Faculty
Our faculty has been carefully selected to represent the Academy’s new vision – one that combines the legacy they inherit, and that looks forward to the future of figurative and representational art. Individually, these artists and scholars are at the top of their respective fields; together, they are the core of the Academy and its mission.
RICK LACEY
DIRECTOR OF YOUTH PROGRAMS AND PRINCIPAL CONTINUING EDUCATION INSTRUCTOR
Originally from Evergreen, Colorado, Rick has spent most of his life in Lyme, Connecticut. He graduated from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2011, with a BFA in painting. He is a recipient of the American Visions Award, as well as the John Stobart Fellowship Award. Rick has been featured in several national magazines, including both American Artist and Art of the West. Rick currently works at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, in Old Lyme, Connecticut, teaching highly popular classes in drawing and painting.
MARISSA ASAL
PRINCIPAL YOUTH INSTRUCTOR
A Connecticut native and a student of master oil painter Will Cotton since 2015, Marissa Asal received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2019. In spring 2018, Marissa spent a semester living in Tuscany, Italy, studying Renaissance art. Asal produces realistic portraiture in a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, watercolor, pastel, ink, and oil paint. Her celebrity portraits have been particularly widely praised. Marissa teaches highly popular summer youth classes.
PAUL MICHAEL
PRINCIPAL PRINTMAKING INSTRUCTOR
Shawn Paul Michael is a Connecticut-based artist who employs printmaking in order to consider themes of isolation and connection in everyday life. He received a BFA from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, where he was a recipient of the Chandler Scholarship, and completed his MFA and Graduate Certificate in Arts Leadership and Cultural Management at the University of Connecticut. Michael’s recent exhibitions include: Video Lounge at URSA Gallery, Bridgeport, CT; Heads/Tails at Atlantic Gallery, NY; Froth at Jill Krutick Fine Art, Mamanoreck, NY; The 13th Biennial Mini Print Exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Fan Culture at the CICA Museum, South Korea; and Sour Milk at the William Benton Museum of Art, CT.
MARINA MELLUZZO
Marina Melluzzo is a second-year art student at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, studying fine arts and traditional realism. An Old Lyme native, she has been pursuing her passion for art since high school. Now, she brings the techniques she is learning at the Academy to her own classroom, continuing the legacy of exemplary art education that has made Old Lyme a destination site for artists for over a century.
EMILY ARCHER
Raised in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Archer’s education in classical art began at a young age through workshops and courses at both the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts and Grand Central Atelier in New York. She later held an internship at a retail fashion company in Manhattan, a period during which she frequented museums and drew inspiration from works of the Old Masters and of 19th-century figurative painters. Her own work, now pursued through the Core Program at the Lyme Academy and which encompasses landscape, still life, and figurative art, unites the concepts of essential beauty and truth to nature with an understanding of visual phenomena, traditional technique, and adherence to observation, while exploring the balance between “the intimacy of the individual and the resonance of the universal.”