Every year, the strength of the Festival begins with the people who help shape it. Our 2026 jurors bring a depth of experience, perspective, and passion that reflects the high standard artists and collectors have come to expect. Tasked with reviewing hundreds of applications from across the country, they look not only for technical excellence, but for originality, vision, and work that resonates long after festival weekend. We’re proud to introduce the distinguished panel guiding the selection of this year’s artists and awards.
Festival Awards Juror
Katherine Brodbeck
Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, Columbus Museum of Art
Anna Katherine Brodbeck is a museum professional and art historian with close to twenty years of experience in the field of modern and contemporary art. She is the deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), where she the leads the curatorial team on the exhibition, collection, and programming strategy for the museum. Prior to joining the CMA, she served as the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). In that role, Brodbeck curated numerous exhibitions including Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations (2024-25); When you see me: Visibility in Contemporary Art/History (2024-25); He Said/SheSaid: Contemporary Women Interject (2023-24); as well as focus exhibitions of the work of Ja’Tovia Gary, Bosco Sodi, Wanda Koop, Minerva Cuevas, Rashid Johnson, Yayoi Kusama, Alex Katz, and Ragnar Kjartansson. Before moving to Dallas, she was associate curator at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, where she co-curated Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium (2016-17), co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Selection Jurors
John Byrd
Associate Professor, University of South Florida
John Byrd was born and raised in the southern mountains of North Carolina. He received his BFA in Ceramics from Louisiana State University in 1997 and his MFA in Ceramics from the University of Washington in 2000. In 2006, he joined the faculty at the University of South Florida, where he currently serves as an Associate Professor. In addition to his teaching, as an artist working primarily with clay, his studio practice focuses on sculpture with an emphasis on creating objects that blur the boundaries between aesthetics and function. Recently, his work has included oversized ceramic vessels and other objects. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and internationally.
Michael Loren Diaz
Assistant Professor, University of Tampa
Michael Loren Diaz, a native of Tampa, received an MFA in Drawing & Painting from Arizona State University in 2019 and a BFA in Drawing & Printmaking from the University of Central Florida in 2016. Diaz’s artwork is shown nationally, notably being included several times in the annual Drawn exhibition at Manifest Gallery. He has won several awards such as the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize, as well as being a finalist for the 2019 AXA Art Prize. Specializing in drawing, Diaz recently returned to Tampa to teach as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tampa.
Danny Olda
Chief Curator, Dunedin Fine Art Center
Danny Olda is a curator, art critic, and art publication editor with many years of experience in each discipline. He has curated exhibitions, lectured, and served on grant panels for private galleries, nonprofit spaces, museums, and colleges and universities. More recently, Danny has served as the curator for the Gallery at Creative Pinellas and the Woodson African American Museum of Florida, and is currently the chief curator at the Dunedin Fine Art Center. His writing has been featured in several national and international art publications such as Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Artillery Magazine, Momus, Temporary Art Review, Burn Away, Daily Serving, Hi-Fructose Magazine, Beautiful/Decay, Eutopia, Art Radar, and Sarasota Visual Art. He has also written art criticism for local publication Creative Loafing.
Noel Marie Smith
Curator, Wild Space Gallery at the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation in St. Petersburg
Noel Marie Smith is a visual arts curator and arts administrator with over three decades of experience working with artists, curators, and arts institutions locally, nationally and internationally. Since 2023 she has served as curator of the Wild Space Gallery at the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation in St. Petersburg. She retired after 27 years at the USF Institute for Research in Art: Graphicstudio/Contemporary Art Museum, where she worked in a number of capacities, including as Deputy Director of the Contemporary Art Museum, where she curated numerous exhibitions, specializing in contemporary Cuban and Latin American Art. Smith has experience with artist collaborations, educational programming, and grant writing, and is a published translator of literary and critical texts
from Spanish to English.
Emerging Artists Program Juror
Ry McCullough
Associate Professor of Art and Design, University of Tampa
Ry McCullough is an artist, educator and Associate Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa, currently serving as Chair of the Department of Art + Design. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio where he concentrated in the areas of printmaking and sculpture. Upon completion of his undergraduate work, he served as the director of sculptural studies and taught printmaking at the Stivers School for the Arts. McCullough received his MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. McCullough has exhibited nationally andinternationally and founded the Standard Action Press Collaborative Zine Project. He has been privileged to participate in residencies at the Grafikwerkstatt in Dresden, Germany, Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium, and the P+D Throne in Athens, Georgia. In addition to his independent practice, McCullough collaborates on a long-distance unique conceptual print/performance/publishing project called small_bars.
