The 2026 Fall Arts Preview: Ones to Watch

Six Atlanta creatives on the way to bigger things

Our editors selected six Atlantans doing outstanding creative work in various disciplines. Atlanta has no shortage of noteworthy talent, and it’s not about who is the best in any given genre, but we think these six are exemplary. It’s worth watching what they do next.

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The cinematic Southern gothic pop of Ian Elliott goes viral

His website describes his music as “Yearning rock for feral Booktok leftists,” but Marietta-based Ian Elliott is a prolific singer-songwriter with an impressive online following. Born in South Carolina, he recently said he’s “been involved with music pretty much my entire life.”

From singing in a pop duo with his brother to backing American Idol contestant Alto Moon, the 34-year-old musician’s career has been a diverse journey. “Two years ago, I decided I wanted to try my own solo project, which I’d never really done before. I started writing songs, and my goal was to write them and just not care what anyone else might think of them. I was doing them for my own enjoyment in a studio in my house.”

Early this year, Elliott decided to post some of the songs to social media. He made a dedicated TikTok page and began to post the song “Mystic Woman” daily. “My goal was to post it every day until I hated myself,” he laughed. “That was the idea, to post it every single day, starting on January first, until I just felt humiliated by it. By January 6, it went viral.” Other songs became popular as well, including “Movie Screen.”

During the pandemic, Elliott began exploring filmmaking, and it has served his his burgeoning social media career well. “I tend to lean toward the more cinematic approach, and it seems to work for my music videos.”

Originally drawn to the Atlanta area to attend chiropractic school a decade ago, Elliott was impressed by the busy music scene. “When I first moved here, I made a spreadsheet of every open mic night in the area. After class, I would take my guitar and go to two a week. I did that for a couple of years. In the process, I got to know the folks at Eddie’s Attic, Smith’s Olde Bar and Mad Life in Woodstock pretty well. I got some opening gigs, but it wasn’t quite panning out for me.”

“I know it sounds kinda cliché, but as soon as I started making music just to please myself, that’s when other people decided they liked it, too.”

After self-releasing a series of singles, Elliott signed a recording contract in April with Cobrand, an upstart label with a uniquely analytical approach to artist marketing. “They want me to keep doing singles until I have enough to tour with — and then the plan is to combine them into an EP or a full-length album.”

Thanks to his online presence, Elliott has started getting recognized in public, and he said the acknowledgement has been a surreal experience. “Recently, I was out for dinner in Little Five Points, and I noticed a woman was taking pictures of me with her cellphone. I was like, ‘Why is she doing this?’ Then she came over and started singing ‘Mystic Woman’ to me. It was like I was in a TV show or something. It felt so strange. It’s pretty hard to reconcile, because I still try to work as if nobody cares about what I do. But I’m sure glad they do!”

Check out Elliott’s TikTok and Instagram.

— Lee Valentine Smith

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Director Lydia Fort tackles works that center growth, gray areas

For Lydia Fort, directing is about helping people grow and giving them space to tell their stories.

As resident director of Theater Emory and an associate professor of theater studies at Emory University, Fort bridges the classroom and the stage. Over the last 25 years, she has directed productions from the Classical Theatre of Harlem in her native New York to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

Fort moved to Atlanta eight years ago and admires that each theater has its niche. No matter the cast or the crowd, though, she aims to bring an understanding of why people choose their paths.

“Whether it’s a TV show that I’m watching, a play that I’m directing or in the classroom, I’m always thinking: ‘How are we growing? How are we transforming?’” Fort said.

As a Black woman, she sees her artistic choices as part of a larger lineage.

“As people of color, anything that we do has some kind of social or political message or effect just by the nature of how we exist in this country,” she said. “I want to make work that opens opportunities for conversation.”

She recently directed Valeka Jessica’s introspective I’m a Motherfucking Superstar at Theatrical Outfit. While it explored claiming joy for oneself, the upcoming world premiere of Jayne Deely’s i never asked for a gofundme at Actor’s Express (October 1 through October 25) turns the lens outward. Centering a queer Alabama couple mired by gossip and unwanted donations after a top surgery is mistaken for breast cancer, the poignant comedy explores how people show up for each other.

“It’s about how we care for the people closest to us,” Fort said. “[I enjoy plays that] humanize people and introduce their gray areas so we’re looking at them not so much as opposites or villains but as complicated characters with a story to tell.”

Check out Fort’s website at lydiafort.com.

— Angela Oliver

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Kerry Lee blends Chinese dance traditions with personal narrative

Kerry Lee has spent her life moving between worlds. At 5 years old, she began training in Chinese dance under her mother, Hwee-Eng Y. Lee, founder of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company. Outside the studio, she immersed herself in ballet, Broadway-style jazz and contemporary dance, eventually studying engineering at Stanford before leaving consulting behind to pursue the art form that had quietly shaped her life all along. Today, she serves as co-artistic director of the company her mother founded more than three decades ago, bringing a distinctly Chinese American perspective to an art form rooted in centuries of tradition.

For Lee, dance has never been just about movement. It has been a way to understand herself. Her mother immigrated to the United States from Singapore, arriving with a strong sense of her Chinese identity already intact. Lee’s experience was different. Born and raised in Atlanta, she grew up balancing two cultures, often wondering where she fit between them. That search eventually became the foundation of her choreography.

“When you come to the country, you already kind of know who you are,” Lee said of her mother’s experience. “But for me, I was trying to figure out what it meant to have Chinese heritage and also be American.”

That perspective has reshaped the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company’s artistic direction. Rather than treating Chinese dance solely as a way to preserve cultural traditions, Lee is using it to tell contemporary stories about identity, belonging and community. Her latest work, Chinese American Journeys, marks the first full-length production in the company’s 35-year history devoted entirely to original works exploring Chinese American experiences.

Lee’s career has taken her far beyond Atlanta. After college, she danced professionally in New York with companies specializing both in Chinese dance and contemporary movement before returning home, where she also performed with gloATL. She is a Dance/USA artist fellow and remains the only Chinese dancer to earn a ticket on So You Think You Can Dance (Season 11). Yet her greatest impact may be happening closer to home.

As co-artistic director, Lee is expanding the possibilities of Chinese dance in Atlanta, blending classical traditions with contemporary movement, ballet and martial arts while creating space for stories that have rarely been seen on American stages.

For Lee, choreography isn’t simply about preserving the past. It’s about helping others see themselves in the present. Through movement, she is inviting audiences to reconsider who belongs in America’s cultural narrative and ensuring the next generation grows up seeing stories she once searched for herself.

— Brittany Mackins

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Printmaker Sergio Suárez probes the cosmos using carved wood and pressed ink

Parsing through a few sentences of Sergio Suárez’s artist statement is dizzying, prompting one to wonder if he might be from a different dimension. The Atlanta-based printmaker, originally from Mexico is, at the least, a much deeper thinker than most.

“My practice constructs a visual language concerned with syncretism, porosity and the influence of time and distance over notions of material, historical and metaphysical shared realities,” he wrote in the statement he submitted to South Arts before the nonprofit organization named him Georgia’s 2026 state fellow in July. The honor granted Suárez $5,000 and made him eligible to win the larger Southern Prize for Visual Arts.

(In case you’re now reaching for your dictionary — syncretism: the mixing of different religions, cultures or ideas to make a new tradition or belief system; porosity: a measure of the empty, void or pore spaces within a solid material.)

The way Suárez writes about his work is a good indicator of the contemplation, time and meaning he invests in his art.

Suárez’s signature pieces are intricate ink prints pressed on stretched cotton from large-scale, hand-carved pieces of wood. The carvings, like giant wooden stamps, create complicated webs of white lines that interrupt the black ink to create images containing sacred symbolism, astrological shapes, human forms and fragmented natural landscapes.

“The work oscillates between the sacred and the corporeal, between ancestral gestures and the contemporary gaze,” Suárez writes.

Beyond his ink prints, Suárez also creates works on ceramic and stone. One artwork, titled Plane of Immanence, is made of 150 carved and glazed tiles arranged in a grid on the gallery floor in the shape of a real body of water. He calls the work an “anti-vessel: the ceramic body not containing liquid but forming the liquid.”

Suárez’s work not only earned him this year’s title of Georgia South arts fellow, it also landed him an upcoming exhibition at Emory’s Carlos Museum. The exhibition — Anamnesis — will open September 19 and be on view through January 24, 2027.

The name comes from the Greek noun, anamnesis, which can be translated as “reminiscence.” The term was also used by Plato to describe the innate knowledge recalled by the immortal soul through each rebirth.

Suárez had already risen rapidly prior to this year’s accolades. The young artist, who was born in 1995 and earned his BFA just five years ago in 2021 from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design, has already showcased his work in cities across the globe, including Vancouver, Mexico City, London, Haugesund, Tokyo and Kefalonia. His pieces are part of the public collections at the Zuckerman Museum in Kennesaw and MOCA GA. At this rate, his notoriety just might grow to be as big as his philosophies.

On September 19, Suárez will speak at an artists’ talk from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. at the opening reception of Anamnesis. A guided tour of the exhibition with curators Ruth Allen and Andi McKenzie will follow on October 2 from 6:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m.

— Danielle Charbonneau

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Playwright Kira Rockwell explores female characters through comedy 

Since relocating to Atlanta in 2022, playwright Kira Rockwell has made quite an impression upon local audiences, who have had multiple chances to see her work.

“I absolutely feel like I’ve been welcomed with open arms, and I have been really blessed,” Rockwell said in a recent interview. “The opportunities that are being given to me and the ways in which that allows me to give to this community — it’s been truly a gift. This city feels like a home.”

Her debut production Oh, To Be Pure Again had its world premiere at Actor’s Express in 2023, earning rave reviews and winning her the playwriting prize at the Suzi Bass Awards. This summer, her script The Penelopes received a developmental production at Theatrical Outfit, part of its Launchpad Festival. 

With her work, Rockwell explores complex female characters and the pressures and expectations placed on them in modern culture. Her scripts are insightful, emotional and funny.

Now, Horizon Theatre is presenting her comedy Holy Chicken Sandwich until September 20. The show about devotees to a fast food franchise at a chaotic grand opening — featuring Marcie Millard, Brad Raymond, Cara Mantella and Alejandra Ruiz — will be directed by Lisa Adler.

Rockwell hopes the play leaves audiences laughing and uplifted.

“By the end of it, audiences should leave with a sense of hope that we can see — within ourselves — that we are still worth fighting for as a community,” she said. “There is hope on the other side of all of this.”

Visit Rockwell’s website at kirarockwell.com.

— Benjamin Carr

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The Horne Brothers are making documentary magic

The Horne Brothers’ award-winning documentary, The South Got Something to Say, the 2024 film about Atlanta’s ties to hip-hip, could just as easily be the title of their own production careers.

Byron, Tyson and Ryon have been that go-to team for some of the best film and video work coming out of Atlanta since they formed their company in 2006.

They’ve produced for others (MARTA transit system, Clark Atlanta University), themselves (Invasion) and for employers (The South Got Something to Say is a film commissioned byThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tyson’s and Ryon’s former employer).

Ryon says the diversity of projects have taken them all over the world and opened the door to working with big names in the entertainment industry, including comedian and actor Chris Tucker, Broadway stage director Kenny Leon and Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis.  

Their most recent project, Love, Patrick: Nothing Is Impossible, took them to Paris to walk the same streets as the subject of the 90-minute documentary, fashion designer Patrick Kelly. What started as an assignment for Ryon to work his editing expertise in the movie quickly became a Horne Brothers production as the filming evolved.

“When Ryon saw it, he was like, ‘Hey, guys, we need to be involved with this,’” Tyson said of the brothers being brought on board with the blessing of executive producers Ray Cornelius and Jessica Manning. “They were open to it and were gracious enough to allow us to come in and work with their baby.”

Ryon says that’s what has made their business grow so quickly. Their individual skills have kept them in demand — Ryon as a writer/director, Byron the ideas man and Tyson the photographic eye. When they meld together, they make magic.

“The work now for us is about legacy, about what we leave behind,” Ryon said. “It’s what we want people to feel when they see our work and how people feel when they encounter us.”

— Leon Stafford