Fall 2025 Open House – Dawn Hayden
Come celebrate the start of the semester with us at the CPAD Open House on Friday, September 19 from 2-4 PM in the CPAD Lab @ Borland 113! This week we’re spotlighting the work of Dawn Hayden, who will be one of the artists at the Open House.
About the artist:
Dawn Hayden is a multimedia artist, designer, and storyteller born in Paoli, Pennsylvania. She recently completed her Bachelor of Design in Digital Multimedia Design at Penn State University, along with a Certificate in Digital Arts from the College of Arts and Architecture. She lives and works between Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois.
Dawn’s work blends photography, collage, video, and experimental typography to explore themes of compassion, presence, and emotional connection in everyday spaces. Her current project, BeLovingKindness, reimagines visual metaphors for care and connection in urban environments through digitally layered collage, soundscape, and augmented reality. Her creative practice is deeply informed by over a decade of international development work in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and the Philippines, where among other things, she led communication initiatives, trained youth in digital storytelling, and managed national media campaigns.
She currently serves as a Senior Advisor for the Neighborhood Free Health Clinic serving southwestern WI, and Veterans Community Response based in WA, ID, and MT. Dawn enjoys labeling all things, laughs most days with her partner while their dog gives them side eye, and relishes the fact that smiles are free.
BeLovingKindness is a visual meditation on compassion as a deliberate act. This collage-based series began with a simple question: What does it mean to be loving kindness?
The work explores how tenderness, stillness, contradiction, and care can live inside our daily spaces, particularly in places that are fragmented, overlooked, or discarded. I photograph ordinary materials: chairs, trash bins, trains, clocks, flowers, mailboxes, and collage them with poetic text fragments drawn from Metta meditation and personal reflection.
Phrases like “May I be grounded,” “Let go,” and “You are not a machine” appear in glowing gradients or soft motion. They offer the viewer an opportunity to participate in compassion and stillness in a world that rarely slows down.
Each collage in this exhibit is enhanced through augmented reality, activating soundscapes, brief meditations, floating text, and visual effects that bring the works to life in a multi-sensory, participatory experience.
