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
Tammie was born and raised in Northwestern Montana on the Flathead Reservation. Her father was Qlispeʼ (Upper Pend d’Oreille) and Séliš (Bitterroot Salish), and her mother descended from non-Indigenous settlers who arrived on the reservation in the 1920s. Situated between these two cultural lineages, her aesthetic navigates their intertwined and often fraught histories while exploring her own experience as a mixed-blood person.
Working through both Indigenous and non-Indigenous modes of making and seeing as well as those shared across those communities, her practice spans a wide range of materials and processes, including paint, wood, fabric, resin, hair, bone, paper, and beads. As an artist, her work moves between processes rooted in both of her traditions. Each material is considered for the lineage it carries—how its cultural origins, uses, and stories interact. Through these materials, Tammie explores the thresholds where her cultural experiences converge, seeking forms of connection that feel resonant and accessible to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers.
Tammie earned her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston in 2022 and her BFA from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle in 2019. She also holds a BS in Anthropology and Archaeology from Montana State University in Bozeman. She currently lives and works in Bremerton, Washington.
LÉA DONNAN
Northampton, massachusetts
Exploring the making of marks as small as an embroidery stitch and as large as the flight of a missile, Léa Donnan creates sites of exchange that question the divide between sanctity and survival. She returns to The Studios seeking points of connection through the lens of intergenerational trauma, resilience, and belonging. Experimenting with recodifying information systems informed by her own neuro-ophthalmic visual rehabilitation in the wake of a disabling head injury, she continues to interface with continuing themes of ruin and resurrection. Donnan 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. In addition to a residency at the International Cité des Arts in Paris, she was a guest artist at Andrea Zittel’s A–Z West, producing work for a 600-mile-long exhibition stretching from Joshua Tree, California, to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Currently, she is focused on socially engaged, educational, and artistic collaborations, most recently having worked extensively with a groundbreaking American institution recognized nationally.
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?
Rogers was named to the Forbes' 2024 “30 under 30” list in the Art and Style category. She has exhibited at Documenta 15 (Germany), Weserburg Museum (Germany), Lilley Museum (NV), the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), the California Museum of Photography (CA), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA), California State University, Fullerton, The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MA), Torrence Art Musuem (CA), and the Fuller Craft Museum (MA).
She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023-2024). Rogers also held residencies at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (2022), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), and MASS MoCA (2025). She is a recipient of Hearthland Foundation Grant (2025), Anonymous Was a Woman (2025), and has been featured in The New York Times, Harper's Bazaar Japan, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, ARTSY, New American Paintings, Boston Art Review, and The Boston Globe.
Rogers received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Rogers is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor and Head of Sculpture at the University of Virginia. She is currently represented by Super Dakota.
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.
GREESHMA Chenni veettil
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).
Kseniia Bolshakova is an Indigenous writer creating prose in the critically endangered Arctic language Dolgan. A member of the Dolgan Tribal community Iydyna, she was born and raised in the tundra of the Siberian Arctic. She is the second Dolgan-language prose writer in her people’s history. As one of the youngest keepers of the Dolgan language—spoken by approximately 1000 people—she is deeply committed to preserving her native tongue and traditional knowledge, as well as advocating for Indigenous rights and social justice.
Kseniia works internationally, serving as an expert on the peoples of the Russian Arctic for several human rights organizations and delivering lectures at leading U.S. universities, including Dartmouth College, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of California, San Diego. She was awarded a writing residency at MASS MoCA through the Assets for Artists program and, in collaboration with Amherst College Press, is compiling the anthology "Reindeer Caravan: Indigenous Writing from Siberia".
Her interactive book "Маамыччыттар / Catching Reindeer", created in collaboration with artist Ripley Whiteside, was featured in the Unbannable Library and Banned Books Week exhibitions in the United States.Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals in English (Words Without Borders; Arctic and Circumpolar Indigenous Futurisms; Cultural Survival), Swedish (Det icke-ryska Ryssland: ur de dekoloniala litteraturerna), Dolgan (Kuluk), and Russian (O rodnom), with translations into Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Northern Sámi underway.
