About — Staff & Faculty

Visual Art Institute's creative team of professionals are devoted to providing the youth of the Salt Lake area with the most remarkable creative art program possible. Our faculty and staff are made up of working artists from the community. One of VAI's goals is to connect our students with highly qualified artists from a broad range of creative disciplines and backgrounds.

Bruce is a practicing artist with an emphasis in mixed media painting. He has received a BFA in Drawing/Printmaking and an MFA in Drawing/Painting from Brigham Young University. He has two additional years of post-baccalaureate study in Mixed-media Printmaking and Printing from California State University Long Beach. He has taught at the university level for 20 years, for the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, and Utah Valley University. He was introduced to the Visual Art Institute in 1995 and was added to the faculty for the 1995-1996 school year. In 1998 Bruce was selected to be the new Executive Director of VAI. He is committed to the mission of VAI and believes that introduction to a strong art curriculum at an early age is beneficial to children. He challenges his students to let their artwork be a positive reflection of their life.

Laura has been personally involved with the Visual Art Institute for 15 years. After starting out as a volunteer mom with a daughter attending classes, she continued as an employee attending to the office needs. As the school has grown, she is now the Community Relations Officer. She teaches elementary age children and believes that all children are created with great imaginations that can become stagnant if not allowed to constantly explore. She encourages children to stretch beyond their familiar techniques and find new ways to express themselves with art. She has studied art at Utah State and University of Utah. Her inspiration for art started in high school as she had the great Utah artist Don Olsen as a mentor that helped her form and give identity to her ideas of art and color theory.

Kate is a painter and installation artist. Her work explores people and their interaction with collection, accumulation and memory. Most of her subject matter is friends and family and the objects they surround themselves with. Kate was a student at VAI from the time she was 13 until she graduated. She received her BFA from Brigham Young University and her MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI. She has taught at Wayne State University, Harrisburg Area Community College and VAI.

A longtime student of the human figure, Una attended the New York Academy of Art’s Graduate School of Figurative Art where she earned her MFA, and also studied at the National College of Art & Design in Ireland and the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. Una finds the figure an appropriate and exciting tool to use in understanding issues common to all aspects of drawing and painting, and is especially fascinated in her own drawing and painting by the endless possibilities and collaboration inherent in portraiture. She has taught at VAI since Fall 2008, at Utah State University, at Appalachian State University and Caldwell Community College in North Carolina, and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She earned her BA in Studio Art from Smith College.

Lenka is a painter who explores the differences and similarities between cultures, organisms, and the struggles for place and survival. She was raised in Europe in the Czech Republic and attended a school very much like the Visual Art Institute. She has a BFA in Painting from the University of Utah, has participated in an Master of Fine Art residency Program at the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Maine College of Art. She has taught at the University of Utah, Weber State University, and Westminster College. She has taught at VAI since 1995 and is an incredible asset to the program. She helps her students to feel important and capable of incredible things.

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Through this school I have been able to push my limits and realize there is a lot to learn in the world of art and much more to appreciate than what is placed in front of me