SAIC Alums Lead NewCity’s 2025 Breakout Artists List

NewCity's Breakout Artists 2025 once again demonstrates the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) vital role in developing the city’s most promising artists, with six alumni included out of the 10 featured in this year's selection. These graduates embody SAIC’s enduring commitment to artistic innovation and excellence, and their recognition in this list underscores the School's ongoing influence on Chicago's vibrant art scene:

Leticia Pardo (MFA 2024)
Drawing from her architectural background, Pardo recontextualizes domestic and public spaces through installations that explore belonging, memory, and identity. Her work—spanning casting, ceramics, and industrial materials—preserves traces of lived experience, as seen in mnemonic: 3707 W. Dickens Ave., where latex casts of a century-old house drape scaffolding, merging personal and collective histories.

Breanna Robinson (BFA 2017)
Robinson's evolving practice bridges printmaking, ceramics, and speculative archaeology. Her "composed tablets"—engraved plaster and porcelain works—draw from African artifacts and imagined futures, blending abstraction with cultural narratives. Inspired by glitch aesthetics and familial objects, her tactile sculptures reflect her transition from 2D to 3D experimentation.

Hope Wang (BFA 2018)
Wang's multidisciplinary practice weaves photography, poetry, and textiles into meditations on memory and diasporic identity. Using jacquard looms, she transforms images into textured weavings that oscillate between representation and abstraction. A co-founder of LMRM Chicago, Wang fosters collaborative textile innovation while exploring themes of grief and fleeting beauty.

Dabin Ahn (MFA 2020)
Ahn merges hyperrealism with poetic fragility in paintings and sculptures. His recent work explores grief and transformation through motifs like melting candles, fractured glass, and moths—ephemeral symbols of resilience.

Sebastian Bruno-Harris (MFA 2023)
Bruno-Harris blends ceramics, video, and assemblage to interrogate identity and collective longing. His cross-disciplinary practice thrives on collaboration, yielding organic forms that oscillate between intimacy and ambiguity.

Sofía Fernández Díaz (MFA 2022)
Fernández Díaz, who is also a lecturer at SAIC, draws on Indigenous craft and ecological wisdom to create tactile sculptures. Her patitas series—whimsical objects perched on beeswax legs—bridges ancestral knowledge and diasporic memory.