The Studios Application review panel
We are beyond grateful to all of these artists and curators who have devoted time, energy, and expertise in selecting the top artists and writers for The Studios at MASS MoCA. Our application review panels change each cycle. Thank you to:
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2026 Residency Season:
Cate Pasquarelli
Cate Pasquarelli received a BFA from the Cooper Union and studied at the Slade School of Art in London, UK. She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum, BravinLee Programs, Steve Turner, The Dorsky Museum, the Wassaic Project, and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair in New York and Los Angeles. Her work is included in the collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody as well as filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver. Selected residencies and awards include the Cooper Union Medici Award for excellence in art, a Winter Residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA, and a Programming Fellowship at the Wassaic Project.
Pasquarelli currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Murjoni Merriweather
Sculptor, Murjoni Merriweather (she/her) grew up in Temple Hills, Maryland. During her time there, she fell in love with art at the age of 8 learning how to draw from trial and error and art kits her parents would give her. After dabbling in photography, drawing, painting and graphic design, Murjoni tried out ceramics by the time she was in 8th grade where her heart grew whole. While feeling so connected to clay, she started making work that reflected the black experience. In 2018 Murjoni graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art with her BFA in Ceramics and concentration in Film/video. During this time, she explored celebrating blackness through figurative forms. Murjoni has been able to expand her knowledge and experiment at places like Creative Alliance (Baltimore, 2019-2022), Fountainhead Residency (Miami, 2021) and The Alma | Lewis Residency (PA, 2022) in ways that talk about emotion through the clay itself.
Murjoni currently resides in Baltimore Maryland with her cat, Kiva, where she continues to aim towards inspiring and celebrating black culture in ways that make us feel seen.
Berny Tan
Berny Tan (b.1990, Singapore) (she/her) is an artist and curator who explores the tensions that arise when she applies systems to – and unearths systems in – her subjective experiences. Her strategies often reflect a fundamental interest in language as it is read and written by her. In her curatorial work, she nurtures an artist-centred practice grounded in empathy, sensitivity, and collaboration.
Tan holds an MA (Dist) in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BFA (Hons) in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts. Between 2021 and 2024 – while continuing to present her artwork in solo and group exhibitions – she organised 8 curatorial projects in Singapore, including a publicly accessible residency as part of Singapore Biennale 2022. She earned the 2022 IMPART Art Prize in recognition of her independent curatorial practice. Since 2024, Tan has been Curator of the Design Collection at Singapore Art Museum.
Photo by Charmaine Poh.
Willie Binnie
Willie Binnie (he/him) is a Scottish-American artist born in Dallas, TX in 1985. He lives and works in Williamstown, MA, where he has been a lecturer at Williams College since 2019. He received his BA from Pitzer College in 2008 and his MFA from SMU in 2014. Binnie has been awarded residencies at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, FL (2014), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE (2020), and The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX (2024). Binnie co-founded Beefhaus, an artist-run art space and community center in the Expo Park neighborhood of Dallas, which supported solo and group presentations and performances from 2013-2018. In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, Binnie co-founded the Puerto Rican artist residency program at MassMoCA–an ongoing, fully-funded fellowship for visual artists and writers from Puerto Rico.
Martín Wannam
Martín Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) (he/him) is a visual artist and educator whose work offers a critical exploration of his homeland’s historical, social, and political landscape from a cuir viewpoint. With an equatorial perspective that intersects brownness and wildness, Wannam’s iconoclastic and maximalist approach challenges mainstream narratives through photography, sculpture, and performance art. He earned an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico, a Diploma in Contemporary Photography from La Fototeca, Guatemala, and a BA in Graphic Design from Universidad Rafael Landivar. His work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Latinxs Project at NYU, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center (Chicago), El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Panama), Houston Art League, Project Row House (TX), and the XXIII & XXIV Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City. He is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill and part of Fronteristxs & Becoming Sticky Collective.
AJ McClenon
A.J. communicates through text & language, repurposed materials, moving images, and sound, and is driven by familial & collective grief, water, escapism, Blackness, geomorphology, US history, and the global future. While excavating tangible ways to approach sonic and visual textures, A.J.'s work is filled with versions of many truths, I weave together personal and oftentimes Bildungsroman narratives, Black ontologies, time travel, physics, geomorphology, and the biology of various species.
Farshid Bazmandegan
Farshid Bazmandegan’s (he/him) work explores the intersection of memory, violence, and the material world to examine the complexities of exile and displacement. Through his practice he looks at how Western imperial interests have shaped the lives of many in the Middle East, including his own. By delving into personal, political, and historical narratives, Bazmandegan reflects on the idea of a body without a home in the landscape of exile.
Farshid Bazmandegan was born and raised in Iran. He is an Iranian-American artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Bazmandegan received his MFA in sculpture from UCLA and his BA in visual arts from UC San Diego.
Image by Carolina Porras Monroy
Epiphany Couch
Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. Using mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she re-contextualizes these forms to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. In 2024 she was a Studios at MASS MoCA resident, recipient of a 2024 Ford Family Foundation Oregon Visual Artist Fellowship, and a commissioned artist for Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places. Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and fairs across the U.S.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington) in the shadow of təqwuʔməʔ (Mount Rainier). She now resides in Portland, Oregon, where she is a member of Carnation Contemporary.
Quique Lee
Quique Lee (he/him) is a contemporary artist based in Guatemala whose work, ranging from embroidery and fiber art to interdisciplinary projects, explores social themes, collective memory, and masculinity through innovative, community-engaged practices.
Michael Hambouz
Michael Hambouz (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator known for creating chromaesthesia-influenced works – explorations in dimension and color made under the guidance of music – to process bouts of loss and reflections on time spent living in the rural Midwest, New York City, and within the cybersphere as a first-generation Palestinian-American. Experimenting freely with mediums, he encourages unexpected results and mutations in compositional form to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted multidimensional paintings and prints, intricate layered paper cut outs, drawings and animations.
Hambouz received a B.A. from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, and has been awarded a fellowship at the Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA and two residencies with Wassaic Project in upstate New York. His work has been exhibited at The National Arts Club, Print Center New York, Club Rhubarb, Deanna Evans Projects, Andrew Edlin Gallery, and The Centre for Contemporary Printmaking (Bangor, N. Ireland), including exhibitions solo/two-person exhibitions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Elijah Wheat Showroom, The Krasl Art Center, Moore College of Art, Troutbeck, 3S Artspace, and a 20-year survey exhibition at alma mater Antioch College in 2018. His work has been featured in Artnet News, The New York Times, Design Milk, and Hyperallergic among others.
Janhavi Khemka
Born in 1993 in Varanasi, India, Janhavi Khemka (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated with a B.F.A. in Painting from the Faculty of Visual Art, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi in 2015, and an M.F.A. in Graphics from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan in 2017 and a Studio Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA in 2023.
With her impaired hearing, Khemka looks at disability not as a disadvantage, but as a lens through which one can see, understand, and negotiate with the world differently. Each work is an expression of her unique ways of interacting with the world without acoustic sensation.
Khemka’s art practice is characterized by her thoughtful choice of medium to translate her perception. Most of her work is rooted in personal memories, her physic and physical life. She calls her works small dots in the vast map of the mind and memory, constituted by the particular use of the medium. Presently working from Chicago, USA, Khemka has been creating live performances that question the meaning of language and how we understand it.
Carolyn Clayton
Carolyn Clayton (she/her) is an artist and residency director living in North Adams, MA. She is the co-founder of the Walkaway House, where, with her partner Benjamin Westbrook, she lives, works, and operates the Tend and Center of Gravity artist residencies. In addition to being their home, the Walkaway House provides physical space and opportunities for visiting artists, overnight guests and the local arts community to make meaningful work and connections in downtown North Adams.
Clayton uses the framework of her 1850’s historic home and the facilitation of an artist residency within its walls as a social practice from which to consider the melding and overlap of art and life. Through this lens she makes installations, participatory systems, and sculptural displays. Her work examines the allure of cleanliness and order in contrast to the human drive to accumulate, hold close and imbue objects with meaning. She received her MFA from University of Michigan in 2016 (with a certificate in Museum Studies) and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. She was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in sculpture in 2016 and a National Arts Strategy Creative Community Fellowship in 2018, where she began to develop the concept for the Walkaway House.
Mariah Rigg
Mariah Rigg (she/her) is the author of the short story collection EXTINCTION CAPITAL OF THE WORLD (Ecco, 2025). Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts,The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Lambda Literary, along with being published by The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2025 Residency Season:
Silvia López Chavez
Silvia López Chavez (she/her) is a Dominican-American visual whose community-centered murals form connections across disciplines and cultural boundaries. She uses joy as an act of resistance and celebration through her vibrant work world-wide. Silvia is a proud recipient of a Common Good Award from MassArt, a Leadership in Public Art Award by New England Foundation for the Arts, and The Boston Foundation’s Brother Thomas Fellowship Award. She is a graduate of MassArt the School of Art and Design and Altos de Chavon, Dominican Republic. Silvia continues her studio practice close to the ocean between Boston and DR.
Hogan Seidel
Hogan Seidel (they/them) is a photographer and moving-image artist working in the traditions of experimental film, photochemical abstraction, and botanical collage. Their current artistic research, framed through poetic, political, and personal lenses, delves into contemporary queer discourse, queer history, and queer ecology. Hogan currently teaches experimental analog filmmaking courses at MassArt, and darkroom photography at Simmons University.
Laura Sofía Pérez
Laura Sofía Pérez (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, film, sound, and installation. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts. Her work draws from feminist and avant-garde cinema, phenomenological philosophy, Caribbean Postcolonial theory, and ancestral knowledge. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation with artists of varying disciplines and backgrounds to voice common perspectives on political, cultural, and social issues. Recent film festival selections include Doc Fortnight 2024: MoMa’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media and Third Horizon Film Festival 2024. Recent artist residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2020), the AfA Masterclass: Radical Care with Terike Haapoja (2020), and La Práctica at Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2019). She is Visiting Faculty in Film/Video at Bennington College, Bennington, VT.
Ruth Owens
Ruth Owens (she/her) is a figurative painter and video artist from New Orleans, where she is represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery. She is a participant of the Prospect.6 Triennial and exhibited a solo show at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art. Artist residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in NY. She is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museums, Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. (Photo by Jonathan Traviesa.)
Jade Yumang
Jade Yumang (he/they) was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and has been living in the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in Chicago, IL. They have exhibited their work in several museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Jade has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the BC Arts Council. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. They earned an MFA with Departmental Honors from Parsons School of Design in 2012 and a BFA with Honors from the University of British Columbia in 2008. Jade is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Mokha Laget
Mokha Laget (she/her) is a New Mexico-based interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work explores themes of displacement and perceptual instability through geometric abstraction, animation and performance of visual scores, large shaped canvas, printmaking and sculpture.
Born in North Africa, she studied Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design (BFA) in Washington DC. She holds a CCI from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in simultaneous interpreting and translation and has spent much of the past 25 years traveling parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Formerly a Curatorial Assistant for the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Mokha has extensive experience as an independent curator. Her writings and reviews have been published in The Santa Fe Reporter, THE Magazine, Sculpture Magazine and the New Art Examiner.
In 2022, Mokha's survey exhibition covering the last 10 years of her career opened at the American University Museum in Washington DC. She is included in numerous museum collections and actively represented by several galleries in the US, including in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe and Houston.
She was awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant in 2019 and visiting artist residencies at the American Academy in Rome, Mass MoCA, Millay Arts, and the Golden Foundation.
She currently lives and works in an off-grid studio in the mountains of New Mexico.
Felipe Shibuya
Felipe Shibuya (he/him) is a Brazilian ecologist and artist who decided to adventure around the world. His journey began when he completed his PhD in ecology and nature conservation at the Federal University of Paraná. He then decided to explore the visual aspects he had included in his research, beyond the purely scientific perspective. He also holds an MFA in studio art from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he worked with pigmented bacteria, with the intention of understanding how the colors they synthesize could be communication signals for humans. Being a scientist-artist enables Felipe to explore different forms of life, from bacteria to trees, using different methods, from microbiological culture to videos. However, all of his work involves aspects of his own identity, and he always highlights the visuality of nature. Currently, Felipe is an Assistant Professor in the Experimental and Foundation Studies Department at Rhode Island School of Design.
Funlola Coker
Funlola Coker is a sculptor from Lagos, Nigeria. Funlola’s work follows research threads in the realm of recollection, imagination, and the surreal. Embracing the literary style of biomythography, Funlola builds narrative sculptures that call on nostalgic memories and moments of the mundane held dear. Liminal spaces are explored in the context of Yoruba cosmology and Africanfuturism. Using materials and techniques based in craft, these sculptures suggest dream-like and half-remembered spaces, yet sacred.
Coker’s work has been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum, TONE Gallery, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, including a solo exhibition at Brooklyn Metal Works. Collections include Brooklyn Metal Works and the National Ornamental Metal Museum. Coker has received awards such as the Thayer Fellowship from the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government (2022), and the Society of Arts and Crafts Craft Innovation Jumpstarter Award (2023), and the Boston Center for the Arts Coker holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Carlos Vielma
Graduated as an architect, Carlos Vielma is a Mexican visual artist. His work in painting, video, and installation deals with subjects like migration, the landscape and its monuments, and the US-Mexico border. He has participated in several residency programs, including the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Nebraska, the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, among others. Vielma has exhibited his work at institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art in Texas, Museo Anahuacalli, and La Nao Galería in Mexico City, among others. His works are part of collections including the Servais Family Collection, Colección Fundación Casa Wabi, and the Mexican State, which recently honored him with a membership in the National System of Art Creators (SNCA). He lives and works between Mexico City and Houston Texas where he is currently a fellow of the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Portrait by Harland Bozeman
Simon Han
Simon Han (he/him) is the author of the novel Nights When Nothing Happened (Riverhead Books, 2020), which was named an Indie Next Pick and best book of the year by Time, the Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar, and Texas Monthly. His stories have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, Guernica, Fence, and Electric Literature, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Aperture, Lit Hub, and the Paris Review Daily. He has received support from MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Born in Tianjin, China and raised in various cities in Texas, he lives in Medford, MA and teaches at Tufts University. He is at work on a second novel.
Berny Tan
Berny Tan (b.1990, Singapore) (she/her) is an artist and curator who explores the tensions that arise when she applies systems to – and unearths systems in – her subjective experiences. Her strategies often reflect a fundamental interest in language as it is read, written, and spoken by her. In her curatorial work, she nurtures an artist-centred practice grounded in empathy, sensitivity, and collaboration.
Tan holds an MA (Dist) in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BFA (Hons) in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts. Between 2021 and 2024 – while continuing to present her artwork in solo and group exhibitions – she organised 8 curatorial projects in Singapore, including a publicly accessible residency as part of Singapore Biennale 2022. She was awarded the 2022 IMPART Art Prize in the curator category in recognition of her independent practice. In 2024, Tan joined the Singapore Art Museum as Curator of its new Design Collection. (Photo by Charmaine Poh.)
Sonya Lara
Sonya Lara (she/her)is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in The Maine Review, Frontier, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She was accepted for the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency, and others. Sonya was the recipient of Wisconsin’s Own Library Poet in Residence Fellowship and the Studios Fellowship through The Studios at MASS MoCA. Additionally, she was a finalist for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets.
Epiphany Couch
"Epiphany Couch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. Using mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she re-contextualizes these forms to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. In 2024 she was a Studios at MASS MoCA resident, recipient of a 2024 Ford Family Foundation Oregon Visual Artist Fellowship, and a commissioned artist for Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places. Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and fairs across the U.S.
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian/Mixed European and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington) in the shadow of təqwuʔməʔ (Mount Rainier). She now resides in Portland, Oregon, where she is a member of Carnation Contemporary. "
Sean Desiree
Sean Desiree (they/them) is a conceptual and interdisciplinary artist, born and raised in the Bronx. Their interest includes social engagement and disruptive interventions that counter biased societal structures. In addition to being an artist, they are an educator facilitating the BIPOC Builders Immersions at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. In 2024, they attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2022 they were awarded fellowships at Leslie Lohman, and Socrates Sculpture Park. They have attended residencies at More Art, MASS MoCA, and Wave Hill. While an Artist in Residence at More Art, they debuted their socially engaged public art sculpture, BEAM ENSEMBLE in collaboration with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Calvin Gimpelevich
Calvin Gimpelevich (he/him) is an NEA Fellow, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, and the author of Invasions (Instar 2018). His work has been recognized by Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, CODEX/Writer’s Block and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; it has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Essays 2022. He is at work on several novels.
Natalia Sánchez
Natalia Sánchez (she/her) was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1992. She received her BFA at Columbus College of Art and Design in 2015 and based herself in Columbus, OH for seven years. During this time , she had her studio at Blockfort Columbus, participated in organizing artistic and cultural events, exhibited in group shows, and grew a network of colleges, patrons and collectors. After Hurricane Maria, she returned to Puerto Rico re-rooting herself in the town of Arecibo where she continues to develop her painting, multimedia and community engagement practices. These expressions are influenced by architecture and urban planning in her immediate landscape and by the psychological implications of the built environment and the human psyche.
Sánchez received the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant in 2019 and with it developed an audiovisual documentary titled “País Espejo” about Arecibo’s history focused in its urban planning or lack thereof. It integrates the narratives of elders in the community, as well as historians and other community leaders. She had a solo show in Arecibo’s Casa Ulanga where together with a body of paintings showcased “Pais Espejo” back to her community. In 2021 she exhibited in the group show “ A Diasporic State of Mind" at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea, New York. In 2022 she had a solo show at Kilometro 0.2 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Shortly after exhibiting in the Kilometro 0.2 group show “Once Upon a Time” In 2023. She was awarded the MASS MoCA Fellowship for Artists from Puerto Rico, where she was a resident artist in August – September 2023. In 2024 she’s exhibited in a group show at Marshall Gallery in Santa Monica, Los Angeles titled “Structural” and another group show at Master’s Gallery in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico titled “Bajo Otro Sol”.
Lily Xie
Lily Xie (she/they) is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially-engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-actualization for communities of color. In collaboration with local residents and grassroots organizers, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The work they create together often takes shape in illustration, print media, video, and installation. Lily was a 2023 City of Boston Artist-in-Residence and she holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT.
Maurya Kerr
Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer, artist, and 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow. Her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and appears in multiple journals. Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Other writing honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Maurya is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy noun (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award). Her work has been supported by residencies and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, Monson Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.
Portrait by Alan Kimara Dixon
Ella Jacobson
Ella Jacobson (she/her) is a cultural critic and writer originally from interior Alaska. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Drift, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, High Country News, and Real Life, among other publications. Much of her work explores how people metabolize their exposures to violence and death. She holds a masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and she is the recipient of residencies and support from Edith Wharton House, Straw Dog Writers Guild, Monson Arts, I-Park Foundation, Good Hart, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust Foundation. She is a former New York University Abu Dhabi Fellow in Writing. You can find her on Twitter @_ellajacobson.
Amanda Machado
Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, and many others. In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations including Patagonia, The Aspen Institute, HipCamp, and many others. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.
Amanda has a degree in English Literature and Nonfiction Writing from Brown University, and currently lives on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland.
Quique Lee
Quique Lee (he/him) is a contemporary artist from Guatemala, specializing in textile and fiber art. His work explores social themes such as masculinity, collective memory, and societal change. His recent project, "Embroidery Circles for Men," uses embroidery as a medium to address traditional masculinity, opening spaces for critical dialogue and fostering collaboration within communities. Quique’s practice also incorporates interdisciplinary approaches, merging textile art with social activism. Through his art, he engages with complex cultural and social issues, aiming to generate meaningful conversations and reflections on these pressing topics.
Carolyn Clayton
Carolyn Clayton (she/her) is an artist and residency director living in North Adams, MA. She is the co-founder of the Walkaway House, where, with her partner Benjamin Westbrook, she lives, works, and operates the Tend and Center of Gravity artist residencies. In addition to being their home, the Walkaway House provides physical space and opportunities for visiting artists, overnight guests and the local arts community to make meaningful work and connections in downtown North Adams.
Clayton uses the framework of her 1850’s historic home and the facilitation of an artist residency within its walls as a social practice from which to consider the melding and overlap of art and life. Through this lens she makes installations, participatory systems, and sculptural displays. Her work examines the allure of cleanliness and order in contrast to the human drive to accumulate, hold close and imbue objects with meaning. She received her MFA from University of Michigan in 2016 (with a certificate in Museum Studies) and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. She was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in sculpture in 2016 and a National Arts Strategy Creative Community Fellowship in 2018, where she began to develop the concept for the Walkaway House.
Janhavi Khemka
Born in 1993 in Varanasi, India, Janhavi Khemka (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who graduated with a B.F.A. in Painting from the Faculty of Visual Art, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi in 2015, and an M.F.A. in Graphics from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan in 2017 and a Studio Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA in 2023.
With her impaired hearing, Khemka looks at disability not as a disadvantage, but as a lens through which one can see, understand, and negotiate with the world in a different way. Each work is an expression of her unique ways of interacting with the world without acoustic sensation.
Khemka’s art practice is characterized by her thoughtful choice of medium to translate her perception. Most of her work is rooted in personal memories, her physic and physical life. She calls her works small dots in the vast map of mind and memory, constituted by the particular use of the medium. Presently working from Chicago, USA, Khemka has been creating live performances that question the meaning of language and how we understand it.
Feda Eid
Feda Eid (she/her) is a Lebanese diaspora visual artist and photographer living in the occupied lands of Wampanoag and Massachusett People- so called Quincy,MA. Her work explores the expression of heritage, culture, identity and often tense but beautiful space between, what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. Using the everyday, passed down and reimagined as portals to ancestral wisdom and the Sacred. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. Feda is guided by her family's journey as Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982 and her childhood growing up as an Arab and Muslim in the US.
Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lesley University, and The Shed NY among others. She was 2019 Luminary and Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2022 Massachusetts fellowship Artist in Residence at Mass MoCA Studios, 2022 Collective Futures Fund grantee, 2024 Foundation For Contemporary Arts grantee and awarded WBUR's 2024 The Makers, Boston's 10 artists of color whose work you should know.
Sonya Lara
Sonya Lara (she/her)is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in The Maine Review, Frontier, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She was accepted for the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency, and others. Sonya was the recipient of Wisconsin’s Own Library Poet in Residence Fellowship and the Studios Fellowship through The Studios at MASS MoCA. Additionally, she was a finalist for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets.
Ash Eliza Williams
Ash Eliza Williams (they/them) grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains in SW Virginia. Ash makes work about interspecies communication, non-human language, and exploring alternative and more vibrant ways of engaging with the sensory worlds of plants, creatures, and each other. Recent exhibitions include Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Wasserman Projects, and Chautauqua Institute. Ash often works with scientists, including as an artist-in-residence at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Mountain Lake Biological Station as a Lucille Walton Fellow. Ash is a lecturer at Smith College.
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2024 Residency Season:
Laura Sofía Pérez
Laura Sofía Pérez (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, film, sound, and installation. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts. Her work draws from feminist and avant-garde cinema, phenomenological philosophy, Caribbean Postcolonial theory, and ancestral knowledge. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation with artists of varying disciplines and backgrounds to voice common perspectives on political, cultural, and social issues. Recent artist residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), BAiR Emerging at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2020), the AfA Masterclass: Radical Care with Terike Haapoja (2020), and La Práctica at Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2019).
Hogan Seidel
Hogan Seidel (they/them) is an experimental photographer & moving image artist with a creative presence in both Boston & Seattle. They are a co-editor of Analog Cookbook, a UNC Press journal dedicated to promoting accessibility in celluloid filmmaking. Hogan currently teaches media arts courses as affiliated faculty at Evergreen State College.
Sonya Lara
Sonya Lara (she/her) is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Frontier, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. She was accepted for the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency, and others. Sonya is the upcoming Wisconsin’s Own Library Residence Fellow for Spring of 2024 and is the recipient of the Studios Fellowship through The Studios at MASS MoCA. Additionally, she was a finalist for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets.
Silvia Lopez Chavez
Silvia Lopez Chavez (she/her) is a Dominican-American visual artist whose collaborative murals aim to forge meaningful cross-cultural connections and transform urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. She explores personal stories of adaptation, assimilation, and resilience at the studio through painting, printmaking, and drawing. Most recent collaborations include Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute (DATMA) in New Bedford, MA, and The Outlaw Ocean Project in the Dominican Republic. Local works can be seen across Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem. She is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the recipient of the New England Women's Leadership Award by the Boys and Girls Club of America (2022), and a New England Foundation for the Arts Leadership in Public Art award (2021). She recently completed art residencies at MASS MoCA, Haystack, and Vermont Studio Center. Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, Peabody Essex Museum, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University. Silvia is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Altos de Chavón, the School of Art Design in the Dominican Republic. She continues her fine art studio practice at Atlantic Works Artist Studios in East Boston.
Jamie Denburg Habie
Jamie Denburg Habie (she/her) is a Guatemalan artist and cultural practitioner living and working in Antigua, Guatemala. As an artist, Jamie is interested in exploring the intersection between matter, mind and body as an exercise in decentralizing consciousness, particularly through the lens of neuroscience, materiality, the body and political ecologies.
Jamie is Co-founder at La Nueva Fábrica, a contemporary art space and residency program in Antigua, Guatemala dedicated to empowering communities through art. La Nueva Fábrica presents exhibitions and offers residencies, public programs, education and multidisciplinary workshops, while also holding a permanent collection of historic Latin American photography and the artworks of the late Guatemalan artist Lissie Habie (1954-2008)—whose philanthropic endeavors through New Roots Foundation (est. 1998) eventually led to the creation of the residency program (est. 2013) and La Nueva Fábrica (est. 2018).
Tara Sabharwal
Originally from Delhi, Sabharwal (she/her) has been based in NYC since 1989. She graduated from MS University, Baroda and received a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, London. Over a career that spans 40 years, she has had 45 solo shows in Japan, India, Germany, the UK and USA. Sabharwal has received many awards, including: The British Council, Meehan, and Durham Cathedral fellowships in the UK, the Joan Mitchell and Gottlieb Foundation in the USA. Her work is in the collection of the Library of Congress, NY Public Library and the Peabody Essex, Victoria and Albert, DLI and British Museums. She has taught at The Guggenheim and Rubin Museums, The Cooper Union, City College, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Women’s Studio Workshop. In 2017 she formed the group “inBEtween’ with American, German and Indian artists and has curated ten exhibitions on the theme of migration and intersectionality in Germany, US and India. In 2023 she had a major decade exhibition at Bikaner House, New Delhi.
Erin Fostel
Erin Fostel (she/her) (American, b.1981) is a visual artist who creates representational drawings with charcoal. Her work often depicts the everyday moments of life, from images of intimate home interiors to the shared public space. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Art History from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including: the C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore, MD); Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA); Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (Salt Lake City, UT); Neon Gallery (Wroclaw, Poland); Moving Poets Novilla (Berlin, Germany); and the Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD). Fostel is a 2019 recipient of the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Artist Travel Prize and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award. Her drawings are in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Maryland Center for History and Culture, and the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. Her studio is based in Baltimore, MD.
Mike Vos
Mike Vos (b. 1986) (he/him) is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR.
Vos utilizes his 4x5 film camera in experimental ways to advocate for the preservation of the environment through immersive storytelling. Drawing inspiration from various literary movements and themes such as Surrealism and Magical Realism, his photographic projects all exist within a shared universe; each focusing on different facets of an overarching story.
Traditional landscape photography lacks the ability to fully translate the complex emotions that come when viewing places firsthand that are ancient, beautiful, and strange. Much like variant adaptations of the same subject matter, Vos pushes the capabilities of analog photography to interpret landscapes into ethereal and otherworldly dreamscapes to capture the awe and wonder that exists in the natural world.
Jamele Wright, Sr.
“My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth, by creating a conversation between family, tradition, the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by the way Hip Hop gathers different cultures through sampling and is charged with an energy channeled and passed through the Pan African lineage. The “In Transit” Series and my textile work is inspired by the Great Migration of Black Americans, who left the familiar in the hope of something better.”
Feda Eid
Feda Eid (she/her) is a Lebanese-American visual artist living on occupied, unceded, territory of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People (Quincy,MA). Her portrait/self portrait work explores the expression of heritage, tradition, identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US.
Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lesley University, and The Shed NY among others. She was 2019 Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and awarded the 2022 Massachusetts Artist Residency Fellowship at Mass MoCA Studios. Her recent series Made in USA, صنع في أمريكا is on view at the Boston Public Library central branch until February 2024.
Lani Asuncion
Lani Asuncion (they/she) is a Boston based multimedia artist working within public spaces to create socially engaged art by weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance in relation to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx. They use new media technologies as a tool to encourage conversations to magnify connections that work to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.
Norma Vila Rivero
Photographer, multimedia artist, exhibit coordinator and cultural manager Norma Vila Rivero (she/her) received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (2005) and a master’s degree in Art Administration in Ana G. Mendez, Universidad del Turabo (2010). In 2011, she co-founded METRO: plataforma organizada, an artist-run space, and from 2015 until 2018 was the Director of ÁREA: lugar de proyectos. In 2017, she was selected to participate in DebtFair by the Occupy Museums Collective at the Whitney Museum Biennial. In 2018 she presented her project "A metaphor against oblivion", at The John & June Allcott Gallery at Chapel Hill University in North Carolina, USA. In 2020, she received the NALAC Fund for the Arts to continue with her ongoing project "A metaphor against oblivion". In 2021 she was invited to be part of "Suspended Time: Myrna Báez and Norma Vila Rivero" a duo show with Myrna Báez curated by Cheryl Hartup at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon, USA. Subsequently, the Museum acquired one of her works for their collection. Currently, Vila Rivero is the director and co-founder of REUNIÓN, an artistic collective and a space for exhibition projects that was launched in March of 2022.
Natani Notah
Natani Notah (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and a proud member of the Navajo Nation. Her current art practice explores contemporary Native American identity through the lens of Diné womanhood. Notah has exhibited her work at institutions, such as Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Massillon Museum, Tucson Desert Art Museum, apexart, Mana Contemporary Chicago, and elsewhere. Notah has received awards from Art Matters, International Sculpture Center, and the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Forbes, and Sculpture Magazine and she has completed artist residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Kala Art Institute. Notah holds a BFA with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University and an MFA from Stanford University. Currently she is a 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Garvin Sierra Vega
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1977. Garvin Sierra Vega (he/him) holds a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. During his formative years he worked as an assistant to prominent sculptors such as Ramón Berríos and Soucy de Perellano. Parallel to his work as a visual artist, Sierra Vega currently works as a freelance graphic designer, exhibition designer and set designer. His work has been exhibited internationally in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Slovenia, Mexico, Portugal and the United States, among others, and is part of prestigious private and institutional collections, most recently appearing in no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum and also at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) and the Museo de Historia y Antropología de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (MHAA).
Jo Cosme
Jo Cosme ( she/her)is a Boricua award-winning multimedia artist who was displaced from Borikén (colonially known as Puerto Rico) to Seattle a year after Hurricane María. Her shock over North Americans’ ignorance of the archipelago inspired her to create works that provoke reflections on US Imperialism, disaster capitalism and neocolonialism in her homeland.
Cosme holds a BFA from PR's School of Fine Arts majoring in photography in 2014. Her work’s been exhibited in places such as the Museo de las Américas (PR), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle), Dab Art Gallery (LA), and Galerie Rivoli 59 (Paris). She’s been invited to give talks in places such as Allied Media Conference, and MIT Game Lab to name a few. By 2022, she was awarded the new project grant from NWFF’s Collective Power Fund and the GAP award from Artist Trust. She was granted the Puerto Rican Artist Fellowship at MASS MoCA’s A4A Residency, where she started working on her first solo show, Welcome to Paradise. The first iteration of this show is set to open March 7th of 2024 in Gallery 4Culture, Seattle.
Lynn Yarne
“I am a 4th/5th generation Chinese and Japanese American working in Portland, OR. Given the prevalence of historical and ongoing race-based displacement and community separation,themes of community, resilience and loss often come up for me in explorations of space and stakeholdership. I wonder about the capacity for art to engage and create stakeholders, to actively involve people in repair and visionary thinking.
I have worked in education for over 18 years. In the past 8 years I have worked as a classroom teacher in a public school facilitating a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on cultivating a critical social justice lens. The program aims to equip young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. In 2015, we built a screen printing studio that now trains over 120 youth printers a year. Creating opportunities for young people to express their visions and engage and community members is of great importance in my work as an artist.”
Carolyn Clayton
Carolyn Clayton (she/her) is an artist and residency director living in North Adams, MA. She is the co-founder of the Walkaway House, where, with her partner Benjamin Westbrook, she lives, works, and operates the Tend and Center of Gravity artist residencies. In addition to being their home, the Walkaway House provides physical space and opportunities for visiting artists, overnight guests and the local arts community to make meaningful work and connections in downtown North Adams.
Clayton uses the framework of her 1850’s historic home and the facilitation of an artist residency within its walls as a social practice from which to consider the melding and overlap of art and life. Through this lens she makes installations, participatory systems, and sculptural displays. Her work examines the allure of cleanliness and order in contrast to the human drive to accumulate, hold close and imbue objects with meaning. She received her MFA from University of Michigan in 2016 (with a certificate in Museum Studies) and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. She was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in sculpture in 2016 and a National Arts Strategy Creative Community Fellowship in 2018, where she began to develop the concept for the Walkaway House.
sTo Len
sTo Len (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work has centered on collaborations with environmentally abused landscapes and municipal agencies. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len’s work has included printmaking with polluted waterways, 3D scanning Fresh Kills landfill, recycling waste into art materials, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. He has been the Public Artist in Residence at the Department of Sanitation in NY and the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment Facility in Virginia. Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics.
Roscoè B. Thické III
Roscoè B. Thické III (b. 1981) (he/him) is a Miami lens based artist whose work examines themes of family, community, and intimacy through his narrative arrangements and presentation of his images. Roscoè’s work ranges from traditional photography to experimental printing techniques and unique framing concepts. Roscoè’s work is inspired by literature and contemporary documentary practices. He creates environmental lifestyle images that give context clues to his subjects state of being. Roscoè’s education into the arts started while enlisted in the U.S Army. While stationed at Camp Casey, South Korea Roscoè studied Photography and Art. Roscoè continued his studies of Photography and Design at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, Fl.
Alicia Ehni
Alicia (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses pure geometry and pre-Columbian iconography to address territory concerns in shifting landscapes. She studied at Univ. Católica (Perú), Pratt Institute and Hunter College.
Ehni is Program Officer at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) where she works closely with fiscal sponsored projects. She served on GIA’s Support for Individual Artists committee and was Director of Frederico Seve Gallery in her previous role.
Natalie Shapero
Natalie Shapero (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013); her recent pamphlet, Today Hamlet, was published in 2023 by Out-Spoken Press (UK). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Irvine.
Sean Desiree
Sean Desiree (they/them) is a self-taught artist, born and raised in the Bronx. They produce life-size structures and sculptures that serve as sanctuaries, protectors, and symbols of empowerment for marginalized communities. In addition to being an artist they are an educator facilitating the BIPOC Builders Immersions at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. Equipping and inspiring change makers and community members to utilize building and construction is a large part of their practice. They have been awarded residencies at More Art, MASS MoCA and Wave Hill. They were a 2022 Leslie Lohman and Socrates Sculpture Park Fellow. Through their residency at More Art they received funding to produce their debut socially engaged public art sculpture, entitled BEAM ENSEMBLE with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-platform projects explore familial and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms.
Chelsea T. Hicks
Chelsea T. Hicks (she/they) is an experimental artist and literary writer working in her Indigenous language of Wahzhazhe ie. Her work has been published or pictured in World Literature Today, Poetry, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Manetti Shrem Museum, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA from UC Davis. Her debut ‘A Calm and Normal Heart’ received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2023 Residency Season:
Anina Major
Anina Major (she/her) is a visual artist from the Bahamas. Her decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, and identity. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship and serving as a mentor for the Saint Heron Ceramics Residency Program.
Laura Escobar
Laura (she/her) lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Within her art practice, she writes, researches, teaches and cooks. Her work takes place between visual arts, writing and intuitions about presence, voice, food and gathering. Guided by an intense and conscientious interest in time and the way we perceive it and condition ourselves to that perception, from physical to socio-political scenarios noted in natural phenomena. The way we relate to reality, language and other beings is in the core of her research.
Currently, Laura is a professor at the U. Javeriana and U. Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, she is a part of todoestamal, an art and food collective based in Bogotá, while collaborating with independent publishing houses in Colombia.
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez (they/them) is a Chilean poet, novelist and text-based artist. They are the author of A/An (End of the Line Press) the La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and teach creative writing at Clark University.
Sammy Lee (she/her) is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is recently a resident artist at Redline, serves as an ambassador for Asian Art at Denver Art Museum, and operates a contemporary art project and residency space, called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver.
Lee's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid.
Erick Ramos-Jacobo
Erick Ramos-Jacobo (he/him) is immigrant writer, image-maker, and curator. His work focuses on increasing visibility and regional opportunity for Newcomers through artistic practices. His social practice has led him to co-founding and directing The Mariposa Project, A collective of Immigrant creatives and academics based in the Berkshires. Erick has worked with MASS MoCA’s education department as a curatorial assistant and social-emotional learning curriculum reasercher. He was recently named MCLA’s Feigenbaum Scholar for his research.
Feda Eid
Feda Eid (she/her) is a Lebanese-American visual artist from Quincy, MA (Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People territory). Her work explores the expression of culture and identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US.
Dāshaun Washington
Dāshaun Washington (he/him) is a poet living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is a 2021 92Y Discovery Contest runner-up and Missouri Review 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry finalist. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Tin House, and beyond. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry magazine, The Nation, Indiana Review, Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Michi Meko
Michi Meko (b. 1974) (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. His work can be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta, among other institutions. In 2019 Meko had solo exhibitions at the Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta; the Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, South Carolina; and the Chimento Gallery in Los Angeles, and he was featured in Hulu’s Artist in Residence documentary series.
LeAndra LeSeur
Le’Andra LeSeur (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.
LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018).
Vida James
Vida James (she/her) is a Nuyorican social worker from Brooklyn, NY. She is a Delaney Fellow at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers. She is the winner of the 2021 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award and a 2021 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Her writing has been supported by MASS MoCA, Tin House, Bread Loaf and VONA/Voices. She has work appearing or forthcoming in Story, New England Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere.
Lani Asuncion
Lani Asuncion (they/she) is a Boston based multimedia artist working within public spaces to create socially engaged art by weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance in relation to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx. They use new media technologies as a tool to encourage conversations to magnify connections that work to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.
Luiza Folegatti
Luiza (she/her) is a Brazilian artist based in North Adams (USA). She spent five years in Berlin (Germany) integrating artistic practice, teaching, and social advocacy work around the rights of women immigrants. Luiza’s artistic practice focuses on gender and migration, and she applies photography, video, performance, and visual anthropology methods. She also designs and facilitates photography workshops for youth and women groups and strongly believes in projects that combine photography, education, and community building. Currently she is producing a photo essay about mothers and daughters and their experience with migration in Germany and the in the US, as well as experimenting with photo books formats.
Mae Ramirez
Mae Ramirez (she/her) is a Chicana poet originally from Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from California State University Long Beach and is currently working on a full-length manuscript. She is a recipient of the 2020 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and the 2021 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press Literary Award. In 2021 she was a writer-in-residence at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado. She currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
William Burton Binnie
William Burton Binnie’s (b. 1985, Dallas, TX) (he/him) work prods the American mythos: the imagery enshrouding a land with a complex and often dark and troubling past and present, cloaked in a smokescreen of stoic heroism—as well as larger concerns surrounding notions of power, nationalism, bigotry, war, land, death, and the visual markers connected to each. By distilling a pictorial language from a range of sources–film, photography, politics, history, quotidian life–the artist aims to examine these topics, predominantly through painting and drawing, in order to approach the social constructs that underpin them. This altering, colliding, and reconfiguring of images allows the him to mine the complicated and often paradoxical nature of these issues, allowing space for connections between a range of imagery compiled over many years. Through these tactics, he seeks to straddle an apparent bleakness with a genuine humanism, rendering a fraught balance between hope and despair, doubt and belief.
Carola Cintrón Moscoso
Carola Cintrón-Moscoso (PR) (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works explore various relationships between landscape, architecture, politics and technology, with emphasis in sound. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally and in Puerto Rico, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (PR), Centro Cultural España (Perú), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Spain), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Chile), China Millennium Museum (Beijing) and Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park (NY).
She currently lives and works from Santurce, Puerto Rico, exploring the intersection between art and technology.
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez (AXR) (she/her) is a Mexican artist living in NYC. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including three solo shows in Mexico City. She has participated in The Affordable Art Fair in NYC, Crossroads Art Fair in Shoreditch London, Museo Internazionale Italia Arte (MIIT) in Turin, and Untitled Art Fair Miami.
She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts NYC (SVA), and an undergraduate diploma in Media Communications by Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico, including a yearlong exchange at Regents Business School of London.
Arantxa is has been studying Tibetan Buddhism for the past seven years, philosophy that permeates her whole life and artistic practice.
Ella Jacobson
Ella Jacobson (she/her) is a cultural critic and writer originally from interior Alaska. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Drift, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, High Country News, and Real Life. Much of her work explores how people metabolize their exposures to unintentional violence and death. She is the 2022 Miami Book Fair Nonfiction Fellow and holds a masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She is the recipient of residencies and support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Edith Wharton House, Straw Dog Writers Guild, Monson Arts, I-Park Foundation, Good Hart, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust Foundation. She is a former New York University Abu Dhabi Fellow in Writing.
You can find her on Twitter @_ellajacobson.
Jamie Denburg Habie
Jamie Denburg Habie (she/her) is a Guatemalan artist and cultural practitioner living and working in Antigua, Guatemala. Jamie is co-founder and director at La Nueva Fábrica, a contemporary art space in Antigua, Guatemala dedicated to empowering communities through exhibitions, public programs and education, residencies, and multidisciplinary workshops.
As an artist, Jamie is interested in decentralized expressions of consciousness, drawing inspiration from neuroscience, materiality and the politics of the Anthropocene.
Pantea Karimi
Pantea Karimi (she/her) is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in San Jose, California. Karimi grew up in post-revolutionary Iran where her education in science and art at school was convoluted with religious indoctrination. Her art collectively explores historic, religious, scientific, and political themes. Taking the cue from her research on Iran’s historic, religious, and scientific manuscripts and objects, Karimi’s work highlights Iran’s visual culture, and personal narratives reflecting upon her gender and upbringing in Iran, intertwined with conflicting political, religious, and societal issues. Karimi has exhibited internationally across a range of solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She teaches Studio Art and Digital Media courses at the College of San Mateo and Santa Clara University.
Firoz Mahmud
Being born in Bangladesh, artist Firoz Mahmud (he/him) has been a prominent artist for his large scale and ongoing art projects for the last few years.
Firoz’s work has been exhibited at the Bangkok Art Biennale, Congo Biennale, Ostrale Biennale, Lahore Biennial, Dhaka Art Summit, Setouchi Triennale (BDP), Aichi Triennial, Sharjah Biennale, Cairo Biennale, Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, Busan Biennale, Immigrant Artist Biennial NYC, Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, Asian Biennale.
He has also exhibited at the Asia Art Initiative (PA), Hunter East Harlem Gallery & Art at a Time Like This (NY), Berkshire Art Museum(MA), Office of Contemporary Art (OCA), Norway, MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts Rome, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan Contemporary Art at Asia House London/UK, BAB BOX- One Bangkok, Jamaica Flux 2021, Center Pompidou Paris (Screening COAL Prize works), Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Dubai, Twelve Gates Arts, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, University Art Museum, Metropolitan Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo & Geidai PS1, Fuchu Art Museum, Mori Art Museum (CG) Tokyo, and more.
Natani Notah
Natani Notah (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and a proud member of the Navajo Nation. Her current art practice explores contemporary Native American identity through the lens of Diné womanhood. Notah has exhibited her work at institutions, such as Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Massillon Museum, Tucson Desert Art Museum, apexart, Mana Contemporary Chicago, and elsewhere. Notah has received awards from Art Matters, International Sculpture Center, and the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Forbes, and Sculpture Magazine and she has completed artist residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Kala Art Institute. Notah holds a BFA with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University and an MFA from Stanford University. Currently she is a 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
S. Erin Batiste
S. Erin Batiste (she/her) is an interdisciplinary poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2022-2023 The Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow and a 2022-2023 Recess Critical Writing Fellow. She has received fellowships and support from Cave Canem, PEN America, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation, among other honors. Author of the chapbook, Glory to All Fleeting Things, her work has exhibited in New York and has appeared internationally in Interim, Michigan Quarterly Review, wildness, You Don't Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, and forthcoming in, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy.
Batiste’s writing and collage centers Black women, her ancestors and matrilineage, and is influenced by Afrofuturism, maximalism, beauty, the desert, the cosmos and other expansive places, migration, tarot and divination, archives, ephemera and moments left behind. She is currently working on her first full length collection, Hoard.
Sean Desiree
Utilizing the craft of woodworking, Sean Desiree (they/them) produces life-size structures and sculptures that serve as sanctuaries, protectors, and symbols of empowerment for marginalized communities. They're interested in contributing to systems and structures of care. Applying conducive architecture, a term they have claimed to give language to functional forms that heal rather than harm, they aim to disrupt the oppressive building standards that have been normalized by society. The craft of timber framing is employed to create large-scale designs that are connected using wood-to-wood joinery with hemlock beams. Through this traditional craft, they're creating sculptures that provide alternative solutions to government and bureaucratic failure to meet our basic needs as a society.
With each installation and/or public art sculpture, they reclaim components and ideas from preceding works and reanimate them in an evolving self-reflective, interdisciplinary practice. The themes and content fluctuate, but central to their work is a commitment to a socially engaged practice.
Laura Christensen
Laura Christensen’s (she/her) artwork has been featured in galleries and museums, including Kidspace at MASS MoCA, The Art Complex Museum, Bennington Museum, and The Rotch-Jones-Duff House.
Laura received MASS MoCA’s “Assets for Artists” Professional Development Grant and a 2021 Finalist Award in Photography from the Artist Fellowship Program of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
In 2016 she was awarded her second Artists’ Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Grant, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, this one in support of her book project, THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty-One Writers.
Jamele Wright, Sr
Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22 Jamele Wright, Sr. (he/him) moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. While raising a family Jamele produced art, jazz, and poetry events throughout Atlanta. Realizing that there were many young artists not being represented he started a gallery called Neo Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After a number of solo and group exhibitions Mr. Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History. He concentrated on African and African American Contemporary Art. Jamele graduated with Master of Fine Art from School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. He completed a residency at MASS MoCA as well as artist in resident at Gibbes Museum, Charleston, SC. He currently maintains his practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
Pallavi Sen
Pallavi Sen (1989) (she/her) is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, and intuitive, musical movement. Current interests include planting gardens and meadows, the inner lives of birds and animals, and what emerges from grief of the anthropocene. Pallavi is the author of Dead Planet Cookbook published by GenderFail Press, and runs the Skowhegan Bird Club with her collaborator Ash Ferlito. Together they have also created the Skowhegan Book of Birds.
She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University, and is the Assistant Professor of Multiples + Distributed Art at Williams College.
She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, PICA's Creative Exchange Lab, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Shandaken Projects, Mildred’s Lane, Ox-Bow, ACRE, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art, among others.
Natalia Lasalle-Morillo
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) (she/her) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist, performer and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-channel films, performance works and multiplatform projects explore familial, neighborly and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms.
Carlos Vielma
Carlos (he/him) is a visual artist graduated as an Architect who works with painting, video and installation.
He has been an artist in residence in the Banff Center, Casa Wabi and Mass MoCA, among others.
Recently he was honored as a member of the National system of creators (SNCA) and is currently living and working in Mexico City.
Sue Huang
Sue Huang (he/him) is a new media artist whose work addresses collective experience. Her current projects explore ecological intimacies, human/nonhuman relations, and speculative futures.
Huang has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Philadelphia Contemporary; ISEA in Montreal; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; among others. She has previously been an artist-in-residence at LMCC, NEW INC, and the Studios at MASS MoCA. Huang has received funding and support from Science Sandbox, Rhizome, the James Irvine Foundation (MOCA, Los Angeles), and Creative Scotland (NEoN), among others.
Silvia Lopez Chavez
Silvia Lopez Chavez (she/her) is a Dominican-American visual artist whose collaborative murals aim to forge meaningful cross-cultural connections and transform urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. She explores personal stories of adaptation, assimilation, and resilience at the studio through painting, printmaking, and drawing. Most recent collaborations include Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute (DATMA) in New Bedford, MA, and The Outlaw Ocean Project in the Dominican Republic. Local works can be seen across Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem. She is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the recipient of the New England Women's Leadership Award by the Boys and Girls Club of America (2022), and a New England Foundation for the Arts Leadership in Public Art award (2021). She recently completed art residencies at MASS MoCA, Haystack, and Vermont Studio Center. Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, Peabody Essex Museum, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University. Silvia is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Altos de Chavón, the School of Art Design in the Dominican Republic. She continues her fine art studio practice at Atlantic Works Artist Studios in East Boston.