The "wow" factor of many set designs lies in their enviable resplendency — their evocation of worlds in which most of us wouldn't mind spending the rest of our days. The Maltz Jupiter Theatre's Annie and Other Desert Cities come to mind, with their lush and livable milieus of money well-spent. Others, like our winner, reside on the opposite extreme, reminding us of places we hope to never see or, since it's a historically grounded piece, to never see again. The Timekeepers is set in a labor camp, and with his design for Island City Stage's production, Michael McClain took the bold gamble of fencing in his set with row after row of barbed wire. Inside the richly detailed, modified chicken coop were wonderfully curated objects, from the makeshift toilet — AKA, a metal bucket — to the vintage Victrola to, most important, the box of broken watches we understood to have been removed from the remains of Holocaust victims and whose existence is the only thing keeping the play's two central characters alive. Those obtrusive wires were a constant reminder of the characters' hopelessness, but at the same time, when the drama heated up inside the camp, you forgot they were there. This set might not have worked on a larger stage, but with its already inherent sense of confinement, Empire Stage provided an ideal environment; it was the best set we've ever seen in that room.

Over the past year, Slow Burn Theatre Company has proved that sometimes the best theater can originate from the unlikeliest places: in this case, a high school in the boondocks of West Boca Raton, an area so remote that you're likely to pass tumbleweeds on your way to the parking lot. But once you get inside, you're transported to worlds that are complex, moving, frightening, and unique. Founders Patrick Fitzwater and Matthew Korinko, who launched Slow Burn five years ago, are never content to restage the same old theatrical warhorses, preferring to challenge their audiences with plays they've never seen before — and sometimes improving on the source material in the process. This past year saw the theater fully emerge from its shell; for the first time, it became eligible for Carbonell Awards, and its first show of the season, Next to Normal, promptly received more nominations than any other production in South Florida (Fitzwater won for Best Director of a Musical). Slow Burn presented this rock musical about a bipolar housewife with remarkable depth and humanity, bolstered by six dynamic voices and a beguiling set design inspired by M.C. Escher. The company followed it with Parade, another high-water mark (see our Best Musical winner). Its next show, Chess, couldn't match the previous two in emotional connection, but its breathtaking lead performances continued to shatter boundaries.

It was just the second production from Fort Lauderdale company Island City Stage, but The Timekeepers became the year's underdog success story when it won all six of its nominated categories, including Best Production of a Play, at the Carbonell Awards. Why? First, it's a brilliantly written play, by Dan Clancy, that touches important subject matter — homophobia, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust — without being depressing or messagey. It's set in a Nazi labor camp, where a flamboyant gay man and a retiring Jewish man are forced to spend their days repairing timepieces. But they need to get over their own prejudices against each other before they can turn their abysmal situation into a shared life that's worthwhile, even if that life has a limit at the bottom of a box of watches. The play's tone is not an easy one to strike, but Michael Leeds' direction for Island City Stage was deliberate yet transfixing, and the interactions of his cast felt heart-stoppingly authentic. Michael McKeever, an accomplished playwright and comic actor, showed us an entirely new persona onstage, tapping dramatic reservoirs of which I didn't know he was capable. The Carbonell-winning sound design, with its crackle of vinyl records, blankets of gunfire, and metronomic tick of pocket watches, helped bring the stunning scenic design to bracing life.

When South Florida's theater critics attended Slow Burn Theatre's Next to Normal in October, most of them had seen the same show a year and a half earlier at Actors' Playhouse in Coral Gables, in a production that was nominated for some of the highest honors in the community. But they hadn't seen anything quite like Fitzwater's take on this masterful musical. Bold flashes of color and potent, uncomplicated choreography told the story of a wife and mother's struggle with bipolar disorder with great efficiency. But what really made this production resonate was that, like Slow Burn's best work, it uncovered new territory within a familiar text, finding unforeseen avenues to explore. A more straightforward reading of Next to Normal would laser the attention largely on Diana, the direct sufferer of the debilitating condition, but Fitzwater's genius lay in shifting the central focus to the family members, like daughter Natalie (Anne Chamberlain) and husband Dan (Matthew Korinko), both of whom were justifiably nominated for Carbonell Awards. They became the emotional shrapnel of Diana's erratic, delusional behavior; the tragedy of her reality hit home the hardest through Korinko's tear-stained Dan, which probably ranks as his finest performance.

When it comes to writing concept albums, John Darnielle of indie-rock cult heroes the Mountain Goats once said, "I write songs, and they begin to sort of hang together, sort of like a crowd gathering in a public space." That's basically what happened with The Longing and the Short of It, a collection of older and newer songs from emerging composer-lyricist Daniel Mate. He realized that beyond their specifics — a man waits, frustrated, in an endless Starbucks queue; a boy feels he can never live up to his more talented brother; a woman runs into her ex in a public venue — the songs all dealt with longing, with an emotional or physical lack that needed to be filled. The world-premiere, cabaret-style production of these songs at Theatre at Arts Garage was simplicity personified, with the refreshingly Spartan musical direction (just an onstage piano) and set design putting our focus fully on the six actor/singers, who felt born to translate Mate's funny, knotty, and touching lyrics. If there was one showstopper among them, it was Elizabeth Dimon's uproarious "Starting Shit With You," which contained such brilliant lines as "Like a melted GI Joe, I'm sticking to my guns."

Earlier this year, Fort Lauderdale got aesthetically lucky when artist and Florida Atlantic University assistant professor of architecture Henning Haupt took his class outside to get to work. There, he and his crew used paint rollers to beautify "the tunnel" inside the city parking garage located between First and Second avenues just north of Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale. With paint rollers in hand, they transformed the space from ceiling to floor into a psychedelic gem boasting six layers of red, yellow, and blue tones. The result adds a little culture to your morning commute.

LoCastro's work is badass. In recent years, the lowbrow artist grew up, from curating hip shows in Wynwood to staying in and focusing on his work full-time. Good thing he did. Last year, the Italian-German artist impressed the art world when he launched his "Geometry" series. The vivid abstract works are a result of a painstaking painting technique. He begins by pouring resin on a wooden box or flat surface, sets it to dry overnight, and then uses criss-crosses of tape to create geometric patterns on the dry surface. He then spray-paints over the tape, lets the paint dry, and removes the tape. He pours another layer of resin, creates another paint layer, and so on. The layering takes countless hours and creates a graphic design appeal, but viewing it up-close is when pure magic unfolds. Colors shine and glow through layers upon layers. The designs translate well on fabric, so he created a line featuring scarfs, skirts, and leggings that can be purchased at his eponymous website.

Trying to catch up with Ubiera is nearly impossible. He's usually out burning up hours spray-painting walls. The Dominican-born street artist has painted murals inside the International Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport, inside the Evernia Parking Garage in West Palm Beach, at Delray's El Camino Cocina and Tequila Bar, and at Miami's Wynwood Brewery, just to name a few. Ubiera describes his style as "postgraffism," a genre that grew out of graffiti and includes nods to graphic design, comic books, and typography. Many of his designs incorporate a gorilla with a wild and fierce face. For Ubiera, the gorilla signifies urban art: a movement that's bold, strong, and raw.

Nowadays, anyone with an Instagram account can claim to be a photographer. But Samantha Salzinger goes beyond using slick editing filters when snapping photographs. She actually constructs the environments she shoots. The Yale MFA graduate and associate professor of art at Palm Beach State College makes large-scale dioramas with her hands. She'll spend hours sculpting materials into landscapes, plush with trees and hills and eerie Mars-like grounds void of life. With a meticulous attention to lighting and detail, she'll take her camera and shoot. The resulting photographs appear to capture realistic landscapes; it often takes viewers a while to grasp that they're interacting with a fabricated world.

Jill Slaughter, a San Francisco Art Institute-schooled and Whitney Museum-awarded scholar, brings a creative vision to suburban Pembroke Pines. As the city's curator of special projects, she puts on shows year-round at Studio 18. Many of these have serious themes — in "Which Way Out," she explored LGBT coming out of the proverbial closet; in "The Sincerity Project," she showed works by autistic children — but she made us crack a smile last year when she enlisted artist Todd Brittingham to "face-bomb" her city by gluing cartoonish smiley faces onto buildings and trees.