Photography

Devin Mawdsley. The College of William and Mary, B.A.; Indiana University, M.F.A. candidate. Devin is an award-winning artist and photographer with extensive China travel experience. He majored in Chinese at William and Mary, where he was a Chinese language teaching assistant, a member of the Chinese Student Organization, founder and president of the William and Mary chapter of IMPACT!Humanity, and a starting winger for the Tribe Rugby team. He studied abroad at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he served as a program assistant for the William and Mary Study Abroad China program, and at the School of International Tourism at Guizhou Normal University in Guiyang, Guizhou, China. Devin returned to China to work as a translator/interpreter and visual designer for the Guizhou Rural Culture Development and Preservation Center, where he created tourism plan literature, art, and photographic arrangements. He is currently pursuing his M.F.A. in Studio Arts – Painting at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he works as a woodshop technician and as a development assistant at the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology. Devin’s artwork has been exhibited widely. He is an avid “freerunner,” boulderer, hiker, and soccer player.

Exploration

Sheri Martin. University of Kansas, B.A.; Johns Hopkins University, M.A. Sheri graduated with honors from the University of Kansas, where she double-majored in English and Italian. She has lived, traveled and studied in China and Taiwan for more than four years, including a year of intensive study at Tsinghua University’s Inter-University Program, a term at National Taiwan University, and the Princeton in Beijing summer program. In 2006, she wrote for the Insider’s Guide to Beijing. She received her master’s in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where her coursework in political science, law, and economics and thesis were completed in Mandarin. Sheri was a teaching assistant in a China-US relations course at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, and has worked as a Chinese language teacher and curriculum specialist with a Confucius Institute affiliated with the University of Kansas. In 2009, she was awarded a Next Generation research fellowship at the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle, Washington. She researched the state media strategy in the case of the 2008 Lhasa riots, and has published research on China’s technology standards. Sheri has traveled extensively in China. She is fluent in Mandarin.