The Artist Fellowship Grant from the Nevada Arts Council recognizes individual artists living in Nevada who demonstrate excellence in their work. Since 1989, the Nevada Arts Council has recognized 220 fellows in Visual, Performing, and Literary Arts who demonstrate excellence in their field. The Fellowship Program was designed to encourage the pursuit of artistic excellence by providing financial support to outstanding artists. Nevada Arts Council Fellowship grants can be awarded at any stage of the artists’ career development. By recognizing and rewarding artistic accomplishments instead of educational experience, these fellows promote public awareness and appreciation of how Nevada artists contribute to the economic, civic, cultural, educational and health benefits in Nevada and its communities. In odd fiscal years the grant is open to visual artists and in even fiscal years it is open to performing and literary artists.

2-Dimensional Artist Fellows

Jeffrey Burden

Jeff Burden is a professor teaching in the painting, drawing, and printmaking area. He teaches advanced drawing, multidisciplinary drawing, and advanced printmaking. He has been involved in the use of technology in art and design for more than 30 years. He has been working in online education developing strategies for the use of visual imagery as a teaching tool in hybrid courses. Burden is also a curator of more than 60 exhibitions. He has received numerous grants for researching both technology and global art. While at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, he has curated or organized AmpleProof (printmaking invitational) 2008; The Scottish Show (a touring exhibit of 15 Scottish Artists) 2009; Extreme Sensibility (a touring exhibit of Taiwanese Video Art) 2009; Not Without Form (a drawing invitational) 2010; At First Glance (painting) 2010; Seeing Voices (drawing invitational) 2013; Layered and Burnished (mixed media invitational) 2015, Kuso: A contemporary Taiwanese exhibit 2016; A Wail and a Clang: Contemporary Drawings (a drawing invitational); and Grit and Sensitivity 2018 (a printmaking invitational). Burden has worked closely with artists in Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Great Britain, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan to bring exhibits and artists from those countries to the U.S. 

Studio work is focus in is in drawing, photography, film, painting and technology. His work has received numerous awards and is in a number of collections.

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Glynn Cartledge

An artist who spent over two decades as a criminal lawyer, Glynn Cartledge cross-examines the criminal justice system with a contextual series narrating societal treatment of the accused, convicted, and released. She paints portraits of formerly incarcerated citizens in both formal settings and as whimsical paper dolls. She paints early immigrant floor cloths as contemporary prison rugs, which link poverty and otherness and suggest that incarceration follows us home. Collaged jail cells, recorded oral histories, and archival documents from both her files and from formerly incarcerated people provide context.

Criminal justice provides raw material for a life-long pursuit Cartledge has had as both a lawyer and artist to investigate, deconstruct, and come to terms with utopian ideas of justice in the face of continued and inevitable misinterpretation, manipulation, and all-too-often its conspicuous absence. Her views of the failing justice system certainly are not original; many share these views, but as an artist and attorney, her hope is that what she brings to the artwork is original because it comes from firsthand experience working within the system.

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Gig Depio

Las Vegas-based Filipino painter Gig Depio presents the conjunctions of contemporary and historical forces in the form of intense, often large-scale, figurative compositions. Depio’s body of work focuses on American culture and its history, the exploration of the unfamiliar west and later expansion and influence across the globe, especially on the convergence of American, Philippine, and Spanish histories at the turn of the 20th century and in contemporary society.

Depio has exhibited across Nevada, with shows at the Nevada Museum of Art, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Clark County Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, among others. Depio has been an exponent for public, nonprofit and independent art in Nevada since 2009, and has recently extended his advocacy internationally, including exhibitions with the National Commission for Culture and Arts (NCCA), Manila, Philippines, at the 58th Venice Biennale, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

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Bobbie Ann Howell

Bobbie Ann Howell spent her youth in beautiful Lee Canyon, Nevada, a mountain community northwest of the Las Vegas valley. Continually inspired by a landscape that has dramatic contrasts from the desert valleys to high mountain vistas, from crowded urban centers to the open windswept spaces these spaces are an ever-present element in her life and in turn in her art. Howell attended school in Indian Springs, Nevada, and graduated from Western High School in Las Vegas. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts is from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. She received her Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and drawing from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, Illinois, and she has been fine arts faculty at Steven F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas; University of Nevada, Las Vegas in Las Vegas; and the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas; teaching sculpture, foundry, drawing, life drawing, two- and three-dimensional design, and printmaking. 

Her experience includes working in the arts and humanities as a cultural center director, museum director and educator, curator, collection design and management, and is currently a program manager for Nevada Humanities. She works and teaches workshops and classes for a wide range of students from her studio, B.E.S.T. Arts 4 U, in Las Vegas. Her artworks are in public and private collections and exhibited and in regional and national exhibitions. Howell was part of the 2017 ArtPop Street Gallery where one of her artworks was displayed on a billboard along Interstate 15 in Las Vegas, and in 2018 and 2023, she was awarded the Nevada Arts Council Visual Art Fellowship Award.

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3-dimensional Artist Fellows

Miya Hannan

Miya Hannan’s installations, sculptures, and drawings try to preserve stories that are almost forgotten or that would otherwise be lost, using the archival quality of landscape and place. She has been actively showing her work in many solo exhibitions in the United States. She also had numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including Women’s Essence Shows in 2022 (Paris, France), 2021 (Rome, Italy), and 2019 (Venice, Italy). Her artist’s book, a collaboration project with Brighton Press in San Diego in 2017, is now in the collections of over 30 institutions including the Getty Research Institute, Library of Congress, and Stanford University. She was awarded many artist residencies, including the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming, Willapa Bay AiR Residency in Washington, and the Red Gate Residency in Beijing, China. In 2012, she was commissioned by TEDxSan Diego to create an installation for their meeting. She also received the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award from Mesa College, San Diego. Before coming to the United States, she received a bachelor’s degree in medical technology and worked for a hospital for seven years in her native country of Japan. She is now an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

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