), supporting visual artists, musicians, poets, freelance creative vendors, and many others.

Paloma Mayorga

Paloma Mayorga

https://www.palomamayorga.com/

Paloma Mayorga is an interdisciplinary botanical artist working across photography, video, performance, installation, painting, and printmaking. Often using her own body as medium, Mayorga explores movement, place, and cultural identity in relation to the landscape and ancestral uses of plants. Her work draws on ecological stories, sensory experiences, and the memory held in landscapes to reflect how reconnecting with plants can help us become more attentive and responsible stewards of the land.

Mayorga earned a BA in Painting from the Sarofim School of Fine Arts at Southwestern University, and has gone on to exhibit her work across Texas and nationally. Most recently, her work was exhibited as part of the 2024 Texas Biennial in Houston, TX, ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI, Artpace in San Antonio, TX, The Contemporary Austin, and Big Medium in Austin, TX. Mayorga has also received the Emerging Artist Award from the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, Best Visual Artist by the Austin Chronicle Reader’s Poll, and Southwestern University’s 18 Under 40 Award. Currently, she acts as Curator for Coronado printstudio and serves on the Board of Directors for DORF and PrintAustin.

Katy McCarthy

Katy McCarthy

https://katymccarthy.com/

Katy McCarthy (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker and educator based in Austin, Texas. She holds a BFA from UC Santa Barbara and an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Arts program at Hunter College in New York. Her short films weave narratives that tell human stories backgrounded by social and environmental themes and have been screened at the Dallas International Film Festival’s Short Film Fest, Cindependent Film Festival, The Every Woman Biennial Film Festival, CUNY Film Festival, and NurtureART’s Single Channel: Video Art Festival. Her video works have been included in group shows at Tiger Strike Asteroid Gallery Los Angeles, Flux Factory, and the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Museum among other venues. She has been an artist-in-residence at Lighthouse Works, LMCC Governors Island, SOHO20 Residency Lab, Grin City and The Wassaic Project. In 2018 Katy was the inaugural and sole recipient of the St. Elmo Fellowship at UT Austin. In 2021 she received the Austin Film Society short film grant for her short film “The Violinist.” She is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

R. Eric McMaster

R. Eric McMaster

http://rericmcmaster.com/

R. Eric McMaster’s practice involves video, sound, performance, installation, and sculpture exploring themes of separation, coalescence, and site. Experiences are jolted in some way, be it through environment or situation, with works reframing the familiar to suspend our material or cultural assumptions.

R. Eric McMaster is an Austin-based artist whose works have exhibited at The Blanton Museum of Art, The Contemporary Austin, The Blaffer Museum, Hiroshima MOCA, The Contemporary (San Antonio), Locust Projects, Vox Populi, Antenna Gallery (New Orleans), and the Lawndale Art Center, among others. He is the recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Art Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and numerous residencies.

Britt Moseley

Britt Moseley

https://brittmoseley.com/

Britt Wilder Moseley is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Denver, CO., and is currently based in Austin, TX. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in 2012 and his MFA from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has been shown at the VAC (TX), Shedshows (TX), Creek Show (TX), Mass Gallery (TX), Folly Tree Arboretum (NY), Hammer Museum (CA), St. Ann’s Warehouse (NY), Dixon Place (NYC), LaMama ETC (NYC), Mattress Factory (PA), Special Special (NYC), and the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (NY), among other venues. He has received grants from the New York City Arts Corps. (NY) and Wavefarm (NY), and was an artist in residence at the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred College (NY) and the St. Ann’s Warehouse (NY).

Phoebe Shuman-Goodier

Phoebe Shuman-Goodier

https://www.phoebeshumangoodier.com/

Phoebe is an interdisciplinary artist from Rhode Island. She holds a BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she received the John A. Chironna Scholarship and the Paul Krot Memorial Scholarship for excellence in photography. Her project Bad Dogs won the 2024 Film Photo Student Award sponsored by Kodak and has been featured by Fotofilmic, Musée Magazine, and F-Stop Magazine. Phoebe was one of Review Santa Fe’s 100 featured photographers at Center in 2024. She recently received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was the 2023-2025 recipient of the Russell Lee Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Photography and the 2023-2025 William and Bettye Nowlin Endowed Presidential Fellow. Phoebe explores accumulation, waste, and debris from the perspectives of art, psychology, and American consumerism. Her practice involves serious play: transfiguring trash, negotiating function, and making magic from the everyday.

Topher Sipes

Topher Sipes

https://tophersipes.com/

Topher Sipes is an Austin-based multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and immersive 3D designer.
He works at the intersection of digital media, ecology, and embodiment, creating technodelic experiences through projection mapping, virtual reality performance, and public art. His work explores flow states, fluid dynamics, dream symbolism, and eco-geology. Clients include Google and the Houston Symphony, with work featured at Creek Show, in Las Vegas, and at festivals and conferences nationwide. With a foundation in drawing and environmental interpretation, Topher co-founded MetaCaustics with Jasna Boudard to craft light-based environments that reconnect audiences to nature, presence, and transformation.

Tiffany Smith

Tiffany Smith

https://tiffanyksmith.com/

Smith is a media artist and educator whose work explores how technology shapes memory and perception. Through video, installation, and interactive media, she constructs immersive environments where the real and the simulated collapse into one another. Her practice investigates hyperreality, fantasy, and entropy to reimagine how we navigate technologically mediated worlds.

Smith’s work has been exhibited across the United States and was recently included in exhibitions at Co-Lab Projects, Ivester Contemporary, Easyside, The Museum of Human Achievement, The Wrong Biennale, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, and The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, CA.

In 2024, Smith curated "New Suns"—an interactive multimedia exhibition of 13 Austin artists exploring speculative fiction and worldbuilding—at Goodluckhavefun, and co-curated the summer group show "Infinite Scroll" at Ivester Contemporary. She is a regular contributor to Concept Animals, an artist-run publication supporting contemporary art dialogue in Austin, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ana Treviño

Ana Treviño

https://www.anatrevino.net/

Ana Treviño is a visual artist and educator living and working in Austin, TX. Her practice deviates from the rules of filmmaking that are informed by cultural histories. She uses a feminist lens to think about the concept of borders, whether visible, invisible, or blurred. Her connection to the U.S./Mexico border deeply influences her work and the stories with which she engages. Through video installation and performance, she explores how she can reclaim subjugated narratives. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the University of Florida and a BS in Television and Film Production from Florida International University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Instruction in Studio Art at Texas State University.

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