Stephanie J. Williams: Things That Don’t Have Names

Interdisciplinary visual artist Stephanie J. Williams will tell us about her artistic practice, which bridges sculpture and animation. Her work navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand contemporary social coding.

This event is presented by UMBC’s Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA).

Stephanie J. Williams is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work has been exhibited in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show image of Stephanie J. Williamsexhibitions, at the Walters Art Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Lawrence University, and the Delaware Contemporary. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Williams College, the Nicholson Project, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and ACRE. Recent animated works have screened at Slamdance (2024), Ann Arbor Film Festival (2024), the New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival (2023, Jury Citation – 2022), the Atlanta Film Festival (2023, 2024) and Outfest LA LGBTQIA+ Film Festival (2023). She has received grants from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund at Johns Hopkins University and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. She received an MFA in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design under a Presidential Scholarship and is currently full time faculty in Animation at Maryland Institute College of Art.

Admission is free. A reception will follow the talk.

This event is open for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.

Image: Stephanie J. Williams, The Expectation of the Observed, displayed as part of the I’ll Meet You There exhibition, Hamiltonian Artists and The Nicholson Project, 2026.