MFA Alumni Career Panel

Join us for an engaging discussion on careers in the arts, featuring distinguished alumni who will share insights into their unique professional journeys. Each speaker will provide a brief overview of their career path, highlighting key experiences, challenges, and successes. This interactive conversation offers students the opportunity to ask questions, gain valuable perspectives, and find inspiration for their own creative careers. Food will be served!

Alumni guest speakers:

David L. Johnson is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Johnson's work focuses on the urban built environment, pinpointing moments of slippage between public and private property. His practice uses photography, video, found and stolen objects, and installation to examine the politics, histories, aesthetics, and forms of use that define contemporary urban space.

Recent solo and dual exhibitions include: Fanta MLN, Milan (2025); The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin; Art Lot, Brooklyn (all 2023); and Theta, New York (2021). Recent group exhibitions include: The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2026); Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (both 2024); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Chicago Architecture Biennial, Chicago; MoMA PS1, New York (all 2023); and Artists Space, New York (2022). Johnson received a BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program and is a part-time faculty member at the Fine Arts MFA program at the Parsons School of Design. Johnson’s work is held in the public collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Columbus Museum of Art.

Christina Kerns is a photographic artist working with alternative printing techniques, net art, and printed matter. She received her BFA in photography with a minor in art history from Pratt Institute and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from the University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited solo and two-person shows at Fjord Gallery, The University of South Carolina, Marshall University, Lyon College, and Hope College where she was the 2024 Borgeson artist-in-residence. Her work has also been exhibited in two-person and group exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Kerns’s work explores the translation from a virtual to a physical space, through photography and material gestures. She is currently an Associate Professor at Lincoln University, PA, and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Aislinn Pentecost-Farren is an artist, curator, and public historian. She uses museum collections, historic buildings, and landscapes as the starting points for sculpture, installation, writing, printed media, and public interventions. Her practice infiltrates existing systems of cultural reproduction to reveal overlooked narratives within established histories. Her current work sites the psychic weight of the crisis in objects from the origins of the catastrophe, and explores hindsight, responsibility, and time. Pentecost-Farren’s art practice draws on over 15 years of experience with museums, parks, heritage groups and public art organizations. As a public historian and curator, she conducts research, writes for public and academic audiences, and leads interdisciplinary projects that convene communities to create collaborative, site-specific interventions at historic places and green spaces. Past partners include the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bartram’s Garden, Roebling Museum, Eastern State Penitentiary, Mural Arts Philadelphia, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, Hidden City Philadelphia, Glen Foerd on the Delaware, Philadelphia Lazaretto, Fairmount Park Conservancy, the Riverfront North Partnership, the Arts Council of Wales, and Elsewhere Museum. She has exhibited work at Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design, The University of Delaware, Western Carolina University, The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Vox Populi, Practice Gallery, and Grizzly Grizzly. Aislinn has an MFA and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives and works in Philadelphia. www.aislinn.info

Emilio Martínez Poppe is an artist concerned with the right to the city and the struggle of public memory. Through a social and research-led practice spanning photography, sculpture, text, and installations, he explores the spatial mechanisms and ideological conditions that reproduce state and capital infrastructures. His current work explores the potentials of cultural organizing within the public sector as in his public art commission “Civic Views” in Philadelphia and his role managing the Public Artists in Residence Program in New York. Recent commissions and exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the City of New York, Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, New York; Mural Arts, Icebox Project Space, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia; Petrine, Paris; and De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam. emiliomartinezpoppe.com

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.