About the artist

Beth Krensky is an area head and professor of art teaching in the department of art & art History at the University of Utah. She received her formal art training from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts and MIT’s center for advanced visual studies. She was one of five founding members of the international artist collective, the Artnauts. Her work is intended to provoke reflection about what is happening in our world as well as to create a vision of what is possible.

She is also a scholar of youth-created art for social change. She holds an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D. in educational foundations from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

In 2022, Krensky was named the Utah higher education art educator of the year and in 2019, she was selected as one of Utah’s 15 Most Influential Artists. Among her academic honors, she has been awarded the presidential scholar, public service professor, and distinguished teaching awards from the University of Utah. She is currently one of five performance art finalists for the 16^th Arte Laguna Prize. 

Maddie Blonquist Shrum is a recent graduate of Yale Divinity School (M.A.R. visual arts and material culture, 2022) and the Institute of Sacred Music. She holds a certificate in public humanities from Yale University and has worked at several art institutions, most recently the Yale University Art Gallery, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brigham Young University Museum of Art. She is passionate about collaboration, arts accessibility, and museum studies—all interests that have led her to pursue a career in art curation, education, and publication.