Artful Business Cohort

Sanaa Sharrieff

Born in Brooklyn, NY and now based in North Carolina, Sanaa Sharrieff is a contemporary fashion artist who bridges fine art and design, transforming couture into richly textured visual narratives. Inspired early by New York City’s fashion culture, her practice evolved from still-life studies in oil pastel to detailed sketches of fabrics and sewing spaces, sharpening her sensitivity to texture, form, and movement. This evolution led to her signature concept, Couture on Canvas, where personal exploration became a powerful mode of self-expression. Through mixed-media works layered with acrylic and textiles, Sharrieff celebrates the elegance, strength, and storytelling power of clothing, beginning each piece with the silhouette as a study of identity in motion. Drawing inspiration from her Savvy Chic Clothing designs, she creates a dialogue between wearable art and visual art, positioning fashion not as trend, but as living, dimensional art.

Kristin Price

Kristin Price is an intuitive painter based in Thomasville, North Carolina. Born and raised in New Jersey, she has been creatively inclined since childhood, though mostly with pencil and paper. Her painting practice began in late 2020 during the Covid pandemic to pass the time. It was then she discovered a love of color and the meditative effect of putting paint on
canvas. As a mixed media artist, she works with acrylic paint and ink, soft pastels, charcoal and occasionally collage to create her pieces. Inspired by the textures and shapes found in the natural world, Price’s art emerges primarily as interpretive floral forms in vases.

Wanda Robinson

Wanda is a self-taught acrylic painter based in North Carolina whose work is rooted in coastal beginnings and shaped by a lifelong pull toward creative expression. Raised along the Virginia coast, her early connection to the sights and sounds of coastal life continues to influence her work, even as her subject matter expands beyond literal shoreline scenes. Before fully committing to painting, Wanda spent a little over two decades in the corporate world, balancing family life with a creative practice that steadily grew alongside her professional career. In 2021, she stepped away from corporate work to focus entirely on painting, embracing a lifelong calling to create with more intention and freedom. Wanda’s paintings balance impressionistic observation with an occasional touch of abstraction. She is drawn to fleeting moments—soft light across water, distant trees dissolving into atmosphere, birds pausing in stillness—using layered brushwork, restrained palettes, and subtle shifts in value to evoke calm and contemplation. Rather than documenting a place exactly as it appears, her work reflects how a place is felt and remembered. Working primarily in acrylics, Wanda values intuitive mark-making, texture, and rhythm, allowing areas of her paintings to remain loose and suggestive. Her compositions often feature high horizons, softened edges, and quiet expanses that invite the viewer to slow down and linger. Wanda lives and works near Winston Salem, North Carolina, where she maintains a home-based studio and is actively engaged in the regional arts community. Her work reflects an ongoing evolution toward authenticity—painting not just landscapes, but moments of belonging, stillness, and grace.
 

Terri Millard

​Terri Hirtz Millard is a contemporary artist based in High Point, North Carolina, known for her work in collage and mixed media. Her artistic practice centers on carefully layered compositions that transform paper, texture, and color into expressive botanical imagery. Millard’s recent work frequently explores floral themes, particularly detailed daffodil collages and other botanical subjects. Through the layering of materials and intricate design, she captures both the delicacy and vibrancy of the natural world. She is an in-house and resident artist at Studio 136 Gallery in downtown High Point, where she actively participates in exhibitions and community art events. Through her work and presence in the local arts scene, Millard contributes to the creative energy of the High Point arts community while continuing to develop her distinctive mixed-media style.​​​

Tammy Plaster

Tammy Linette Plaster, known professionally as Art by Tammy L Plaster, is a Greensboro, North Carolina–based graphic designer and mixed-media artist whose work embraces abstract, loose, and whimsical forms. Her creative practice is rooted in the belief that art allows us to express ourselves, discover ourselves, and sometimes lose ourselves in the process. She creates art as a form of self-expression, finding beauty in the unexpected combinations of organic and structured design. Plaster’s paintings and collages emerge from an emotion-driven, intuitive approach where instinct and feeling guide her marks, colors, and compositions. Her work often features a blend of natural elements and geometric forms, particularly circular shapes and playfully rendered flowers, creating spaces where spontaneity, playfulness, and quiet contemplation coexist. Working across a variety of pigments and materials, Plaster incorporates watercolor, acrylic, gouache, pastels, and alcohol ink into her layered compositions. She experiments with diverse paper surfaces including tissue, teabag, deli, rice, copy, and tracing paper, as well as sustainable mineral paper made from stone. These materials allow her to achieve smooth blends, vibrant color, and delicate textures that give her work a distinctive character.
Monoprinting has become an important part of her process, expanding her sense of experimentation and discovery. By layering and blending mediums, each print and impression introduces an element of surprise, transforming the once-intimidating blank canvas into an invitation for exploration and self-expression. 

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