UCF’s Student Government hosted its annual Women’s Empowerment Conference, an event to highlight women’s contributions to their respective fields. This year centered on women in the arts. The event featured artists’ work across painting, sketching, and poetry.
Despite Orlando being a hub for entertainment, UCF is well known for its STEM identity, as it was founded to help the NASA program in aerospace engineering. Through this event, female artists were given a rare platform to show off their talents at a university-sanctioned event.
Student Government Safety and Transportation Coordinator Emely Lopez, a sophomore accounting major, organized the event. She wanted to build on last year’s garden-inspired theme while pushing into new territory. “I wanted to explore women in the arts and celebrate that,” said Lopez, who is a dancer herself. “I wanted people to see what goes on day-to-day for a female artist.”
Leaning into the gardenesque vibe, the event provided a place to build your own bouquet with a multitude of different colored flowers, as well as ribbon and a mesh material to wrap the flowers in.
The night featured presentations from ten artists: Lorelei Fredda, Mia Rivero, Elora Pfriender, Celeste Bourjolly, Katrina Calliez, Madeline Bailey, Jocelynn Dickerson, June Garcia, Noah Keller, and Nora Rudmann. They demonstrated that art comes in many forms.
Lopez feels women’s empowerment in the arts is necessary. “It definitely inspired me because it shows me all of the hard work that’s going on, and it’s like everyone’s working hard towards that end project and bringing something to life. It’s truly something so rewarding.”
Madeline Bailey, President of the Arts Club and a Studio Arts BFA senior, appreciated that artists were given space to speak freely. “Being able to freely speak on their own thoughts without having to follow a prompt is really great,” she said — something she noted women in the arts don’t always get.
June Garcia, Secretary of the Arts Club and a Studio Arts BFA third year, presented a self-portrait titled “Exactly What You’d Expect.” As a former computer science major, Garcia said the piece reflected her lifelong instinct toward self-expression, even in spaces that didn’t always welcome it.
“I feel like everybody who is in that field is more professional and not super creative, but whenever I was in that field, I was always different,” Garcia said. “I’ve always been expressive of myself, even when maybe the environment around me wasn’t even like that.”
Images were shown on the screen of the paintings and sketches the women made. Studio Arts BFA major and biology minor, junior Celeste Bourjolly’s “Adornment Array” painting that depicts what’s on Bourjolly’s nightstand.
“This piece means to me my college years,” said Bourjolly. “Through my college years, I’ve collected so much jewelry that I’ve gotten from friends or events that I went to, that I supported the artist, and I would just buy for them. It really just shows what I usually see when I wake up and go throughout my day.”
For first-year graduate student Elora Pfriender, the fact that a mainstream campus organization put a spotlight on the arts carried real weight.
“UCF is such a STEM school,” Prfiender said. “UCF has been really hardcore in embracing AI, and I think it’s always nice to see an appreciation for original art, human art, from an official university organization.”
In a world that grows closer to art made with sentences and prompts rather than human hands, it clearly meant a lot to these women to have this spotlight on the hard work that they made.