Ivette Spradlin is an award winning, Cuban-American artist whose work centers around the emotional aspects of transition, adaptation and communal ties. She holds a MFA from Tyler School of Art and a BFA from the University of Georgia. Since the 1990’s she has photographed and recorded the stories of members of different subcultures and their environs, such as punks and skateboarders, Cuban exiles in the United States, female-identifying artists, those who have experienced a Bigfoot sighting and her friends and neighbors during the 2020 lockdown.
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Spradlin has shown her work nationally and internationally, and has taught photography and art at colleges and universities in and around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, including Carnegie Mellon University for eleven years.
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For ten years, Spradlin collaborated with Lenore Thomas as an artist team called BUFF. BUFF created multiple bodies of work, showed in several exhibitions, publications and screenings, and continued to produce new work despite living in separate states.
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In 2021, after twelve years in Pittsburgh, Spradlin relocated back to the Atlanta area where she began working on an oral history project called The Wild Wild West End. This video oral history has screened in multiple cities and won an Audience Choice Award the Berlin Punk Film Festival in 2025. When she is not working on her projects, she is taking long night walks with her partner and basking in her role as "Tía" to her siblings' amazing children. She currently teaches part time at Kennesaw State University.
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