People – Spudnik Press

Kacie Lees

Meg Duguid — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 17:00:42 +0000

As an Artist in Residence at Spudnik Press, Kacie Lees will develope a new body of printwork bringing together thermally-responsive inks and high visibility reflective fabrics. Drawn to the visual language of early 20th century pseudosciences — including Rorschach ink blot tests and Thought Forms — her prints take on a nebulous, expressive quality that mirrors the uncertainty and wonder embedded in those early attempts to make the invisible visible. The resulting work is at once intuitive and investigative, evoking the turbulent, shapeshifting conditions of our early universe and inviting viewers to sit with ambiguity, pattern, and the limits of human perception

Kacie Lees is a Chicago-based neon artist, printmaker, and metalworker whose interdisciplinary practice explores nature and history through the phenomenon of light. Grounded in craft and informed by research into optics and chaos theory, she fuses time into matter, using light as both subject and medium to reveal shared atomic origins and ideas of universal interconnection. Fire and electricity are central to her process — from molten glass to radiant plasma, Lees creates sculptures that glow, existing somewhere between natural phenomena and human perception.

Lees teaches neon fabrication nationally at institutions including New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and strengthens the voice of glass craft through public workshops in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Corning, and Seattle. She is the author and illustrator of Neon Primer: A Handbook on Light Construction, a 200-page, hand silk-screened technical manual that serves as a crucial resource to preserve material and fabrication history, define a contemporary visual language for neon, and expand its interdisciplinary reach.

Alex Hohnsen

Meg Duguid — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:33:13 +0000

Alex Hohnsen is a Chicago-based artist, designer, and animator. They earned their undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and recently completed a Master’s in Animation and Motion Design at DePaul University, culminating in a solo exhibition titled Meditation on Creation and Destruction: Anxiety of a Shared Resource.

The show, centered on printmaking, featured large mixed-media murals, linocut prints, collage, monoprints, risograph prints, 3D modeling, and stop-motion animations. Alex continually returns to printmaking as a medium for exploration and expression. They view printmaking as a way to celebrate creativity, and with Riso, they enjoy experimenting while pushing the boundaries between spontaneity and precision.

Karla Santana

Meg Duguid — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:34:26 +0000

At Spudnik Karla Santana will develop Loteria, a new mixed-media body of work exploring identity, heritage, and intergenerational memory through print and textile practices.

Santana works across a wide range of mediums, including Risograph printing, screenprinting, sewing, and crochet, often combining multiple processes within a single piece. Her practice draws from formative childhood experiences, integrating character-based imagery and vibrant visual language as a means of examining memory and identity. Beneath their bright palettes and approachable forms, her works carry layered reflections on belonging, family, inheritance, and cultural pride.

Loteria draws inspiration from the iconic Mexican card game of the same name, using its symbolic structure as a framework for personal storytelling. Santana outlines the complex relationships to culture that can be shaped by periods of embarrassment and shame, as well as deep love, gratitude, and pride. Through this series, she revisits pivotal stages of her life, pairing each with cultural symbols that have followed her family across generations.The project offers a space to reconsider family narratives with appreciation and to arrive at a powerful realization: “wow, de verdad gané la lotería” (“wow, I really won the lottery”).

Throughout her residency, Santana will utilize Spudnik Press’s print facilities to expand the scale and technical complexity of the series. A public event will be announced in conjunction with the residency.

Karla Santana is a first generation Mexican-American designer and illustrator from Chicago. As a self proclaimed “serial-hobbyist,” Karla enjoys exploring a variety of mediums from Risograph printing, screenprinting, sewing, crochet and more. Karla often combines multiple mediums to create whimsical pieces that integrate nostalgic elements of her childhood with silly characters and cutesy styles.

Angela Runge

Meg Duguid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:55:18 +0000

Angela Runge is a User Researcher who has worked on improving IBM Cloud’s customer experience for over a decade. While coming from a product design background with a Fine Arts degree, Angela has had hundreds of conversations with IT Architects, Admins, and Engineers to understand what it’s like to work in enterprise IT and use cloud computing. Angela loves learning about architecture, urban planning, and the development of cities, and is fascinated by the parallels between virtual environments and the built environment. Angela lived in Austin for 9 years but recently moved to Chicago to trade triple digit summers for winters with -20 F wind chill. She served as a Studio Monitor at Spudnik Press prior to joining the board.

Michelle Savoy

Meg Duguid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:47:52 +0000

Michelle is a dynamic and results-driven media executive with more than 20 years of experience building high-growth digital business units. Over the years, she has held responsibility for sales, training and talent development, revenue growth and digital strategy, operations infrastructure development, and working with underserved audiences. Giving back to the community and integrating mindfulness with business has always been central to her focus, inspiring past positions as a college professor and in management for an arts nonprofit. She is a wife and mother to four children and one canine child “Nash,” a large, lovable Bernadoodle with whom she regularly meditates.

Email: boardofdirectors@spudnikpress.org

Emma Chalut

Meg Duguid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:26:06 +0000

Emma Chalut (she/her) is an artist and designer with a practice rooted in letterpress and intaglio printmaking. She began printing in Seattle, where she fell in love with the process and methods of traditional printmedia through several residencies and fellowships, partnering with Editions Studio, Chautauqua Visual Arts, Cornish College of the Arts, and Seattle Print Arts. She continued her practice after moving to Chicago to finish her degree at the School of the Art Institute, and got involved with Spudnik in 2023. She now works as a professional letterpress printer for Double Trip Press, as well as teaching intaglio and letterpress at Spudnik.

Stella Rae Binion

Meg Duguid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:09:40 +0000

Stella Rae Binion (they/she)is a chicago-born poet, filmmaker, printmaker, and bodywork practitioner. Stella Rae first began letterpress printing at Brown University as they earned a bachelor’s degree in Literary Arts and Modern Culture and Media. They were a book arts studio manager at the John Hay Library from 2018-2020, developing a specific love for working on Vandercook presses. As an independent artist, Stella Rae’s poetic, filmic, and book arts practice centers around fugitivity, witnessing as honor work, and the celebration and protection of Black queer people.

Nick D’Alessandro

Meg Duguid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 19:30:41 +0000

Nick D’Alessandro (b. Massachusetts) is a Chicago-based artist focusing on industry and subsequent disposal practices. His work draws from the events of planned obsolescence, collecting the objects of its disregard. In approaching a fiber context, the materiality of the objects studied becomes centered, and honored in light of their exhausted utility. Investigating extraction systems as a catalyst for land destruction, digital colonialism, and material reuse within the textile industries, he asks what the aesthetics of these essential materials offer a throwaway society, and looks for the point at which an object becomes waste.

https://nickdalessandro.net/

Leslie Baum

Meg Duguid — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:42:07 +0000

Abe Lampert

Meg Duguid — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:20:36 +0000

Rodrigo Lara Zendejas

Meg Duguid — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 19:24:33 +0000

Born in Mexico in 1981, Rodrigo Lara Zendejas is the Assistant Professor and Area Head of the Ceramics Department at the University of Notre Dame. He received an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2013 and his BFA, Summa Cum Laude, from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. Lara has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in the state of Mexico; Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago; C.G. Boerner in New York City; Centro cultural Ignacio Ramírez El Nigromante in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas; Test Site Projects in Las Vegas; Governors State University, IL; among others. He has been in such residencies as MASS MoCA, Cerámica Suro, ACRE, Ragdale, and Cross Currents: Cultural Exchange. Lara has two monographs of his work, Máscaras y Artefactos and Memorials. He won the first prize in sculpture at the Premio Nacional de las Artes Visuales in Mexico in 2010. He has received several awards including: Make a Wave Award, 3Arts, Chicago; Individual Artists Program Grants, DCASE, Chicago; Proyectos Especiales FONCA, Mexico City; Emerging Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York City; Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico City; Extraordinary Abilities Visa (O-1), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, 2013 SAIC Fellowship Competition; PECDA Estudios en el extranjero, IQCA, Queretaro, Mexico; International Graduate Scholarship, SAIC; and the John W. Kurtich Travel Scholarship, SAIC, Berlin/Kassel, Germany, among others. Currently, Lara lives in Chicago.

Edra Soto

Meg Duguid — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 19:19:20 +0000

Edra Soto (b. 1971) is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of outdoor project space The Franklin. Soto instigates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of history, and loss of cultural knowledge. Having grown up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago community, the artist has evolved to raise questions through her work about constructed social orders, diasporic identity, and the legacy of colonialism.

Soto has presented recent solo exhibitions at Comfort Station, Chicago, IL (2024); Maine College of Art & Design, ME (2024); Morgan Lehman Gallery, NY (2024); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2023); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2023); Abrons Art Center, New York, NY (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2018); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2017); The Arts Club of Chicago, IL (2017). Her work has been featured in notable group exhibitions including Widening the Lens: Photography, Ecology, and the Contemporary Landscape, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2024); Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People, MSU Broad Art Museum, MI (2024); Entre Horizontes, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2023); no existe un mundo poshuracán, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2022); and Estamos Bien, La Trienal 20/21, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2021).

She has been awarded the Joyce Award; 3Arts Next Level Award; Illinois Arts Council Fellowship; Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award; and US LatinX Art Forum Fellowship; and MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund. Soto has received numerous public commissions, for Public Art Fund at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, NY (2024); Noor Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (2024); Now & There, Central Wharf Park, Boston, MA (2023); the Chicago Architecture Biennial, IL (2023); Terminal 5 at O’Hare International Airport, IL (2023); Chicago Botanic Garden, IL (2022) and Millennium Park in Chicago, IL (2019). Her work is in the collection of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico and Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago.