Alumni of the Month: Kenisha Webster

When Kenisha Webster returned to college in 2023, she assumed she’d be studying photography. After all, she had been practicing the craft since 2005 and planned to pursue an associate’s degree in it. But life had other plans for Kenisha—and so did art.

At the time, Kenisha was managing a serious autoimmune condition that impacted her mobility and speech—the same condition that had forced her to leave Stephen F. Austin State University after high school. After returning to college as a non-traditional student, her only goal was to finish as quickly as possible. She turned to her faculty advisor, Dr. Melde, and asked for the fastest route to graduation. Melde suggested taking ceramics. Although Kenisha had never touched clay before, she enrolled in her first ceramics course in May 2023—and everything changed.

“I absolutely fell in love,” Kenisha said.

Working with clay became more than a passion—it became a support system. It offered her a way to express herself without words and brought peace to the distress her auto-immune disease had caused.

“Art re-centered me,” she said. It tamed her autoimmune condition and brought back parts of her she hadn’t seen in years.

Kenisha primarily uses clay sourced from her family’s ancestral land in the “Pineywoods” of Northeast Texas. That same iron-rich soil that shaped her childhood now forms the foundation of her vessels and sculptures—works that explore cultural history and transformation.

Kenisha went on to earn her Associate of Fine Arts from Texarkana College and transferred to East Texas A&M University, where she will graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Studies in May 2025. She’s already been accepted into a graduate program at Stephen F. Austin State University—returning to the very place where her college journey first began.

Kenisha’s journey hasn’t been easy, but it’s one branded by resilience, creativity, and the power of starting again. For students who may feel overwhelmed by the idea of going to college, or returning later in life, her advice is powerful:

“Everything is hard until it’s done—everything is scary until it’s done. But you can do hard things. All you have to do is start.”

From a tough beginning to becoming a recognized name across East Texas, Kenisha Webster’s work tells a story of courage and transformation—of a woman who found her voice again through clay, and now uses that voice to shape inspiration, memories, and art from the ground up.