When creativity calls

Eight staff artists are featured in their homes, studios, and work spaces.

Photos and video by Niles Singer/Harvard Staff Photographer

Niles Singer

Harvard Staff Photographer

March 20, 2025 8 min read

Harvard staff cultivate talents that flourish beyond the gates

Nearly 300 talented artists from across the University are displaying their work in the annual Harvard Staff Art Show. Created as a venue where staff can share their creativity with the broader community, the show is now in its fifth year. Below are profiles of eight of these creatives who were happy to chat about their projects.

Scott Murry

Designer, Illustrator, and Photographer

Senior Designer, Harvard Library

Scott Murry in his apartment.

Scott Murry said his “Find Yourself,” part of a series of monoline-style digital drawings about mental health created during the pandemic, is about “trying to think about who you are with intentionality.”

Murry’s interest in the visual arts was nurtured in ninth and 10th grades by teachers who motivated and challenged him to achieve. He went to the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Art Institute of Boston and “was wild about editorial illustration and children’s book illustration” before taking on various roles at design agencies, in environmental design, and at the Weekly Dig.

These days Murry is being intentional with his time, drawing, designing, doing concert photography, publishing a children’s book, and working on a photo book of his son, Elliott. He is particularly excited by the design possibilities of the double Ls and double Ts in his son’s name.

Murry works on a drawing from his series that reads, “Have hope it will be better.” The drawing is “related to something from the pandemic or politics, where it just felt very busted, like, you know, you find your car on cinder blocks with a broken windshield, which I have with my own car.”

Pairs of custom Vans shoes printed with Murry’s designs.

Eve Radovsky

Cabinet and Furniture Maker

Faculty Assistant, Harvard Law School

Eve Radovsky holds the cabinet she’s displaying in this year’s Staff Art Show.

In 2018, Eve Radovsky enrolled in a full-time program in cabinet- and furniture-making. “I also have always really appreciated furniture design, and I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands,” she said. Her white-oak-and-maple piece in the show was inspired by an image of a blanket chest created by Thomas Dennis in the 17th century.

Radovsky used carving gouges to remove sections of wood for the front and small metal stamps to create the background. She also used several different types of stains to “age” the piece in a way that mimicked the more dangerous process of fuming.

She has also been a passionate knitter for the past 10-plus years and is currently working on creating a sweater for herself.

The front of her cabinet is hand-carved.

Radovsky knitting while sitting in a chair she made herself.

Yuwei Li

Drawer

Neurotechnology Engineer, The Center for Brain Science

Yuwei Li holds her drawing of Lou the budgie.

Yuwei Li likes drawing cute animals, including her budgie, Lou, who died right before Thanksgiving. For her, “drawing is a way to relax and be happy,” and the picture she chose to display is meant both to remind her of her pet and thank him for being a part of her life.

“This is actually based on a photo that I took from my cell phone … One day, he was just, like, winking at me. And then I happened to capture him winking with my camera.”

Li, shown in the Center for Brain Science’s machine shop in Harvard’s Northwest Building, uses her talents at work to design and fabricate equipment for approximately 40 different labs. Her latest after-hours project — inspired by “Star Wars” fans she met at Comic-Con in San Diego — is a 3-D print of a one-to-one scale model of R2-D2, which she hopes to mount on wheels and use to carry her tools.

Li solders a project for her work in the machine shop.

Li is assembling her 3-D R2-D2 piece by piece.

Veronica Bagnole

Embroiderer

Digital Project Manager, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Veronica Bagnole holds her current embroidery project.

For Veronica Bagnole, embroidery is a calming and historically rich artform. When she isn’t overseeing the GSD’s website and supporting a team of 100 content editors, she works on embroidery pieces that can take hundreds of hours to complete.

Bagnole’s piece shows a woman from the late 18th to early 19th century, whose likeness she created from AI images that she modified to create an outline before adding texture during the roughly 250 to 300 hours it took to embroider.

“When people come to this piece, I want them to look at it and think, ‘Who is that woman? Why did she have her portrait done?’”

Bagnole said embroidery deserves more recognition as not just a craft but a historical art form that allows her to honor and “connect with generations from the past.”

The gold chain is one of several small details Bagnole improvised.

Four pairs of 19th and early 20th century embroidery scissors from Bagnole’s collection. She calls them “beautiful little pieces of history.”

Stanislav Karachev

Dancer and Poet

Energy Performance Engineer, Harvard Medical School

Stanislav Karachev poses in the mirror he used for his poetry and dance piece “My Mirror.” A video recording of his performance is in this year’s Staff Art Show.

When Stanislav Karachev was invited to dance at a venue in New Hampshire, he knew he had to go big. He ended up creating the performance featured in this year’s art show, a mix of poetry, music, and dance he used to express his feelings during a breakup.

Karachev decided that he would incorporate a mirror and engage with the audience during the performance. “Everyone thinks, ‘Oh, you’re like, I’m doing a solo. It’s all about me.’ And it’s not. It’s about the audience and the connection between the performer or performers with the audience.”

Karachev recorded his poem and mixed his backing track with the help of a neighbor who also works at Harvard. He chose krump as the dance style because of its high energy. Karachev said he ended up impressed with where the intensity drove him: “I didn’t know I could move like that.”

The sole of an artist.

A page from Karachev’s poetry notebook.

John Buonomo

Astrophotographer

Senior Cloud Architect, Harvard University Health Services

John Buonomo in front of The Great Refractor at the Harvard College Observatory.

John Buonomo’s earliest attempts at astrophotography were in 1978. The self-taught artist said he became fascinated with his subject at 9 years old when a neighbor showed him a view of Jupiter and Saturn through his refractor. Buonomo’s first photographs using film and a manual tracking scope weren’t very successful, but the advent of digital technology “changed everything.”

These days Buonomo uses dedicated cooled astro CCD cameras, high-end optics, auto guiding, and computer-controlled scripting to create his work. Once he’s captured an image, he uses specialized software to stack multiple exposures and adjust other parameters to reveal faint structures. He calls the balance of technical skill and artistic vision “what makes astrophotography both demanding and deeply rewarding.”

Arched Rock at Goat Rock Beach in Jenner, California.

Photo Courtesy of John Buonomo

Buonomo looks through the Clark Telescope at the Harvard College Observatory.

Toru Nakanishi

Photographer and Sculptor

Exhibition Production Specialist at the Harvard Art Museums

Toru Nakanishi with several of his 3-D printed sculptures.

Toru Nakanishi’s love of photography started in college, when he began creating black-and-white photos in a darkroom. But when he no longer had access to a darkroom and couldn’t justify the cost of a digital camera, he began making images on a flatbed scanner.

This year’s show includes one of Nakanishi’s flatbed scans of ramen noodles. To create his images, Nakanishi laid the noodles on the scanner and turned off all the lights to get a black background. For other images, “I made a flatbed scanner with a glass wall on top of it. You can fill it with the water and then float the item in it and then scan it.”

This photograph shown is a piece of a much larger noodle series, one image of which is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Nakanishi also sculpts in wood.

Nakanishi holds the photograph he is displaying in the Staff Art Show.

Fionnuala Gerrity

Ceramicist

Conservation Technician at Harvard Library Preservation Services

Fionnuala Gerrity.

Fionnuala Gerrity first tried ceramics as a kid, but returned to it before the pandemic by taking courses at Indigo Fire in Belmont. They were surprised by the result: “I had no idea it would grow into an entire body of work, like a side gig to my professional career.”

Today, “everything that I do is based on local forest ecosystems,” Gerrity said. Using slabs as the primary construction method, building the vessel first, and finally adding sculpted elements, Gerrity tries to depict nature as accurately as possible. During the photoshoot, they shared a finished tea set decorated with “three different moths that preferentially associate with bitter nut hickory.”

“I love the idea that they might inspire people to look a little bit more closely at what’s around them,” Gerrity said.

Gerrity working on a current project.

Gerrity at Indigo Fire in Belmont.