CCAD Alumni Awards

Kymberly C. Moreland-Garnett
(Fine Arts, 1991) 

During her 22 years as a fine arts teacher at Trinity Preparatory School in Winter Park, Florida, Moreland-Garnett has led foundations, printmaking, and advanced printmaking courses, hosted international school trips, volunteered in her community, and advanced her own skills through various professional development activities.  In addition to many years of active participation in professional organizations, Moreland-Garnett received the 2009 H. Benton Ellis Award for Excellence in Teaching and the following year was named Middle School Art Educator of the Year by the Florida Art Education Association. Earlier this year, the FAEA named her the June Hinckley Art Educator Award of Excellence winner, honoring her for submitting the most entries for its K–12 exhibition. Moreland-Garnett’s classroom is known as a common gathering place for her students, both to work and because she is seen as a trusted, caring adult on campus. 

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Lori Sayre
(Advertising & Graphic Design, 1995)

Lori  has won numerous awards for her professional work in advertising, including taking home a bronze award in the 2009 Clio National Awards. She also is a recipient of awards from the Medical Marketing Association and the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts. Now at Quantum Health, Sayre’s previous employers include Diamond Cellar Holdings; Lord, Sullivan & Yoder; and GSW Advertising. At GSW, she was part of the original team to create the “Pink Tank,” a strategic and creative division focused on marketing healthcare to women. Beyond her paid work, Sayre has volunteered her time with New Directions Career Center, whose efforts she supports by designing marketing materials and facilitating email communications, as well as gathering donations of household goods and clothes for the women it serves.

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Cathy Ann Johnson-Conforto
(Illustration, 1989)

Johnson-Conforto is CEO and Creative Director for Luv-it Studio, responsible for collaborations across multiple platforms including marketing, creative ideation, retail outlets and messaging for service sectors. In addition, she cofounded—with her son Clinton Love Johnson—Soul Ah-Mazing, a media platform that celebrates the human family in all its diversity. Johnson-Conforto recently illustrated the critically hailed children’s book Stand Up! 10 Mighty Women Who Made a Change.

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Joshua Walz
(Advertising & Graphic Design, 2016)

After graduating from CCAD, Walz started his career at ZoCo as a graphic designer with a focus on user experience and digital design. Over the past six years, he’s worked on numerous UX projects ranging from web design to agile products and today he leads the UX focus at ZoCo, working with clients, improving processes, and coaching their team. Walz is a longtime volunteer with the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts, serving as the organization’s vice president of education in 2017-2019, and in 2021, he took home an Award of Excellence from the CSCA in the Interactive category. In addition to his work at ZoCo, Walz is the designer for his family’s business, SBS Property Management.

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Albert Wong
(Fine Arts, 1970)

Born in Nanjing, China and raised in Hong Kong, Wong has had a long and fruitful career in art and education. An illustration and design professor at the University of Texas for 36 years, Wong has directly shared his knowledge and experience with hundreds of students over the decades. In addition to his work in the classroom, Wong, a painter, illustrator, and graphic designer, has participated in individual and group exhibitions around the world; has work in more than a dozen corporate and museum collections in the U.S. and Hong Kong; has created advertisements for corporate and nonprofit clients; has written academic papers on such subjects as calligraphy, graphic design, and haiku; has made academic presentations on Chinese and Japanese culture; has had work in a number of books and periodicals; and has translated the work of other art historians.

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David Brame
(Illustration, 2005)

Brame has been consistently working as a comic book illustrator and cultivating his own Afro-Futuristic character, Dusty Funk, via personal work and gallery installations for the past several years. Brame’s ongoing work in comics explores issues of race and identity in the context of the American South, Black Gothica, mysticism, storytelling, and the African diaspora. In 2021, Brame illustrated the Eisner Award-nominated After the Rain; that same year, another book he illustrated, Lionman, was included in the Afro-Futurism period room installation "Before Yesterday We Could Fly" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  In 2020, Brame contributed illustrations for an animation as part of Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch at the Bronx Museum, and he also produced The Struggle, a scholarly work for Black youth published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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