Meet this Month’s artists-in-residence!
We begin our Fall/Winter Season of 2026 by welcoming a new cohort of ten artists to the Studios at MASS MoCA. Our November cohort consists entirely of alumni of the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building Program.
Residency session: November 05 — 17, 2026
Akilah Scharff-Teoh
Greenfield, Massachusetts
Akilah Scharff-Teoh is a first-generation Caribbean-American artist and strategist based in Western Massachusetts, where she explores the joy and toil of liminal existence. Studio Feeler, her art practice, is a combination of self-actualization, meditation, spiritual embodiment, and ancestral quest-making. While ceramics is her primary focus, Akilah’s quest-making intersects with photography, textiles, and collage. Themes around duality are recurrent in her functional and sculptural forms. In 2024, Akilah received the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals, the 4th annual Kaabo Clay Award for Black Ceramicists, and the 2024 Assets for Artists/Valley Creates Capacity Building Program. She was also featured in the September/October 2024 edition of Artscope Magazine. Additionally, Akilah has been a Mentor in Residence (Interactive Track) and Dedicated Mentor at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, technology and design in New York City, as well as a mentor for Black Public Media’s BPMplus program, which provides creative, educational, and financial support for Black creative technology fellows. In late 2023, Akilah served as an Emerging Technology Consultant on the PBS American Masters documentary, Searching for Augusta Savage.
Alice Hixon Kirk
Monterey, Massachusetts
Alice Hixon Kirk is a cellist, composer, and industrial designer. She creates multi-media performances with an emphasis on live musical improvisation, humor, and story-telling. She has worked as an improvising musician with comedians, dancers, and video artists, and has performed as a multi-instrumentalist in metal, jazz, ambient, and gamelan ensembles. In 2024, Alice participated in the recording of the self-titled debut album from the Kasambwe Brothers, coinciding with the launch of the new label, MASS MoCA Records. In 2025-2026, Alice has performed in the WBCR Experimental Music Festival, the PS21: The Dark Festival, and at the MASS MoCA Chalet.
In parallel with her work as a solo and ensemble performer, Alice designs and fabricates experimental musical instruments and interfaces to expand frameworks of composition, performance, audience participation, and creative inclusion, such as musical chess sets and inexplicably long cello bows.
In addition to her musical work, Alice has designed and fabricated custom skateboards and taught skateboard fabrication workshops to local youth groups with the support of the Mass Cultural Council. Her experimental skateboard designs were most recently on view in 2026 at the Craft In America Center in Los Angeles.
Currently, Alice is preparing to compose and perform a solo cello on-stage accompaniment in the upcoming stage production of Family Meal, as part of the New York Theater Festival 2026.
Armené Margosian
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Beatriz Amelia
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
Beatriz Amelia is a Boston based multidisciplinary artist. Her work engages with diasporic communities through a visual exploration of the resilience and endurance of culture. Her paintings are full of hidden imagery, worlds within everyday objects, drawing from Puerto Rican traditions and visual language to investigate questions of belonging and reinvention. Beatriz holds a BFA in painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She is currently a studio resident at Boston Center for the Arts. She has participated in exhibitions In Boston, New York City, Miami and Puerto Rico.
Jennessa Burks
West Boylston, Massachusetts
Jennessa Burks is an educator, community advocate, and self taught artist based in Worcester, MA. She earned her Bachelor’s degree from Worcester State University and later her Master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Over the years Jennessa has immersed herself in a lifelong passion for the arts, emphasizing therapeutic benefits, forging community, and the power of public art. Through the use of paintings, mixed media pieces, and murals she works to express her emotions and amplify the voices of marginalized communities. Her work often captures the beauty, strength, and resilience of Black and brown communities through portraiture- Black and brown folks are commonly underrepresented in art spaces, unfortunately reflective of their stories and truths being underrepresented throughout history. With her portraits she aspires to bring joy to others who may experience the void of being unseen while bringing awareness to those who hold the privilege and fulfillment of being seen. Jennessa believes public art sparks necessary dialogue around issues impacting those who hold marginalized identities. Outside of her individual pieces she strives to create community involved murals that engage folks in both the design process and implementation. She has helped create over 20 large scale public art projects throughout Massachusetts. Jennessa finds there is an almost tangible sense of pride that people exude when communities come together to uplift a space through visual storytelling. Her works of art and commitment to community arts have been honored with awards such as the Katherine Erskine Award, MAEA Community Arts Educator of the Year, Worcester’s 40 Under 40 award, and the Key to the City of Worcester.
Julissa Rodriguez
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Kim-Sarah I
Pelham, New Hampshire
Kim-Sarah I (b.1999, she/her/hers) is a Khmer-American visual artist based in Lowell, MA, at Western Avenue Studios and Lofts. She merges photography and mixed media practices to delicately observe and confront her experiences. Coming from a history of needing to conceal and remain silent to survive, her act of creating serves as a root to bridge her expression, cultural identity, and memory. Weaving, arranging, and layering are not only actions in her process but also ways for her to create a narrative archive to preserve and move forward. Kim-Sarah was part of the SEAD Project’s SEA Change Lab Winter 2023 Cohort and participated in the Assets for Artists Capacity Building Lowell Cohort. She’s exhibited work at Griffin Museum of Photography, the Loading Dock Gallery, Lowell City Hall, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, and McCoy Art Gallery.
Michael Talbot
Revere, Massachusetts
Michael Talbot is a Jamaican-born, Boston-based Freelance Artist and Visual Story-teller who has worked on a wide range of projects, murals, exhibitions, and showcases since 2012. His work, often narrative-driven, is most characterized by a keen use of motion, negative space, as well as a limited palette reminiscent of graphic novels and other forms of sequential art. And although his passion and interest for storytelling is forefront in his practice and craft, he tends to draw from his knowledge in Illustration, Design, as well as Animation to help strengthen this process.
"With all that is going on in the world, I acknowledge that it is necessary to have a chorus of voices bringing light to what is important and what us as a people will always need: unity, justice, and love. However as a visual artist, my desire is to be the voice that soothes, inspires, and motivates others to ponder their individual wonders of life. Through my art, I seek to be the light that helps others to look forward and look beyond what isn’t going right at the moment — to provide some solace in a state of unrest, leaving everyone who sees it hanging in the balance of reality and wonder."
Michelle Mullet
North Reading, Massachusetts
Michelle Mullet is a self taught artist who likes to paint Brutalist Architecture in an abstract style. Her series of Soviet Bus Stops celebrates hard edge geometric abstraction while layering bright, joyful color over powerful, concrete structures. Influenced by angular architecture, color theory and the concept of fortification, she creates unexpected architectural tableaus for viewers to study.
Her first solo show, titled “The Architecture of Happiness,” exhibited at Boston City Hall in 2024.
In 2025, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, DCIS Stage 0. She spent most of that year in treatment and is now in remission. She attended an artist in residency at the McCanna House, curated by the North Dakota Museum of Art, at the end of 2025.
She is the winner of the 2023 Denis Diderot AIR award from Chateau Orquevaux and she received a Mass Cultural Council Recovery Grant in 2023. She studied professional development thanks to an Assets for Artist/Mass MoCA Capacity Building Grant in 2024.
Her work is in private collections in Mexico, Germany, France and Spain.
Sunny Allis
Northampton, Massachusetts
Sunny Allis is a queer multimedia artist, designer, director and musician. Through an interdisciplinary approach, they utilize installation, animation, painting, sound, and sculpture to explore interactive participation in dreamworld spaces for people of all ages. With a BFA in Theater Direction and Set Design from New York University and an MFA in Integrated Media and Experimental Sound from California Institute of the Arts, they create paintings, videos, objects, music, and dynamic environments that are activated through play. Their colorful, tactile, nostalgic, and joyful work gives the viewer permission to engage with their imagination and brings groups of people together in the process. They explore themes of transformation, malleability, the absurd, the ecstatic, animism, and ways of finding portals to hidden worlds.
Sunny’s animations have won awards internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Madrid Experimental Film Festival, and the Linoleum Festival in Moscow. Their installations have been exhibited at Occidental College, Kidspace Children’s Museum, the City of Santa Monica, and several galleries and colleges in Massachusetts. They’ve received grants from the Mellon Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Assets for Artists, and MASSCreative.
Sunny authored and illustrated a bilingual children’s book called Hooray, What A Day!/¡Viva,Qué Día!, which follows ten-year old non-binary Frankie and their best friend Jesse through a joyful day in their queer and colorful community. The book has been included in Gender Inclusive Classrooms' curriculum resource list of books for teachers who want to foster safe, welcoming gender-inclusive classrooms. They currently live in Western Massachusetts.
