Every once in a while we have the good fortune of working on a project that we feel truly matters, a project that we’ll still be thinking about years from now. Maybe even something we can imagine telling our grandkids about – surely you’ve had moments like that where something you did in your professional life really mattered?

Michelle Spanyard

It’s actually a series of projects that are all related. It stemmed from a desire to contribute in some small way to healing our community after a horrible tragedy. After the shooting that occurred on January 8, 2011 in Tucson, I had the overwhelming feeling that I needed to create something that could be used to raise funds for Child and Family Resources, in memory of Gabe Zimmerman who was one of the people who tragically lost their life. Read more>>

Sonja Bochart

My most meaningful project has been working for Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, PA. I have worked with this client for over a decade- helping support their mission to foster a greater connection between humans and the natural world and to promote social and ecological well-being. My role as a biophilic designer on a number of their buildings, including Living Building Challenge certified projects – is to help explore design strategies that connect people with the natural world. Read more>>

Jake + Zach Scally

The most meaningful project we’ve worked on is our upcoming debut EP, “KEEP HOPIN’ // KEEP DREAMIN’. This has been an album we’ve been working on for over a year and a half. We’ve had these songs in our hearts, but we are excited to get these new melodies and truths out. Our first single we released from the album is Keep Hopin’ — an epic, sweeping musical landscape that encompasses themes of ambition, dreams, and purpose. We were blown away by the love and support we received from this song. Currently, it sits at over half a million streams world wide. God has been so good to us! We’ve also released a few others such as Defined By You, Right On Time, and YOU. Read more>>

Tricia Rider

The Dapper Playing card set holds a special place in my heart, as it not only became a success but also originated from a simple classroom exercise. During my final year in school, we were tasked with illustrating a single face card from a standard playing card deck. The exercise ignited my passion, and I couldn’t let it end there. Post-graduation, I transformed this concept into a complete set of playing cards featuring hand-drawn illustrations in a vibrant palette. My inspiration drew from the sophistication of 1920’s formal wear, infused with a touch of comedy and my love for cats, resulting in the “Dapper Cats” playing card set. Read more>>

Kahlil Daniel

My third EP, and latest project, “KD III,” has felt like my most meaningful project. I released it this year and it celebrates the ten years that I’ve been independently releasing music since 2013. I knew I wanted this one to be unapologetically R&B. I kept it short and sweet with only three songs but it definitely packs a punch. One of my favorite things to do is perform live, so when making music, I’m constantly thinking about different songs I can add to the gumbo of a live show. I had some uptempo’s but mostly mid-tempos, and was definitely looking to switch it up this time around. So I focused on creating three upbeat songs and am really proud of the outcome. Read more>>

Shuning Huang

The creation of “Thou汝” was a transformative and profoundly inspiring experience for me. As I embarked on this journey shortly after arriving in the United States, I was met with both excitement and trepidation. I was stepping into unfamiliar artistic territory, surrounded by a new set of collaborators and a diverse cultural landscape. The inception of “Thou汝” began with a deep exploration of my own cultural roots, drawing from the rich tapestry of Chinese dance traditions and philosophy. This was followed by a meticulous process of blending these elements with Western dance techniques and contemporary artistic expressions. It was a delicate dance of harmonizing two distinct worlds – East and West. Read more>>

Lindsay Heider Diamond

My work all has meaning to me, from the book cover designs I create for incarcerated authors through AuthorsInside.org and/or independent authors, to the designs such as the one I created for the Charlottesville City Bus Art competition (it won), to my fine art with its explorations of emotion and presence in this human life. I am also working on a series of children’s books, which are probably more accurately for “the inner child” in all of us. Read more>>

Rylee Jensen

I had always wanted to create my own work, yet I was too scared to take the leap and start. With inspiration and encouragement from fellow actors, coaches, and mentors, I finally wrote my first short film: ‘The Yellow Room,’ earlier this year. That experience made me realize that I am capable of creating my own work, and so is everyone else! Read more>>

David Nieker

I just attended a preview of a feature film I’m in called “The Next Big Hit,” which is scheduled to be released later this year. I play a theater owner who rents his venue to the main characters so they can produce a Martial Arts Musical. I have two nice scenes, and director Pat Battistini gave us some freedom to do some wild lines and add our own jokes. In previews, my scenes got some pretty good laughs, so I’m proud of my performance. It was really an amazing pleasure to work with the entire cast and crew, the kind of fun movie-making and great attitudes and efforts you hope will happen every time. Read more>>

Verlon Roberts

It may sound cliche, but every project is meaningful to me. I use myself and a personal connection as my way in when working on a character or writing a story. For example, I recently finished a TV pilot, and it’s about identity at the core. I’m a military retiree, and the day I left active duty, I lost my job, friends, and, most importantly, identity. So, I used this pilot to explore that loss of identity. I decided to wrap it up in a dark comedy about a family each finding their new identity, and I loved every second I spent on it. I am currently working on a spec feature about finding one’s purpose. It’s an action comedy titled Bag of Dicks. Anytime I use my personal life experience and creativity, it is meaningful and something I will always cherish. Read more>>

Nicholas Tabarrok

Our most recently completed film, IRENA’S VOW, just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a meaningful, important film because it’s the true story of one woman’s incredibly bravery and sacrifice during the holocaust. When the Nazi’s invaded Poland, Irena Gut, who was 18 years old at the time, was forced into labor to work as a maid in the house of the highest ranking Nazi officer in the town of Tarnopol. Amazingly, she hid and kept alive 12 Jews in the basement of the house during the entire occupation. She hid, fed and protected 12 people literally and figuratively under the nose of the Nazis. Obviously this put her at great personal risk, but she put the lives of others above her own. Read more>>

Sheila Crider

My most meaningful project is the word I coined, BLACKSTRACTION, and the work I’m doing to make it part of the fine art lexicon. Blackstraction is defined as a way of working in studio that I can trace back to the 1950’s. It refers to the objectification of painting and drawing from two dimensional works into three dimensional works which may be scuptural, ie viewed from all sides or in relief. It considers depth part of the picture plane. Working this way became a focus for artists around the same time as minimalism. It was largely ignored by critics at the time because they believed Black artists’ work inferior to that of their white male counterparts. Read more>>

kHyal !

In my case, it’s been more about changing how I convey my work in the world rather than one specific meaningful project. I learned as a young child to use my creativity to process life, explore my thoughts and emotions, and problem-solve. My long-standing mantra is that “art saves lives.” I certainly feel like it saved mine. I was born with a very different way of looking at things, often resulting in being misunderstood, sometimes bullied, and socially isolated. My personal art gave me a place of belonging. Read more>>

Timothy Monger

All of my albums represent a different part of me, or at least where I was at a certain point in my life, but with my newest one, I feel like I finally dialed in on my most authentic self. Authentic is one of those tricky words that gets bandied about in the creative world and it means different things to different people. In this case, I’m using it to say that after two decades of releasing music, I finally recorded a collection that sounds exactly like how I see myself. Or the self I like most, the one that my best friends would recognize. Read more>>

Saira Mary Netto

There have been many projects that have been meaningful to me throughout my years at college and in the industry as a designer. In college, I took complete artistic freedom with my work through the guidance of my professors. Whereas, the projects that I have worked on in a company come with strict guidelines in order to be commercially viable. To create for yourself and to create for a larger audience are both extremely important for a designer to experience. The first helped me to understand who I was as a designer and the latter allowed me to apply my knowledge to a setting where I could make a living out of my work. Read more>>

Yan Wang

Around a year and a half ago, I started on this narrative that has long nested my mind, a story about a village girl, and her journey of womanhood with the background of one-child policy that had been applied in China for several decades. Based off my experiences in printmaking, I decided to not just make this project on paper, but to make an animated work, better telling the narration; in addition, I wanted to take advantage of the unique textures I can acquire from physical prints, to compose this frame-by-frame animated project entirely from monopirnts and collages on paper. Read more>>