Emory Arts Fellows

Tom Dixon is a sound designer/mixer, educator and filmmaker (under the name Eislow Johnson) from Skokie, Illinois. His practice engages with cinema as a sound art and as a way of navigating and responding to the world's vibration and instability. His films have screened nationally and internationally at festivals and venues such as Prismatic Ground, L'Alternativa, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Light Matter Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and Cosmic Rays Film Festival. Films featuring his sound work have screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, SXSW, Museum of the Moving Image, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, FICUNAM, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and Open City Documentary Film Festival, among others. Tom has taught in universities, bilingual schools, libraries, forest preserves, co-ops, and living rooms. He recently earned an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MA in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University.

Stephanie Dowda-Demer, MFA’18 VCU, is an American photographer and experimental media artist. Her work excavates invisibility and creates space for reflection through phenomena, communion, and kinship. Dowda DeMer uses the materiality of photography to address grief, climate catastrophe, and power. Dowda DeMer was named the inaugural Iowa Idea Fellow in Photography at the University of Iowa. She has taught photography at Arizona State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and most recently, Wesleyan College. DeMer holds an MFA in Photo + Video from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist alum, Hambidge Fellow, and Idea Capital grantee, and her work has been published in Dialogue, Bad at Sports, MuseA, ArtsATL, BurnAway, and Numbers Inc., among others. She is currently represented by White Space Gallery-Atlanta, and has shown at Grizzly Grizzly-Philadelphia, MART-Dublin, Institute 193 Lexington, KY, PhotoNola, Day & Night Projects, Atlanta, University of Iowa, Atlanta Contemporary, and other galleries. Dowda DeMer curatorial projects include Practicexpractice, McCrary Gallery at Wesleyan College, and currently serves as Creative Director for the Lostintheletters Studio & Space, opening late summer 2025. She is the Art Editor of Brink Literary Journal and co-founder of the Atlanta-based creative writing festival, The Letters Festival. She has been awarded grants from the Georgia Council for the Arts, the Leonian Foundation, Fulton County Arts Council, Atlanta Mayor's Office, and others. 

Madelyn Sher is a dance and theater artist, educator, and native New Yorker. Her formal training includes butoh, theater, bachata, contact improvisation, and contemporary/modern dance. Maddy’s choreographic research interests lie in the rhythms of change, loving and losing, and the bond between language, imagination, and movement. In 2024 Maddy received the Lehman Alumni Choreography Fellowship to set a new work on students for their Dance in Dialogue series. Her work has been presented at various venues and festivals in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts including Cosmic Cherry Festival, Queer Butoh Festival, The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, CREST, SMUSH Gallery, Theater for the New City, and Triskelion Arts. She has performed at BRIC, Knockdown Center, Danspace Project, JACK, in backyards, warehouses, galleries, lawns, and at the end of a pier. Maddy has worked with choreographers Olive Prince, Bebe Miller and Angie Hauser, Vangeline Theater, Duane Lee Holland, evan ray suzuki, REDi Dance Company, Alexander Davis, and others. As an actor, she was a recurring guest star on a TV show called The Baker and the Beauty, a romantic comedy that premiered on ABC in 2020 and became the number one show on Netflix in 2021. Currently Maddy dances for Chloe London and Nami Yamamoto, collaborates with composer Leo Hardman-Hill and film director Nic Motyka, and continues to make her own work. She has an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College.