Awarded Artists from February 1, 2026 Early & Alumni Application Deadline
The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awarded artists from our February 1, 2026 General Application Deadline. Each of these artists will receive a two or four-week residency during the 2027 season at the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Congratulations to this season’s Artists:
Early Application Awarded artists:
Amy Padnani
New York, New York
Amy Padnani is a writer and senior staff editor at The New York Times whose work moves between narrative journalism and imaginative prose. As an editor, she has helped shape ambitious, emotionally complex stories for a wide audience, thinking carefully about voice, structure and whose experiences make it into the record. As a writer, she is drawn to people who exist at the margins of dominant narratives — those who are underestimated, overlooked or quietly refusing the roles assigned to them.
Her longstanding interest in representation led her to create Overlooked, a Times obituary series that revisits the lives of remarkable women, people of color and others who never received obits in the paper. The project sharpened her sense of responsibility to the dead and the living alike: how stories are framed, who gets named, and how language can either flatten or restore complexity.
At the Studios at MASS MoCA, Padnani will focus on two prose projects that extend this curiosity into more speculative and intimate territory. One is a short story for adult readers that uses a slightly surreal premise to explore freedom, constraint and self-definition. The other is a novel about a young South Asian woman moving through male-dominated pool halls in New York City, using the logic and rituals of the game as a metaphor for control, discipline and choice.
The residency will offer the sustained quiet she needs to revise, experiment with rhythm and pacing and push further into hybrid forms that blur reportage, memory and invention — work that she hopes will, in turn, inform the stories she champions as an editor.
Anna Ialeggio
Bar Harbor, Maine
Born by the ocean and raised in the mountains, Anna Ialeggio is an educator and interdisciplinary artist currently living in Northern Maine. Ialeggio has staged exhibitions and performances as an individual artist and member of collectives (Miss Rockaway Armada, KCHUNG Radio, Monday Nite Weirdos) since 2007. Their work takes a winding path through sculpture, performance and image to consider our collectively fuzzy perception of change, as each generation redefines for itself what is "natural” or “normal.” Ialeggio was awarded the 2022 Ursula K Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship from UOregon Libraries' Special Collections and University Archives. They have been recently supported by Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Ortega y Gasset Projects, The Puffin Foundation, PLAYA, Cornell Council on the Arts, REDCAT Theater, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, and Philadelphia Art Alliance.
While unsuccessful in their audition bid for a salaried role as a charismatic prehistoric quadruped at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, they nonetheless earned an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Irvine in 2019. Ialeggio currently serves as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME) and works in community with The Soil Factory, a communitarian art & sustainability project in Ithaca NY. They feel most alive in their practice when they are working on multiple registers, in multiple modalities, at various levels of formality, and on at least several boats.
Darrel ALejandro Holnes
New York, New York
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American poet, choreopoet, and multidisciplinary artist working across the page, the stage, and the visual frame. He is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and an International Latino Book Award, and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, and Callaloo, and are anthologized in the Library of America's Latino Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. He is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and a recipient of the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize, with residencies from MacDowell, Camargo, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Bread Loaf. He has developed choreopoems at HERE Arts Center, NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts, the Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, and elsewhere. At the Studios at MASS MoCA, he is developing Red Blooded, a choreopoem integrating text, movement, and song, alongside a series of accompanying drawings, that explores memory, embodiment, and collective belonging.
Jenna Caravello
Los Angeles, California
Photo by Sean Behr
Jenna Caravello is a Los Angeles based artist, working across animation and interactive platforms. Her practice embraces the real, the virtual, and the cartoonish, unified by an undercurrent dark humor and critical engagement with video game culture, mechanics, and computational systems. Her practice centers personal and non-human narratives, and themes often marginalized in tech and gaming spheres, like longing, liminality, absurdity, love, and aging. Drawing from transhumanist, hyperconsumerist, and hauntological discourses, Caravello explores physical and digital impermanence, the identity politics of digital avatars, and social relationships across online forums.
Caravello teaches at UCLA in the department of Design Media Arts and serves as Associate Director of the UCLA Game Lab. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation and Film/Video Production from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation.
Lara Ehrlich
Gales Ferry, Connecticut
Photo by Janice Checchio
Lara Ehrlich is the author of the novel Bind Me Tighter Still (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the story collection Animal Wife, which won Red Hen Press’s Fiction Award and was published by the press in 2020. Her short fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, StoryQuarterly, SmokeLong Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, F(r)iction, and elsewhere. She is the host of Writer Mother Monster, a podcast devoted to dismantling the myth of “having it all,” the founder and director of the creative writing center Thought Fox Writers Den, and a co-founder of Raging Women, a literary collective centered on women’s rage, power, and reclamation. Lara is a member of the core faculty at StoryStudio Chicago and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writer in Residence at Connecticut College.
rootoftwo (Cézanne Charles + John Marshall)
Detroit, Michigan
rootoftwo, the creative practice of Cézanne Charles and John Marshall, uses public works, immersive spaces, and artifacts to challenge standard narratives of progress. Their work is driven by the belief that "under-imagined futures have consequences," exploring the tension between innovation and societal impact. By questioning technologies like AI and robotics, they probe issues of privacy, agency, and consent to shape futures rooted in equity.
Notable works include Whithervanes, commissioned by Locust Projects, Miami (2018), and Creative Folkestone (2014). rootoftwo were 2025 Rhizome 7x7 participants, are 2023 Creative Capital Awardees for Anyspace? Whatever., and 2024 recipients of a Knight New Works grant for the cooperative game 463NCY. Their practice is the focus of a 2026 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. rootoftwo has presented work at the Cité du Design (FR), Folkestone Triennial (UK), Locust Projects (US), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (US), and the National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto (JP), among others. Their work is held in permanent collections including the Nevada Museum of Arts Center for Art + Environment, the A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute, and Folkestone Artworks.
Charles holds an MPA from the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, where she focused on science, technology, and society and a BA in Theater from The Ohio State University. She serves on boards including the National Arts Policy Alliance, MOCAD, and the Processing Foundation. Marshall holds a PhD in digital design and fabrication from Robert Gordon University, an MFA from The Ohio State University, and a BA from the Glasgow School of Art. He is a Professor of Art & Design and Architecture, the University of Michigan.
Volha Panco
Boone, North Carolina
Volha Panco (b. 1989, Minsk, Belarus) is a visual artist and educator based in Boone, North Carolina. Her research centers around the impacts of social and political upheavals on human relationships with the environment. Through elements of cityscapes, vegetation, and light, her oil paintings highlight the emergence, endurance, and demise of beings, reflecting on the delicate balance of ecosystems, the consequences of power structures, and the natural cycles of life and death.
Panco holds an MFA in Studio Art from Arizona State University, a BFA from Salisbury University, and a BA from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts. She is an alumna of the Dedalus and the Martin Wong Foundations. Her work has been widely exhibited nationally, including at Marc Straus Gallery (NY), De Sarthe Gallery (AZ), and the Asheville Art Museum (NC), and is held in the permanent collections of Salisbury University and the Galbut Foundation. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Appalachian State University (UNC system).
Alumni Application AWarded Artists:
Alejandro Macias
Tuscon, Arizona
Alejandro Macias is a visual artist whose work examines identity, place, and the socio-political landscape through a Mexican-American lens. Raised along the U.S.-Mexico border in Brownsville, Texas, Macias draws from personal and regional histories to explore themes of assimilation, migration, and cultural hybridity. His practice integrates traditional rendering, abstraction, and multi-media approaches, often using the human figure at the center of his practice.
Macias’s work has been featured in New American Paintings, Southwest Contemporary, and the nationally traveling exhibitions Icons and Symbols of the Borderland, Soy de Tejas, and Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way.
His recent honors include the 2023 Lehmann Emerging Artist Award from the Phoenix Art Museum and the Artist2Artist Art Matters Fellowship. He has held artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, MASS MoCA, the Wassaic Project, CALA Alliance in Phoenix, and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency in New York, among others.
Macias has presented solo exhibitions at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Presa House Gallery, Tucson Museum of Art, and LatchKey Gallery in New York. His paintings are part of the permanent collections at the Phoenix Art Museum, El Paso Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Mexic-Arte Museum, and Newark Museum of Art. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Beili Liu
Austin, Texas
Beili Liu is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Austria, Poland, China, Taiwan and across the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Museum; Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museo di Villa Bernasconi, Como, Italy; Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX, among others. Significant group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Art Museum, LA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Asia Society Texas Center; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; and internationally at the Hamburg Art Week, Germany; M.K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Chengdu Art Museum, China; Zhejiang Museum of Art, China; Musée de la Dentelle in Caudry, Montrouge, France.
Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024), the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022), the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Norway (2021-2022), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium.
Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, Artillery, The Huffington Post, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.
David Askew
Brooklyn, New York
David Askew (b. 2000 Virginia, USA) received their Bachelor of Arts in Painting from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia in 2022
Askew is a Black, Queer portrait artist creating human-animal hybrids to bring emphasis to the exoticization and animalization of Black and Brown Queer individuals. Their goal is to celebrate the beauty and uniqueness of both communities.
Askew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ruth Margraff
Chicago, Illinois
RUTH MARGRAFF’s writing is drawn from the edges of opera and art. Acclaimed for “audaciously original" (Moscow Times) “layer after layer of richly textured emotion...and imminent danger” (Dallas Morning News), her martial arts operas with Fred Ho (Apollo, Guggenheim, LaMama, Brooklyn Academy of Music) toured with CAMI to 33 US cities. Her monologue for SEVEN was introduced by Diane von Furstenberg and Meryl Streep at the Broadway Hudson, performed all over the world and translated into 25 languages. Her CAFE ANTARSIA ENSEMBLE toured to Greece, Turkey, France, Azerbaijan, Egypt, UK, Romania, Canada, Croatia, Czech Rep, Hungary, Russia, Serbia, etc. Ruth's MIRROR BUTTERFLY migration suite for Afro Yaqui Music Collective premiered at the New Hazlett (Pittsburgh), Kennedy Center Millenium Stage (DC), NET (Tucson), 1st Mesopotamian Water Forum (Kurdistan) and was released on Innova Records. In New York City, she's worked with Here Arts Center, Joe’s Pub, BAM Café, Prelude Festival/Martin Segal, Hourglass Group, Laguardia Performing Arts Center; Chocolate Factory, CB’s Gallery, PS122 etc; in Los Angeles: Overtone Industries, Theater of Note, Bottom’s Dream, Audrey Skirball Kenis; in Chicago: Trap Door Theater, Red Tape, Links Hall and Pivot Arts Festival. Awards include Rockefeller, McKnight, Jerome, NEA, TCG, TMUNY, NYSCA, IAC, MASS MoCA, Peale Museum, Fulbright; published by Dramatists Play Service, American Theatre, Theater Forum, Performing Arts Journal, TDR, Applause, Backstage, Lexington Books, Playscripts, Autonomedia, New Village Press, New Meridian Arts...she's an alum of Theater Without Borders, New Dramatists, Playwrights’ Center, Chicago Dramatists and Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.