(Pictured left to right: Emily Hanako Momohara, Veronica Melendez, Hope Simpara)
MICA proudly announces new faculty who are joining the College in Fall 2025 across a range of programs and contemporary approaches to art, design, and media.
Emily Hanako Momohara, Animation and Media Arts
Emily Hanako Momohara creates artwork and films that center around issues of family history and legacy. Growing up as part of a mixed-heritage family heavily influenced her creative practice.
She has exhibited internationally, most notably in at the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum (Naha, Japan), Changjiang International Photography & Video Biennale (Chonquing, China), and Art Nova 100, <Beyond the Border – New Media Exhibition> (Beijing, China). Nationally, Momohara exhibited at the International Center for Photography (New York), the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati), Photographic Center NW (Seattle), 21c Museum Hotels (Louisville and Cincinnati), and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (Denver). She was featured in a two-person exhibition Sugar/Islands at the Japanese American National Museum.
Momohara’s first documentary film Namba: a Japanese American’s Life of Incarceration and Resilience was released in 2022 and won awards at the Black Bird Film Festival (Honorable Mention), Seattle Asian American Film Festival (Cinemetropolis Award for Best Local Short) and Crown Point Film Festival (Best Documentary Short).
For Freedoms commissioned Momohara to create four art-billboards which have been presented in numerous locations and are included in the 2024 book Where do we go from here? published by Phaidon Press.
She has been awarded residencies at several arts organizations including the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA), Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and Red Gate Gallery (Beijing, China).
Veronica Melendez, Photography
Veronica Melendez is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator. Her work centers the afterlives of Civil War, migration, and Mesoamerican Indigenous imaginaries. Her projects weave between original photography, archival imagery, collage, oral history, and stop motion animation. These mediums allow her to delve into the hybridity that comes with living in the diaspora. Having ancestral roots in Guatemala and El Salvador and growing up in Washington D.C. she is constantly faced with the complex ideation of home in a city that is deeply tied to her family’s history of displacement. Veronica is a founder of La Horchata, an arts publication highlighting creatives with Central American roots. She was selected for the 2018 Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for Documentarians of the American South by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. And was most recently in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, NPR, VICE, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. The arts publication La Horchata has been exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA and is currently on view at the inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! in the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
https://veromelen.com/
https://lahorchatazine.bigcartel.com/
Hope Simpara, Fiber
Hope Simpara is a fashion designer, technical designer and explorer of interdisciplinary studies in fashion, textiles, graphic design and related art disciplines. She has honed her technical skill and approach to design by teaching and working freelance in various areas of the apparel industry including fashion design, product development, technical design, retailing and surface design. She has developed research interests surrounding the psychological effects of color and geometric abstraction in design, the creative research process in design education and activism and feminism in the fashion zeitgeist. As a custom designer, she has had the opportunity to empower individuals by providing custom design and alteration solutions for clients with varying body types and across all age groups. She has also had the opportunity to use her skillset in the areas of costuming and wardrobe design for film, custom interior design and consulting for fashion-based start-ups.
As a design educator, she seeks to motivate students to comprehensively engage in both their learning experience and the design process as critical thinkers, creative professionals and global citizens. Fostering an environment that promotes student inquiry, creative engagement and challenging students through design methodology and technical processes. Her goal is to bring the industry into the classroom to make sure that students are synthesizing ideas, making real word connections and developing as artists both practically and theoretically. Students have the opportunity to combine traditional methods of art and design along with digital literacy in design to help them find their voice.
She is a graduate of Howard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Fashion Merchandising in 2000, and a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in Fashion Design in 2007.