The SciArt Team

Julia Buntaine Hoel
Founding Director

Julia Buntaine Hoel is a conceptual artist interested in the brain, and Founding Executive Director of SciArt Initiative. She holds positions at multiple academic institutions where she teaches and helps generate science-art-technology collaboration and curricula. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and Forbes, among others. Julia is based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Kate Schwarting
​Programs Manager

Kate Schwarting is an Interdisciplinary artist from New York. Her work utilizes traditional and new media techniques to explore the intersection of art and science with an emphasis on time, process and interactivity. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Microbiology Department at Oregon State University as well the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. Kate is based in Long Island, New York.

​Mia Cardenas
Colloquium & Social Media Manager

Mia Cardenas is a pre-university graduate residing in Dubai, UAE. She specializes in communications and is starting up a digital marketing agency targeted towards scientific organizations. She is passionate about the intersection of synthetic biology and the arts - often exploring these topics and writing articles about them in her online blog.

Emily Garfield
​Community Architect

​Emily Garfield is a professional artist based in New York. She works in pen and watercolor to create intricate maps of imaginary places inspired by the visual language of cartography as well as the fractal similarity that cities share with biological patterns such as cells and neurons. She has held workshops at art venues across the country, from the DeCordova and Peabody Essex museums in the Boston area to the Snite Museum of Art of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Mia A Cardenas
​Social Media Intern

Mia Aailiya Cardenas is a 14-year-old aspiring dancer and science nerd. She loves binge-watching youtube channels that focus on science like Scishow, MinuteEarth, Terra Mater, Physics Girl, and NileRed. She’s also fascinated by the science of cosmetics, and researches an endless amount of time on each and every new ingredient she stumbles upon. She helps the Sciart communications team because she loves learning about scientists that do things with a creative flair and wants to explore how other people combine the two things she loves.

Isabel Beavers
​​Guest Curator

Isabel Beavers is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened at New York Hall of Science (2020), CultureHub LA (2020), SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery (2020), MIT Museum (2019), Icebox Project Space (2019), Framingham State University (2018), Humbolt-Universitat zu Berlin Thaer-Institut (2018), Mountain Time Arts (2017), Emerson Media Arts Center (2017) among others. She has held workshops at the Hammer Museum (2020) and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019). She holds an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. She is currently a 2019-20 Resident Artist with CultureHub LA and 2020 SciArt Ambassador with SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery.
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Tarah Rhoda
​Guest Curator

Tarah Rhoda is an artist and educator based in NYC, where she runs the School of Visual Art’s BioArt Lab, a BSL-1 laboratory that provides artists with the tools of biotechnology and fosters creative applications. Through investigations of the body as a miniature world, her art practice yanks at the sense of self in nature’s reflection. Her recent work employs the physical principle of wetness as a metaphor for empathy, social permeability, and eco-connectivity. She received her BFA (2010) and MFA (2020) from SVA and also studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.  Her work has been exhibited in New York, Denver, Detroit, Toronto, Mexico City, Lisbon, Berlin, Eindhoven and featured in National Geographic, the Guardian, and CBSNews.

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Board of Directors

Julia Buntaine Hoel (President)
Kate Schwarting (Secretary)
Jody Rasch (Treasurer)
Marnie Benney
​William Myers

Where you can find us

While SciArt Initiative does not have one designated location, you can find us at our pop-up art shows and associated events. Stay tuned by joining our mailing list below.