Who: Patrick Renner is a sculptor specializing in geometrical and architectural creations, mostly from recycled colored wood. He began his career with LEGO as a boy, but developed his talent with wood at the hands of his grandfather, a skilled carpenter. His pieces are fairly abstract objects and installations ranging from the work above that resembles a giant ocarina to more esoteric creations like Bounded Operator.

You've seen Renner's work in all the usual local spots like Art League, Lawndale and the Art Car Museum. He's currently working in partnership with a new art space, Avis Frank Gallery. He was lucky enough to land a piece in the CAMH when still in high school, and has his sights set for the big leagues of the Menil and MFAH.

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Who: Tomas Glass is an artist and musician gaining some serious ground here in Houston. His visual work is mostly abstract, focusing on a series of off-balanced geometric shapes that tend to hover just above a recurring edge of blackness underneath. Many of his pieces have the uncomfortable feeling of being slight hallucinations or illusions barely obscuring some darker beyond. He also dabbles in mixed-media collages that come across like good Dave McKean covers, if not quite as phantasmagorical.

He's also a rising musician who recently reached a pretty significant milestone, from our perspective. A tune he co-wrote with Kanude called "Wheels" was featured in True Blood two seasons ago in the episode "You Smell Like Dinner." It was exactly as dirty and down-home as you'd expect for the Southern vampire soap opera. His solo work is wonderfully dark Americana that you should definitely check out. Especially since he's giving his first album, Devil in the Dugout, away for absolutely free. His second album, Beautiful Monster, is now available on SoundCloud.

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Self portrait by Ashley Stoker

Ashley Stoker, who goes by the moniker Fox Marie online, is a self-portrait photographer and painter who also uses handmade jewelry and occult imagery in her artwork. She became active on Tumblr in 2011, and her sometimes-NSFW blog, Hipporacle, has thousands of followers. In 2012 she was given a Houston Web Award by the Houston Press for Best Tumblr.

What She Does
"For my self-portrait photography, I build off making a headpiece or a mask," she said. "I had always put together little masks as a kid and taken pictures."

"I became active on Tumblr in January 2011. I didn't really understand how to use Tumblr at the time. I worked in the library at St. Thomas University and would post funny book covers."

Eventually, through the use of clever tags on her posts, her audience grew.

"I found out about so much art and pop culture just by putting my tentacles out there. It's a well of inspiration for me."

She began selling her jewelry on Etsy to make ends meet. In the spring of 2011, she quit work to move to Austin to take care of her father, who was dying of cancer. He died on Mother's Day of that year.

"I still had college loans I had to pay off. People were really supportive on Tumblr."

More recently, she's been experimenting with oil paintings, and is now selling those on Etsy. She says the paintings are more cathartic to make than the jewelry.

"With the paintings, I'm the boss of that. It's on my clock," she said. "Maybe I'll go back to making jewelry, but if I do, it'll be metalworking."

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Photo by Lynn Lane

Amy Llanes and Jamie Zahradnik performing Breathless.

At the age of ten, Amy Llanes began training in jazz and tap. Her early years in the dance studio developed into a six-year competitive clogging career. Fun fact about the artistic director of one of Houston's newest dance companies: She's a two-time national clogging champion. It wasn't until her undergraduate years at Sam Houston State University that she discovered modern dance.

After suffering a fractured back during sophomore year, she decided to pull back from jazz and focus on modern. The shift in styles marked the beginnings of Rednerrus Feil Dance Company.

During a group improvisation exercise in college, Llanes, the group leader, began to piece the created fragments together. Her instructor then asked, "When does your show go up? It looks like it's almost finished to me." With those words of encouragement, she choreographed her first full-length concert while an undergraduate. "People began to ask, when is your next show? The company was a natural progression of people who wanted to work together and create," she explains.

So what, exactly, is Rednerrus Feil? "Rednerrus is surrender spelled backwards and feil is a word scramble for life. As a choreographer, that is exactly what I try to do. My intention is to be completely open, vulnerable and surrendering of my innermost self for the creative process. Most of the works I create stem from a moment, idea or image from my own personal life or the persons immediately surrounding me."

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Photos by Laura Burlton

Bevin Bering Dubrowski

What She Does
As director of the Houston Center for Photography, Dubrowski is responsible for working with members, staff and the HCP board to establish the vision and direction of the small Montrose museum, something she says is a privilege.

"Photography is changing every day. It's how we tell our stories. Our goal here is to educate people and share our vision," she said. Dubrowski's other roles include managing the museum's 30-year archive, editing HCP's magazine, spot, and its accompanying Web site, and dreaming up big ideas for the museum's education center.

"I work with exhibition staff to see what photographers are making. That's one of the most fun parts of what I do. I'm also thinking of who would make good teachers."

Dubrowski has been executive director at HCP for four years. Before that, she worked at the center as a volunteer for two years, and had been on the Board of Directors for all of two months when the previous executive director left. She is also a photographer herself -- she studied art history and contemporary photography at Emory University in Atlanta.

"I was just so entrenched in it [photography] from the time I made my first image," she said.

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Photo by Simon Gentry

A Frame Dance Productions engagement is more than a dance concert; it's an immersive experience that allows the audience to appreciate movement in ways that go beyond the proscenium stage. "I try to bring people into dance by making small shifts in the norm of experiencing it," says Lydia Hance, director and founder of Frame Dance. "I'm not trying to put dance on the moon, but create slight shifts, whether that's eliminating the fourth wall or inviting non-dancers into the work or creating an app for the iPhone to enhance the performance."

There's also her short films, like Crease and At First Delight, which are quirky, joyous and moody meditations that suggest character and narrative while also portraying fun and emotive movement.

Lydia began dancing when she was seven and grew up training in a ballet academy. It wasn't until high school, though, that she fell in love with choreography. As a senior, she produced her first full-length concert complete with lights, costumes, and music; later, college brought an intense study of Graham technique at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "I've also been really inspired by postmodern dance of the Bay Area, so my movement is a strange fusion of the two. Then there's the use of ballet as a first language."

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Photo by Brittanie Shey

Piyali Sen Dasgupta in her studio at Winter Street

What She Does
Piyali Sen Dasgupta is a mixed-media visual artist who uses everything from egg tempura, stamps and silk to paper, crayon, charcoal and more in her paintings, wood blocks and scarves. She got her start in lithography printmaking and silk-screening before moving to painting with egg tempura on rice paper. Though she works in many forms now, she said it wasn't always that way.

"I was a purist. Now I want to get into a space where I can use everything. The main idea is to express myself. I don't care about anything else," she said.

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Readers have a complaint about Miranda James's popular Cat in the Stacks series of cozy mysteries -- they have to wait too long between installments. Dean James, the male writer behind the Miranda James pseudonym, laughs at the often-heard grievance. "I'm writing one a year; I can't write much faster!"

James's latest release in the series, Out of Circulation, follows librarian Charlie Harris and Diesel, his rescued Maine coon cat. When a library fundraiser sets several of the organizers at odds, Harris is happy to sit on the sidelines and let the "ladies who lunch" duke it out. Then one of the women ends up dead, and Harris's housekeeper is the main suspect. No more sidelines for Harris; now he and Diesel have to catch the real killer in order to clear their friend's name.

Like the other titles in the Cat in the Stacks series, Out of Circulation made it onto the New York Times bestseller list. The experience left James "gobsmacked," according to his Facebook posts.

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Photo by Aaron Courtland

Nicola Parente

"For me, the expansive visual sensibility shared is such an important part of being a creative," says Italy-born painter and photographer Nicola Parente, a spiritual guy who is quite accomplished in the art world.

Parente's works have been shown all over the map, including Mexico and Ethiopia. He's also created work for Dominic Walsh Dance Theater and nearly took home The Texas Spirit award.

Parente, who creates medium-to-large scale works, earned his bachelor's from King College in Pennsylvania and his master's from the University of St. Thomas in 2004.

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Debora Smail

What She Does: Along with her partner Paul Forde, Cheryl Schulke has a leatherworking shop called Stash set up in the historic Haynes Mattress Factory, which was purchased by her grandparents in the middle of the last century. Schulke first got into working with leather after receiving a cowhide in trade for some photography work, and from there has gone on to establish herself as a dedicated creator of unique, custom bags that you can find at Houston's Urban Market.

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