Rosie’s story: from art class at ARHS to a design team at Urban Outfitters
ARHS graduate Rosie Dinsmore, age 23, is an artist who sees beauty in the mundane and recognizes creativity in those who may not see it for themselves. She is the kind of person who notes the architectural details of the window trim on historic houses in her neighborhood, later incorporating their dynamic nature in a frame detail of her latest painting. She is the kind of person who says that physics is very creative, and people who are into physics are very poetic, although she has never had much interest in it herself. She moves through life with compassion, appreciation, and innovation, traits that have guided her to where she is now. Her work, viewable at rosiedinsmore.com, is impressive.
Dinsmore spent the first eight years of her life living in Amherst, before moving to Leverett with her family. She went to Leverett Elementary before moving on to ARMS and then ARHS. Eventually, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Of her geographical ties, she said, “I would say they are very new England; my whole family is from New England.” She was raised by her mom, an English teacher at Summit Academy of ARPS, and her dad, a physics professor at UMass.
While neither of her parents are artists in practice, Dinsmore considers them hobbyists who are very much in touch with their creativity through woodworking and other pursuits. She recalls having plenty of encouragement from her parents around using her artistic voice. “I’m a very project-based person and I come from a very project-based family so that has definitely influenced a lot of how I relax and connect with people and get a lot of fulfillment,” said Dinsmore.
Taking art classes was a highlight in Dinsmore’s time at ARHS, where she remembers taking nearly every studio art course offering there was to take. Though she normally found herself drawn to drawing and illustration, Dinsmore was surprised to find her favorite classes were making ceramics with Hannah Hartl. “I was so hooked. It was such a wonderful community, I would stay almost every day after school and just hang out and throw pots,” she said. “Ms. Hartl is amazing and that’s still one of my favorite communities and memories of how it started.”
Dinsmore seemed to hold a very special place in her heart for pottery and ceramics in the year before going to art school. As an aspiring artist, she was eager to seek out role models in people who had successfully made a living off their art in the real world. For Dinsmore, one of those people was Molly Canter, a potter from Shelburne Falls who she worked for for a couple of years. ¨She was such a wonderful role model because she was an artist who made and sold her work which was so wonderful to be around,¨ she said.
Having graduated in the spring of 2020, Dinsmore finished her high school chapter in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Luckily all of her college semesters were on the RISD campus in Providence, for the first year and a half many of them were remote. “It definitely felt like the whole thing was affected. Class structure shifted and the ways people socialized shifted, so it was an interesting time,” said Dinsmore.
Though her transition from high school to college-level art classes was not without its challenges, Dinsmore used the solitary nature of quarantine to her advantage, making room for growth as a student and artist. Finding little to no social scene to distract her, she had more capacity to focus on her work. “That time was something I felt like I could put into my coursework rather than feeling untethered or at a loss of what to do,” she said.
Much of the solo work Dinsmore did in those first couple years of her college career helped her grasp the reins of her own studies, and flourish even under a rigorous curriculum of such a renowned arts school. Dinsmore explained that as she expanded her horizons as an artist and developed more of an ownership over her work, she didn’t mind all the work she was given because she soon realized she wanted to do it anyway. It’s definitely a gift to have a lot of work when it’s work you really care about” Dinsmore said, “When it’s something that feels like it will contribute to my portfolio and I will be able to build on later, for my own benefit, then I’m happy to sign onto that.”
This idea played a big role in why Dinsmore had decided to apply to art schools, where the focus was mostly on her growth as an artist, versus liberal arts where she could get more breadth but less depth in her area of interest.
She knew that art was what she wanted to pursue during and after college, and recognized RISD as one of the best institutions to prepare for her career involving the arts. RISD’s career center was another source of inspiration for Dinsmore, where a network of practicing artists from around the world would come and talk about their journeys and how they decided to pursue them.
Even her classmates served as huge inspirations, as many of them came with strong ideas and specific agendas that they asserted in their work. “An art school where every single person goes there because they want a career in art was actually more structured and it felt more directed to me. I really liked how that community was so strong there,” she said.
Besides her peers and visiting artists at school, Dinsmore has also looked up to many of her professors. As a drawing and illustration major, she especially admired one of her illustration professors, Fred Lynch. He is a RISD alum who has been teaching there full-time since 2015.
Dinsmore loved how much energy Lynch put into his teaching and how he strived to provide interesting content for his students. “He had so many great quotable inspirational things he would say during class and such great lesson plans,” said Dinsmore. “Growing up in a family of teachers I definitely love it when professors are super organized and I loved how seriously he took his classes.”
After graduating in 2024 and navigating the transition out of college so expertly, Dinsmore achieved what she has always hoped to do, to apply her creative passions in her work. Dinsmore harnessed all she had learned at school, combined with her own initiatives, to find herself with a job on the Urban Outfitter design team not two weeks after graduating from RISD.
She had been trying to land an internship with the company for two years, and despite having gone in person for interviews she hadn’t gotten a spot. However, then she took the matter into her own hands and reached out to an Urban Outfitters Hiring manager, who connected her to someone who had an opening.
Dinsmore highlighted how useful networking has been in her career, ¨I truly think that everything that I’ve done that I really cared about was through a recommendation from someone,¨ she said. ¨Networking is so much more useful than LinkedIn and it’s just taught me that having relationships with people always pays off and it kind of reminds you of why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
She currently holds the position of Assistant Designer for Urban Outfitters, where her team focuses on hard goods such as kitchen decorative items, accessories, and candles. Dinsmore is able to work remotely two days a week and goes into the office the other days, making up her 5 day work week. Her team comprises three or four individuals, an intimate number of collaborators that Dinsmore hadn’t anticipated before working there.
¨I thought it would be this huge thing and we work with a lot of other teams that help facilitate our success but in terms of the design team it’s pretty small,¨ she said. Along with her colleagues, Dinsmore designs renderings for different designs by creating an image of what they want them to look like, before collaborating with manufacturing companies overseas to create the finished products. Though she had worked at Michael’s throughout high school and dappled with freelance or self-employed gigs, working for Urban Outfitters is her first corporate job.
Having experienced so much change and new perspective in the last few months since graduating from RISD, Dinsmore draws on her own experience when she urges people to go easy on themselves when finding their community and path outside of school.
She shared that simply talking to like-minded people, older or younger, has directed her a lot when she is feeling unsure of where to go next. Someone else’s path may not necessarily align with yours, but “I found that [even if engaging with others like me] is not directly helpful in terms of informing my choices, [they still can provide] a lovely sense of solidarity and perspective,¨ said Dinsmore.
