Main Menu

Galleries & Exhibitions

Home Youth Activist Art Archive Meet the YAAA Team Members

Meet the YAAA Team Members


YAAA logo on yellow

Who We Are

The creators of this archive are a team of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff from the University of Utah who are committed to creating, exhibiting, archiving, and/or researching youth-created activist art.

Beth Krensky, Ph.D.

Beth Krensky is an artist, activist and educator.  She is a professor of art education and the Area Head of Art Teaching at the University of Utah. She received her B.F.A. from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible.

She is also a scholar of youth-created art and social change. She holds an M.Ed. from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in Educational Foundations from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her writing addresses community-based art education, youth activist art, and art for social change.

Danielle Waters

Danielle Waters is an artist, photographer, and teacher in Salt Lake City, Utah. She received a Bachelor of Art in Photography from Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts Teaching - Fine Arts degree from the University of Utah. The focus of her graduate studies is teaching photography as a tool for well-being and social change. Danielle is passionate about the connection of mindfulness and creativity, and her artistic work explores the practice of pausing to observe everyday moments.

Nathan Milch

Nathan Milch is an artist and student at the University of Utah.  He is currently working towards his BFA in Art Teaching with an emphasis on drawing and painting.  Once graduated, he plans on creating a classroom environment that combines a love for the arts with a commitment to justice and liberation.  Nathan hopes to open the doors for young artists through deconstructing and decolonizing the ways that the arts have been taught and showing them how creating art can be a radical act in itself.

Sydney Porter Williams

Sydney Porter Williams is a Salt Lake City-based teaching artist. She graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in Art Teaching and works with various communities creating activist artwork. She also has an art practice of her own where she makes personal activist artwork and exhibits her work in shows in Utah. Her artwork explores themes of feminism, class inequality, racial justice, and animal rights through performances, ceramics, and painting.

Kimberly Pack

Kimberly Pack is an intermedia artivist and educator. She was raised in Appalachia and received her BA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an instructor and MFA Candidate in the Community-Based Art Education Program at the University of Utah. Pack’s artwork has appeared in publications such as UC Berkeley’s English Journal The Folio and UC Davis’ Open Ceilings Literary Magazine. Her work is featured in Monument to Extraction as part of the global project Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. She has exhibited in the San Francisco East Bay Area and most recently at the University of Utah’s Gittins Gallery. Her conceptual art practice addresses intersectional oppressions, the anxiety of subsistence living, and the illusion of prosperity doctrine. Pack performs acts of resistance and constructs forms of empowerment to shift consciousness and achieve liberation.

Amelia Walchli

Amelia Walchli is the Visual Resource Curator for the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Utah. She earned her BA in Arts & Humanities with a concentration in Photography from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Graduate studies at the Salt Institute had her photographing stories on tall boats off the coast of Maine. After a gap year traveling, she was a photographer and tech at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Since moving to Utah in 2007, she spends much of her time outside of the University chasing her cat in her vegetable garden and exploring the outdoors on foot and kayak.

Lewis J. Crawford

Lewis J. Crawford is a mixed media photographer/artist and an Associate Professor (Lecturer) at the University of Utah. In 2009, he earned an MFA in photography from the University of Utah and, in 2005, a BFA in photography from Arizona State University, graduating summa cum laude. He is an award-winning artist who has had solo exhibitions throughout the West and has been part of numerous national and international juried and group exhibitions. He defines his research and artwork as Marktitious Imagery—a semiotic examination of the reassignment of marks found in a human-made landscape.