Welcome December’s Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: December 10 — 22, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
TOPAZ WINTERs
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022), which won the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & was a 2025 Sealey Challenge Pick & LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022. Her debut poetry collection, Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024), was a finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes. Topaz’s poetry, fiction & nonfiction are published in The Drift, Waxwing, Passages North, Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, & others. Her work has received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts & the National YoungArts Foundation. She serves as the editor-in-chief at Half Mystic Press & lives between New York & Singapore.
Tammie L. Dupuis
Bremerton, Washington
I am a person of mixed blood; my father was a member of the Bitterroot Salish and Q’lispe tribes and my maternal grandparents were literal white settlers, arriving on the reservation in the early 1920s. Because of this dual heritage, my art is intercultural; its themes and processes are situated between my Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritages.
I am a multimedia artist; I work with mediums that are either non-Ingenious, Indigenous, or used by both cultures. These include but are not limited to paint, textiles, wood, bone, hair, resin, ink, and paper. Through these materials I explore concepts and themes that are situated in the in-between places in which these cultural experiences meet; I look for common spaces between to allow my viewers access in ways that make sense to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers. Through my dual experiences, I learned both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of seeing and making, and these elements are fused together in everything I create.
In my artwork, I investigate the themes visibility/invisibility and recognizability/unrecognizability through my intercultural lens. I am interested in pushing against the invisibility of the Indigenous body in this country and the stereotypical assumptions of what Indigenous work should look like. I’m also interested in exploring and making visible the problematic history of Indigenous people in the US in a way that is accessible to both an Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience.
LÉA DONNAN
Northampton, massachusetts
Referencing marks as small as an embroidery stitch and as large as the flight of a missile, Léa Donnan creates sites of exchange that blur the lines between sanctity and survival. She returns to The Studios seeking points of connection through the lens of collective loss, trauma, and belonging. Recodifying information systems informed by her own neuro-ophthalmic visual rehabilitation after becoming disabled, Donnan interfaces with continuing themes of ruin and resurrection in her practice. She is an artist, educator, and cultural instigator cataloging and remixing the communal history of materials as part of a wider cultural narrative.
Donnan’s work has been featured at MoMA PS1, the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, and Artspace, Sydney. She has been a guest artist at Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West, producing work for a 600-mile-long exhibition stretching from Joshua Tree to Albuquerque, and has had her work transmitted into space in collaboration with Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, Mona Foma Festival.
Currently, she is focused on socially engaged, educational, and curatorial collaborations; most recently having worked extensively with a groundbreaking American institution recognized nationally by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.
KSENILIA BOLSHAKOVA
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AFSANEH JAVADPOUR
Eugene, OREGON
Afsaneh Javadpour is an Iranian artist, curator, and writer based in Eugene, Oregon, currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Oregon. Her interdisciplinary practice employs installation, multimedia, and sculptural approaches to investigate the legacies of war, its victims, collective trauma, and the deliberate erasure and rewriting of historical truth. She examines how power structures manipulate collective memory through the control and distortion of historical narratives, creating gaps and absences in our understanding of the past. Drawing from phenomenological theory, she emphasizes embodied perception and physical engagement with space as critical frameworks for uncovering fragmented truths and the complexities of displacement and exile.
With over a decade of experience in the Iranian contemporary art scene, Javadpour works as a researcher and cultural critic, producing essays, interviews, and analytical texts for contemporary art publications and media. She founded and produced a pioneering podcast dedicated to visual arts in Iran, serving as writer and host to foster critical discourse around contemporary practice and artistic theory. Her curatorial work examines the intersection of art, memory, and historical consciousness, creating exhibitions that persist in questioning injustice and asserting the resilience of artistic resistance against oppression and historical erasure and She engages Iranian mythology, belief systems and ancestral narratives as frameworks for resistance and resilience within contemporary art practice.
Javadpour holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in art studies from Tehran University of Art. Her work interrogates how official histories are constructed and maintained, inviting audiences to engage with what has been overlooked, forgotten, or deliberately obscured.
LaRISSA ROGERS
Ruckersville, Virginia
Rogers is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates how personal and shared memory and history impact the perpetual evolution of cultural identity formation and placemaking. Research and material become the entry point of broader social-political interrogations, often asking the question, who and what survives?
ELLIOT MONTAGUE
South Hadley, Massachusetts
Elliot Montague's films explore the nuances of trans and queer narratives through an engagement with kinship, the familial, the spectral, and rurality. Informed by the Slow Cinema movement and situated within Trans New Wave Cinema, his work explores intergenerational narratives that bring forward magical realism and the folkloric within a meditative pace. Elliot’s most recent film work focuses on the overlapping experiences between the pregnant and birthing body and transgender and gender expansive identities. This three-part series, The Birthing Series, is a body of work that unpacks how we think about transitions, from life to afterlife, dying to death; pregnancy to childbirth; child to parent and vice versa; outside of linear time.
Elliot's award-winning films have received international recognition at over 85 festivals, museums, and venues, including the Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, the Dashanzi Arts Festival in Beijing, The Queens Museum of the Moving Image in NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, among others. Elliot is a twice recipient of the Princess Grace Award from the Princess Grace Foundation and a 2025 MacDowell fellow for Film/Video Arts.
SLINKO
maplewood, NEW JERSEY
Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist currently living in the US. While her
practice is informed by scholarship on labor, agency, and politics, her inspiration comes from interactions with ordinary people, localized contexts, and material culture. With a sharp eye for the personal and the anecdotal, Slinko often zooms in on the micro within the macro of larger historical and political narratives, offering specific insights into the workings of power and its effects on individuals and society. Slinko’s practice encompasses a wide range of media, including political satire, drawing, moving image, performance, printmaking, and graphic design.
Drawing from her experiences growing up in East Ukraine’s Donbas during the final years of the Soviet Union, Slinko’s perspective is a specific blend of personal history and scholarly insight. Slinko sees her practice as an ongoing fieldwork, where she observes and reflects on the broader forces that shape our daily lives. Keenly aware of disillusionment, and dispossession that mark her own lived experience of history, Slinko puts the spotlight on resilience, hope, and humor to give graspable forms to personal agency.
EDGAR REYES
Baltimore, MARYLAND
Edgar Reyes (b. Guadalajara, Mexico) is a multimedia artist and professor. Reyes’s work invites viewers to think about the people, places, and connections they carry with them. His practice draws on the specifics of his own life, and reflections of shared experiences of resettlement and migration. Through his art making he explores his family’s Mexican and Indigenous roots.
Reyes's practice confronts the legacy of displacement in the Americas, seeking to bridge understanding and cultivate compassion. He celebrates the vibrancy of Mexican-American identity while critically engaging with national and cultural ideals. Examining the ongoing blending of Indigenous and European traditions within the Mexican diaspora, he draws connections among ancestral art forms and contemporary experiences, revealing a dialogue between conquest and resistance.
Croton-on-Hudson, NEW YORK
Greeshma Chenni Veettil (b. 1988, India) is a visual artist and educator based in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. She works across photography, sculpture, and installation to explore how images function as material, body, and trace. Her practice investigates the photograph as both an image and an organism—a fragile, foldable surface shaped by the desire to capture time. For her, the photographic print is not a fixed window but something that can be touched, fragmented, and reconfigured, allowing it to exist in relation to other materials and forms. In these new chimeric configurations, these photographic remnants appear to breathe, leak, or fossilize. Through her practice, she reflects on the photograph's dual nature as both preservation and decay, stillness and transformation.
Greeshma holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (2017), and an MFA from Syracuse University, New York (2024), where she was a runner-up for the Graduate Award for Best Work in the Spring Show. She was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2024) and received a full fellowship for her residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA (2025). Greeshma has received the Creative Opportunity Grant from Syracuse University and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at Drewelowe Gallery (Iowa City, Iowa), Light Work (Syracuse), Nancy Cantor Warehouse Gallery (Syracuse), and Point of Contact Gallery (Syracuse).
