Welcome August Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: August 14- August 27, 2025
This two-week cohort includes our Family Fellows. Our Family Fellowships offer the opportunity for parent-artists to attend the Studios at MASS MoCA with their families - each awarded artist is allotted use of up to two of our studio spaces, a private apartment, and reserved space for their children at Camp MASS MoCA.
Emmett Ramstad
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Emmett Ramstad’s art practice explores body maintenance and the intimate collectivity of public space through sculpture, installation, performance, and social engagement. In his work, familiar care products —toothbrushes, tissues, towel dispensers— are exhibited in repetition and exaggerated scale, becoming communal domestic sites and making visible bodily need fulfillment (cleansing, voiding, crying) and the labor of tending to ourselves and others. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota he has exhibited artworks nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Rochester Art Center. He is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a McKnight Fellowship for Visual Artists, an Onassis Eureka Commissions Grant, two Minnesota State Arts Boards grants, a Franconia Sculpture Park Fellowship, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Forecast Public Art Research and Development Grant, and an Art and Change grant from the The Leeway Foundation. He has participated in several artist residencies including Marble House Projects, Hyde Park Art Center and Kala Art Institute, and performed in productions with collaborators Maxe Crandall and BodyCartography Project, in addition to making costumes and sets for five touring contemporary dance productions. He has curated and organized several gallery shows, given lectures and artist talks widely, and his work is in collections including the Walker Art Center Library, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Weisman Art Museum. Ramstad is a lecturer in the Department of Art at University of Minnesota.
Margot Douaihy
northampton, massachusetts
Margot Douaihy (b. Scranton, PA) lives and works in Northampton, MA. She earned a BA in Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.
Douaihy is the author of the lyrical crime novel Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books), which was named a Best Crime Novel of 2023 by The New York Times, The Guardian, Apple Books, CrimeReads, Barnes & Noble, & Novel Suspects, among others. The second book in the Sister Holiday Mystery series, Blessed Water, was named a Best Crime Novel of 2024 by the New York Times and the winner of a Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ Crime Fiction. Divine Ruin, the third installment, publishes January 13, 2026. Margot is also the author of Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr, a true-crime poetry project, and Scranton Lace, a documentary poetry collection about the life and death of a lace factory.
A Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Crime Narrative Series and Multimodal/Multimedia Section Editor of Journal of Creative Writing Studies (RIT ScholarWorks), Douaihy’s work has been featured or reviewed in Colorado Review, The Florida Review, North American Review, PBS NewsHour, Mystery Tribune, Portland Review, Vanity Fair, Vulture, and others.
Douaihy serves as an Assistant Professor with Emerson College.
Zora J Murff
oregon
Zora J Murff (b. 1987) is an Oregon-based artist and educator interested in liberation from anti-Blackness. He uses his creative practice to explore the politics of racialization using provocative imagery and practices photography expansively, stretching it across disciplines to create associative or implied images. He strives to speak plainly about visual culture and its entanglement with race, capitalism, and other forms of hierarchical oppression.
Zora J Murff makes photographs, assemblages, videos, and text works that examine fast and slow violence, the rhythms and resonances of oppression throughout history and into our present, and the desire we are indoctrinated to cultivate for what ultimately hurts us. He is attentive to the structures of state violence in the U.S. and abroad and how they interlock with the mechanisms that make the effects of systems of domination invisible in everyday life. Murff’s photographs alternately capture poignant portraits, shots of playful light, the movement of cities, or signs of quiet life despite the odds. His collages combine text and images from a myriad of sources. For Murff, no issue is a single issue when the havoc created abroad is paid for, dearly, at home.
Pablo Lerma
Amsterdam, netherlands
Pablo Lerma (he/him) is a hispanic queer research-based artist and educator living in Amsterdam (NL). His artistic practice and research are developed at the intersection of image and text with a focus in visual archives and vernacular materials dealing with notions of collective memory, representation, and queerness. His work takes various forms from photographic materials to archival installations and multiple forms of publication.
His work has been exhibited at Photoszene (DE), PhotoEspaña (ES), The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), Flowers Gallery (US), Konstanet (EE), Centro Huarte (ES), New York University (US), Fotoweek D.C. (US), SCAN International Festival of Photography (ES), La Fábrica (ES), and Fundació Foto Colectania (ES) among others. His publications are in collections including the Guggenheim Museum (US), Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (US), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMoMA (US), Aeromoto (MX), Centro de la Imagen (MX), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (US), and the International Center of Photography in New York (US), among others.
He has been awarded with the Grand Prize of Curators Award PDN (US), Fundació Guasch-Coranty (ES) and Sala d’Art Jove (ES). He is been selected for Pla(t)form FotoMuseum Winterthur and nominated for the First Book Award MACK Editions (UK), Critical Mass (US), and PDN 30´s (US). His work and writing has been featured at FOAM Magazine (NL), Unseen Platform (NL), British Journal for Photography (UK), Ain´t Bad Magazine (US), New York Foundation for the Arts (US), PDN Online (US) and PhotoInter China (CH).
He is the Head of the Social Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, a program study connecting artistic practices to gender studies, race studies, decolonial studies and new ecologies. He runs the publishing project Meteoro Editions dedicated to the publishing and exposure of vernacular photography, archives and archival practices through publication formats.
Photo by Silviu Guiman
Lauren Weinstein
maplewood, new jersey
Cartoonist Lauren Weinstein, renowned for her insightful comics, has addressed themes like adolescence, motherhood and mortality in her work for two decades. As the artist-in-residence at Town Clock CDC since 2019, she collaborates with domestic violence survivors, sharing their narratives. Weinstein's graphic novella, "The Gift of Time," received acclaim on Slate.com and was among the best comics of 2021. “By My Own”, her animated short about a woman escaping a violent arranged marriage to find healing and independence with art, is debuting at the Pano Festival in March.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Her acclaimed comic strip, Normel Person, was the last weekly strip to run in The Village Voice. In 2019, Weinstein’s “Being an Artist and a Mother” ran in The New Yorker, won the Slate Cartooning Studio Prize, and was selected for 2019’s Best American Comics.
Weinstein, recipient of two Ignatz Awards, graphic novels include, "Girl Stories," "Inside Vineyland," and the unique science fiction epic "Goddess of War." Recognized for her webcomic "Carriers," she received the Gold Medal from The Society of Illustrators in 2015. Formerly a comics instructor at The School of Visual Arts, Weinstein advocates for egalitarian pedagogy. She is represented by The Steven Kasher Gallery.
Esteban Abdul Raheem Samayoa
Oakland, California
Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa (b. 1994, Sacramento, CA) is a Mexican-Guatemalan artist based in Oakland, CA, whose practice is a profound exploration of cultural heritage, identity, and transformation. Working across charcoal, painting, ceramics, and installation, Samayoa’s work captures intimate moments of nostalgia and resilience, drawing from personal and communal histories. His mastery of black and white charcoal drawings serves as the foundation of his practice, rendering evocative scenes that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Beyond monochrome, he embraces vibrant color and rich textures, incorporating materials like burlap, plaster, and soil—elements that pay homage to his Guatemalan roots and the tactile nature of memory.
Amara Abdal Figueroa
san juan, puerto rico
b. 1990 Ponce, Puerto Rico. Agroceramist, artist and environmental advocate. now I focus on things so small I cannot see them • studying clay on the island to filter water • the past to understand our present • creating ceramic works that are immediately fragments • productive failures • an archeology by the living for the living • tools for the study of a longer lasting ceramic object • the beginnings of locally producing a water filter • in wake of the accelerated landgrab • with clay from under our feet • in different scales • from politics of isolation • articulating exchanges across the archipielago • production between islands • a space that we generate • infrastructure that we create • a network of kilns • a vessel that holds what we ingest • separating pathogens from water • vacuums that trap bacterias and viruses • in the meandering paths of a porous filter • tortuosity • like a winding river • sawdust burns out of clay • leaving small cavities • this is now potable.
