The Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville proudly announces the selection of the 2022 class of Periscope: Artist Entrepreneur Training (Periscope Nashville), an annual business development intensive that empowers working artists to see their creative practice through an entrepreneurial lens. This year’s class consists of 25 artists working in an array of disciplines including visual art, drama, music, dance, film and more.
Artists are chosen for Periscope Nashville through a competitive application process and scored by a panel of community reviewers that includes leading artists, curators, musicians, and creative entrepreneurs in Nashville’s arts, culture and business sectors. Selected artists participate in eight weeks of entrepreneurial training followed by six months of individualized mentorship by high-caliber business mentors.
The program culminates at the Periscope Pitch + Artist Entrepreneur Showcase in September where artist entrepreneurs unveil their creative businesses to the community. After two years of offering the program virtually, Periscope Nashville returns to in-person training this year.
Meet the Periscope Class of 2022:
Aaron English
Music
Nashville-based pianist/singer-songwriter Aaron English tours the U.S., Canada, & Europe singing his own world-music-inspired songs, as well as interpretations of traditional songs from around the world.
In 2015 he founded the International Youth Music Project, a non-profit that helps build & support music programs at orphanages in East Africa.
Highlights of Aaron’s career include having his music featured on the Fox TV drama Bones, a Top 5 radio hit in Italy, and a Top 20 radio hit in the US.
Alison Underwood
Visual Art
Alison Underwood’s work spans most 2-D media, including painting, printmaking, and digital art. In her practice, the artist develops a visual vocabulary to examine the psychology of desire. Imagery of ropes, hair, disembodied limbs, fabric, plants, portals and flat geometries dominate her image making, bringing a visual dimension to the fear and anticipation that exists at the threshold of choice. Alison grew up in a small town in rural Kentucky. She holds a B.A. in Studio Art from The University of Louisville and an M.A. in History of Design and Curatorial Studies from Parsons/Cooper Hewitt in New York City. She currently lives and works from her studio in Nashville, Tennessee.
Amber Sweeney
Music
Amber Sweeney is a songwriter, performer, and recording artist. Her original songs have been featured in two of CW’s television series One Tree Hill and Life Unexpected, as well as in Queen Sugar. Her vocal performance has also been featured in Stephen King’s film adaptation of Riding The Bullet, while she was performing with other artists.Sweeney has released two EPs, two full-lengths, and multiple singles, one of which topped the UK soul charts at #1.
Prior to moving to Nashville in the fall of 2021, Amber served as governor for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Recording Academy for 6 years, and co-chaired the chapter’s Education Committee. Dedicated to serving her community and sharing her expertise, she has organized, moderated, and participated in many education and professional development programs for both established and emerging artists.
Amy Harms
Visual Art
Amy Harms is a Midwest native, most recently moving her art studio from Chicago to Tennessee. Her paper-weaving art series stems from and gravitates towards music, which is a blend of her life – weaving the two art forms together. This series starts with two paintings and vinyl record covers that she paints, cuts apart, rearranges, and finally weaves them all into a final weave. Her process represents life; taking the past, dissecting it, creating something new and making the end vision more evolved.
While her focus professionally has been in the visual art world over the last 15 years, she also has a music degree from Missouri State University, and is still teaching piano privately. She studied interior design at Harrington College of Design in Chicago, and has directed several art galleries, along with art consulting for hospitality designers in Chicago. Amy currently lives in Brentwood with her husband, daughter and two dogs.
Amy Melinda Hoskins
Literary Arts,/Visual Art/Community Artist & Advocate/Gardener
Amy Melinda Hoskins is a poet and visual artist creating with disabilities from her home in South Nashville, Tennessee. Hoskins has hosted a monthly poetry open mic since April, 2017. She hosts the monthly Gestalt Poetry Open Mic, which is virtual for now. Amy has had more than fifteen poems published in the US, and one in Amsterdam. www.amyhoskins.com
Ashley Hylbert
Visual Art
Recognized for her energetic and vibrant style, Ashley Hylbert is an in-demand portrait, editorial, commercial and lifestyle photographer. There is a directness, authenticity and electricity conveyed in her images, which results in a connectedness between subject and viewer. She has steadily immersed herself in capturing subjects in her unique style. Lately, she has been experimenting with a new medium that incorporates her photography with acrylic paints to produce imagery that has a pop art quality that she is developing into a product-based business with a broad appeal.
Becca Hoback
Drama/Theatre/Performance Art/Dance
Becca Hoback is a freelance dance artist based in Nashville, TN. Becca developed a solo project consisting of her Enactor performance program, which premiered at OZ Arts in June 2021, and the Body View community engagement workshop series. In 2020, she received a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for her solo work, and has participated in the Metro Nashville Arts Commission’s THRIVE program as an awardee (2020) and project mentor (2022).
She is a founding member of New Dialect, featured in the company as a performer, outreach workshop team leader, community and company class teacher, and choreographic assistant to artistic director, Banning Bouldin. She is the creative producer, rehearsal director, and collaborator for PRISM by David Flores, a collaborator with Asia Pyron’s PYDANCE, and guest artist for Crystal Peattie’s The Haunted Ballet. Becca trained at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.
Benno Nelson
Film/Television
Benno Nelson spent 10 years as a freelance director and editor in Los Angeles, in 2009 he started his own production company where he served as owner and senior creative director. In 2017 he moved to Nashville and worked as Director of Video Content for Warner Music Nashville. His clients include; AMC, Republic Records, UGG, Atlantic Records and Princeton University. He loves green tea, the music of Spoon and a killer pair of shoes.
Bonnie Aldcroft-Currran
Visual Art
As Darling Lucifer Productions, Bonnie Aldcroft-Curran’s work encompasses light projection and video content presented in various forms, from live experiences to film and print. She creates perception-altering visuals by combining traditional liquid light techniques, vintage projection tricks, experimental video synthesis, and warped video feedback loops with modern technology. The result is Darling Lucifer Productions outputting psychedelia for the contemporary world at the crossroads of analog and digital.
Bonnie’s work is often experienced live as performance art, accompanies musical acts and movement artists, or as immersive environments. Her live content is produced organically in real-time, and no two shows are ever the same. In this age where the need for engaging content is at an all-time high, her unique style of performance, accompaniment, music videos, visualizers, social media content, and print art shines.
Catherine Hollo
Ceramic Sculpture/Jewelry
Catherine Hollo is a ceramic sculptor and maker based in Nashville. As a lover of nature and wildlife, those themes hold a constant presence in Catherine’s work. The creatures, textures and patterns found in the natural world provide inspiration for her art. The animal sculptures she creates reflect this love of nature while highlighting the personality and quirks of the creatures she has observed while volunteering in the local wildlife rehabilitation community.
Catherine earned a BFA in Graphic Design at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and has worked in that field for many years while always maintaining a connection to fine art. She has newly committed to making fine art and to the adventure this new creative path will lead.
Jade Sotelo Carter
Visual Art
Jade Sotelo Carter is a painter born in Billings, Montana in 1986. She works primarily with acrylics but occasionally explores different mediums and enjoys learning. Raised in a creative household, she and her sisters were encouraged to spend time making music and many kinds of art together. She is especially influenced by her family, nature, animals, and Indigenous Peoples.
Carter attended Rocky Mountain College in Billings before moving to Middle Tennessee in 2008. In her late 20’s, she studied at MTSU, completing the Anthropology program. Since then, she rekindled her love for painting and began participating in the local art community. She has been fortunate enough to collaborate with other artists, and work on multiple projects with The Studio 208. She learned Screen Printing at Dragonfly Screen Graphics and currently assists in the Art Department, decorates cakes at Baked on 8th, and enjoys applying her skills in different ways.
Jamison Sevits
Multi-Disciplinary
Jamison Sevits is an original and highly accomplished multi-disciplinary artist in Nashville. Working in arenas of music, theatre, movement and communal art-making, he is continually finding the meeting ground between these forms of expression.
Jamison is also an experienced teacher and facilitator who hopes to continue nurturing his leadership skills in using creativity as a means of healing and community-building. He is ultimately an “explorer-of-the-arts,” and is a true believer that curiosity and play are essential components to the creative practice as well as self and community discovery.
Jamison hopes to one day found a unique theatre company here in Nashville that delves deeper into these practices and can ultimately become a space for not only original productions, but also for encouraging multi-level collaboration and deeper explorations of the creative process.
Kelly McKernan
Visual Art
Kelly McKernan is an independent artist based in Nashville. They graduated with a B.F.A. in 2009 from Kennesaw State University in Georgia and have been a full time artist since 2012. Original paintings are created for galleries, private commissions, and their online store where fine art prints and other products are also sold.
Kelly’s personal work is primarily informed by their journey as an artist and human. Their art explores their personal evolution of an ever-shifting human identity, informed by sexuality, gender, motherhood, a history of childhood trauma and subsequent time in a religious cult, toxic relationships, pregnancy loss and abortion, divorce, and mental illness. All of this weaves itself into the quiet narrative of self-exploration behind Kelly’s vibrant and ethereal paintings.
In addition to maintaining a large social media following, Kelly shares tutorials and teaches workshops, travels across the US for events and comic-cons, and also creates illustrations for books, comics, games, and more.
Lisa Reed Preston
Visual Art
Lisa Reed Preston is a self-taught artist who embraces the beauty of abstraction. Growing up a military child and oldest of 4, Lisa spent much of her youth moving and adapting to new environments. At the age of 11, she won her first art contest with a Martin Luther King, Jr. portrait and acrostic. For years, Lisa lost focus on her childhood passion as the challenges and practicality of life replaced youthful whimsy. Upon moving to the Nashville area, she rediscovered her passion for creativity and became part of the Plowhaus Artist Co-Op.
Lisa’s varied life experiences as an audio engineer, graphic designer, STEM and robotics teacher, and data analyst provide her with an enthusiasm for problem solving and experimentation. For the last 18 years, Lisa has resided with her husband in Bellevue, Tennessee.
James Jones
Visual Art
James was born on a farm in North Alabama in 1967. He studied art in high school where he was bitten by the creative bug. He created stained glass, hammered metal sculptures, and assemblage art in the early 2000s and sold his works around the Nashville area. He served on the board of directors at The Madison art Center in Madison Tennessee during that time.
Since then, his work has been focused on using recycled materials as much as possible. He currently creates paintings on sculpted recycled paper pulp on handbuilt recycled wooden panels. His works can be found on his website, www.jmjarts.com, on his Instagram, @jamesmarkjonesarts, and will be featured on www.artlifting.com for sale starting in May of 2022.
James is a mental health advocate who frequently shares his story of living with anxiety and depression in the hopes of helping others.
Marla Faith
Visual Art
Marla Faith makes art and writes poetry in Nashville. She has published 3 books of her art and poetry, which can be seen along with her oeuvre of paintings, drawings, and collages, at marlafaith.com. Marla has spent her career teaching art in schools, and directing education programs in art museums, while consistently creating her own art.
Ms. Faith grew up in Chicago, and moved to Nashville from New York in 1990. She has a BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MS in Museum Leadership from Bank Street College in NYC. She has exhibited her artwork widely, including one person shows at The Parthenon and Nashville Airport.
Patrick TV Volz
Visual Art
Patrick TV specializes in cartoons, caricatures, and 2-D animation. His hand-drawn “A Mail Called Horse” won the Open Category at the Film Con Hollywood 2018 Short Film Competition and his illustrations and comics have appeared in several international publications.
Patrick TV is currently aspiring to bedeck the blank galleries of the Metaverse with curated collections of NFTs. Merging the excitingly nascent field of decentralized finance with traditional schema of printmaking, he seeks to install an open door for creators of Middle Tennessee to stake their pictorial claim in the virtually limitless frontier of the cryptosphere.
Born in Denver, raised in Syracuse, but lived and sojourned in a metric “buncha” places, he has called Nashville home for the past few years. While away-from-sketchbook, he enjoys a serendipitous walkabout through Music City’s vibrant trivia scene.
Rachael Golden
Visual Art
Rachael Golden is a self-taught abstract artist, using acrylics and upcycled materials. Her work explores the relationship between colors and place or mood, as well as, the intentionality of movement when choosing hope over despair.
Rachael was born and raised in Florida, but feels she came into her own while living in Baltimore during her 20’s and early 30’s. While there she worked at a non-profit assisting with refugee resettlement and was able to take several trips abroad to Asia, Africa and Central America. It was also in Baltimore that she first connected with a vibrant art community surrounding Maryland Institute College of Art. She credits those years with challenging her perceptions of the world, identity, and ideology, as well as her understanding of what it means to be resilient. Her work is an investigation of these abstract concepts through the lens of lived experiences, and expressed in color and lyrical brush strokes.
Sangeetha Ekambaram
Drama/Theatre/Performance Art/Dance/Music
Sangeetha Ekambaram is a classically-trained soprano with a background that spans a wide variety of cultural and musical disciplines. Her singing career has included both opera and concert works in various companies and institutions across North America and Europe. With an entrepreneurial spirit, she has also participated in creative collaborations with other local musicians, sometimes across artistic genres.
Sangeetha also considers herself a multi-dimensional artist, having participated in song and dance across cultures. This has given her a unique perspective on different performances practices as well as a curiosity for how different values are expressed through the context, impact, and function of music-making. She hopes to use this knowledge to stretch and experiment with the culture of classical singing in her own communities. Sangeetha is also a voice instructor, with a passion for guiding her students, no matter the level or genre, to deeper awareness of vocal freedom and natural expression.
Shea Moore
Visual Art
Shea Moore is an up-and-coming Watercolor Artist known for her striking watercolor portraits. After earning her degree in Fashion Design from Bauder College in Atlanta, GA, Shea earned a living as a makeup artist.
In 2016 while visiting Nashville’s downtown public library and checking out a book on watercolor, she fell in love with the way pigment and water worked together and decided to teach herself how to paint using that medium.
In July of 2017 Shea was one of 5 artists selected to paint individual murals in Historic Germantown in Nashville. This also gave her an opportunity to visit Buena Vista Elementary to speak about the importance of art and lead a class drawing session. In September of 2020 she was commissioned to do 6 portraits for The Women’s Foundation of St. Louis for their marketing campaign “Making A Difference.”
Shondell McFall
Drama/Theatre/Performance Art/Film/Television/Literary Arts, Music/Public Art/Creative Placemaking/Visual Art
This short tale is of a boy, now a man, who decided that there was no limit to his value; either as an artist and a human being. Shondell spent a majority of his life trying to figure out where he belonged, who he was. It wouldn’t be until he one day in band class that he discovered his true self. This was a start with music that would turn into a 25 year journey – from touring the country and putting out records, to painting portraits, photography, and making contraptions from scratch. The array of opportunities were falling in from every corner. It was then that Shondell realized that his purpose in life wasn’t a singular linear goal, but a crucible in the way of becoming an everyman, building worlds, and creating the things we only dream about. It would be foolish to not share our gifts and learn how to use them together for a future bigger and brighter than we can fathom.
Soteria Balmer
Music
Soteria Balmer was born in Atlanta, GA on November 22nd. Known lovingly by her peers and colleagues as SoB (So-Be), she graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in Music Business. In her early years of college, Soteria learned that A&Rs within labels were dying. It’s this discovery that eventually led her to pursue an internship with Power Entertainment (a small indie label and management company) in A&R. She coordinated label-related events, as well as developed and maintained relationships with artists, producers, and business partners.
Soteria believes that artist development is one of the most important phases of an artist’s career; that artists truly need support and nurturing during their development stage in order to become the star they dream of! Since interning with Power, Soteria has recently been promoted to VP of A&R and will be overseeing their new signee Yours Truly, Jai.
Steve Wedan
Visual Art
Steve Wedan has created a body of work which encompasses figurative illustration, portraiture, and wildlife pieces. He is currently expanding his interests to include social issues and scenes of the working lives of musical artists and others.
Steve has illustrated magazine covers and articles, and he was the Senior Graphics Illustrator for Orbital Sciences Corporation. He illustrated children’s books and has sold reproductions of his art from his Web site, SteveWedanArt.com.
As his career unfolds, Steve intends to draw increasing attention to art as a conduit between the everyday material world and the creative energy of nature and its expressions.
Trisha Peña
Multi-Disciplinary/Visual Art
Trisha Peña is an original abstract artist based in Nashville. She came to the visual art world later in life by way of music, performing, and writing. She is a self-taught artist who fell in love with the medium by literally painting the walls of her house with invigorating and sensual treatments. Known for saying that she cannot draw a straight line, abstract work with acrylics is her most common medium, with an affinity for markedly textured canvases. A subset of work called “Team Spirit Reimaged” consists of abstract works using the official colors of sports teams, giving fans an alternative to logos and primary colors, displaying their favorite team colors in a more subtle and unique way. Her unique style transfers successfully into products such as purses, silk scarves, high-heeled pumps, and facemasks. Dozens of her endeavors have received international recognition over the years.
Victoria Quirk
Visual Art
Victoria Quirk is a photographer in Nashville. She is passionate about people, food, and using imagery as a medium for storytelling. Whether she’s pouring lattes at Crema, trying a new recipe at home, or brainstorming for a photoshoot, she believes creativity always has a place at the table, and that even the most mundane parts of life deserve to feel like magic.