Welcome 2025 Residency Fellows: Part 1
The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees of 2025’s first batch of residency fellowships! Each of these artists will receive a free residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.
Congratulations to this season’s fellows:
General Fellowships:
(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)
Carmen Lizardo
Carmen Lizardo (Dominican-born) uses experimental techniques alongside photography as her primary medium. Her work highlights overlooked histories and underscores the significance of asserting a place within the narrative of American culture while also situating these experiences within a global context. Culturally, her art reflects her personal metamorphosis and hybrid identity, acknowledging a fragmented history that often fails to connect collective stories of belonging.
Lizardo earned her BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the US Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York Council for the Arts. Lizardo has exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora, ArtsBridge, Oregon Center for Contemporary Arts, Samuel Dorsky Museum, Alfred University, and NARS Foundation. Carmen Lizardo is published in The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes and Gum Printing: Artist's Creative Practices and featured in Hyperallergic. Her public commissions include projects for New York City's MTA and several community-centered initiatives.
Elaine Nguyen
Elaine Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA. She holds an MFA from the University of California Davis, a BFA in Painting, and a BA in Humanities from Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work explores identity, displacement, and ways to capture memory and yearning through the passage of time and light. Her work involves cyanotypes and long exposures addressing the fluidity and blurriness of memory and time. It expands across painting, sculpture, and time-based media creating films that create community through its exploration and reclamation of Vietnamese heritage. Through durational walking performances and site-specific work, she acknowledges the transitory and cyclical nature of searching and wandering as the works evoke timeless, placeless displacement and invoke a desire to enter a portal that could take one elsewhere.
Her work has been exhibited at Root Division (San Francisco, CA), the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (Davis, CA), Roxie Theater (San Francisco, CA), Brea Gallery (Brea, CA), 2727 Gallery (Berkeley, CA), State of CA Building (San Francisco, CA), Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD), Axis Gallery (Sacramento, CA), Praxis Space (Singapore), and Foundation Obras (Portugal) among others. She has been an artist in residence at World of Co in Bulgaria (2021), LaSalle Tropical Lab in Singapore (2023), and Foundation Obras in Portugal (2024). She is currently the Blau-Gold Teaching Fellow (2024/2025) at Root Division and is also an independent curator, curating Conversations in Identity with Asian Creatives Network at the Salesforce Tower (San Francisco, CA), Sacred Strands at i19 Gallery (Orange, New Jersey), and is a member of Gallery 2727 Arts Collective in Berkeley, CA.
Farshid Bazmandegan
Bazmandegan’s work explores the intersection of memory, violence, and the material world to examine the complexities of exile and displacement. Through his practice he looks at how Western imperial interests have shaped the lives of many in the Middle East, including his own. By delving into personal, political, and historical narratives, Bazmandegan reflects on the idea of a body without a home in the landscape of exile.
Living as a Middle Eastern refugee in a post 9/11 socio-political reality, he is investigating the constant state of having to negotiate his position and place within Western society. He is interested in exploring the ways in which individuals or collectives navigate these contradictory forces and develop strategies for resilience.
Farshid Bazmandegan was born and raised in Iran. He is an Iranian-American artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Bazmandegan received his MFA in sculpture from UCLA and his BA in visual arts from UC San Diego.
Photo by Tristan Willey.
Hannah Perrin King
Hannah Perrin King (she/her) is a 2022-23 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA where she was named the inaugural Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow, a scholarship awarded in addition to the fellowship to “an emerging woman writer of exceptional promise.” King is the winner of The Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest, the winner of New Millennium Writings’ 48th New Millennium Award for Poetry, and AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry. About King’s poems, judge Leslie Harrison wrote: “They contain, barely, their own difficult, gorgeous music. They read like they're setting a match to their own paper, they read like fire.” King’s first manuscript is a National Poetry Series finalist, and she is a 2017 Tin House Workshop Scholar. In 2018, King graduated with a Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing from The New School. During her graduate studies, she became Deputy Poetry Editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, where she served from 2017-2020. King’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, North American Review, and Best New Poets, among others.
Katherine Simóne Reynolds
Slippage
Anti-articulation
Overhealing
Katherine Simóne Reynolds feels you looking, and at times enjoys it. Her practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness within the Black Midwestern landscape, conversations on the “non”, and the importance of “anti- excellence”. Her work cautiously attempts to physicalize emotions and experiences by constructing works that include photo based works, film, choreography, sculpture, and an anxious writing practice. Utilizing Black embodiment, vulnerabilities and the interior alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour, residue, the Black church while interrogating the notion of “authentic care”. Her practice deals in Blackness from her own perspective and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work”.
Reynolds has exhibited and performed within many spaces and institutions including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Museum of Modern Art New York, SculptureCenter, and the Graham Foundation. She has exhibited in national and international group and solo shows and has spoken at The Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Black Midwest Initiative Symposium at University of Minnesota. She was also the 2022 Fellow at The Graham Foundation. Alongside her visual art practice She has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary, SculptureCenter, and exhibitions for Counterpublic 2023. She also is mounting two exhibitions for The Stanley Museum of Art, and The Clyfford Still museum for the winter of 2025.
Photo by Laura Banchi.
Leilehua Lanzilotta
Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator. Lanzilotti’s practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue.
Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.”
Other honors include a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award in partnership with Te Ao Mana, Empowering ʻŌiwi Leadership Award (E OLA), and Native Launchpad Advancing Indigenous Performance Award. Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, Bogliasco Foundation, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.
Linda Mickens, a Connecticut-based artist originally from Newark, NJ, uses her art to weave powerful narratives that inspire change and foster connection.
A primarily self-taught sculptor, Linda began her journey working with bronze before creating LinMick, her unique technique that combines paper and reclaimed materials into exciting works of art. From the smaller work of Everyday Angels to the commanding presence of life-sized pieces like Reflections and Unclaimed, her creations are rich with emotion and storytelling.
Her forthcoming project, inspired by her time in Louisiana, delves into the vibrant cultural tapestry of the South. Rooted in the soulful rhythms of jazz, blues, and her southern heritage, the Bitsie Grant Second Line sculptures will celebrate resilience, community, and the enduring spirit of the Second Line tradition.
With projects like A Seat for the Soul and her upcoming works, Linda reimagines public spaces as platforms for living stories, demonstrating how art can bridge histories, ignite dialogue, and unite communities.
Photo by Alex Barber.
Martín Wannam
Martín Wannam (b. 1992) is a Guatemalan visual artist and educator whose work offers a critical exploration of his homeland's historical, social, and political landscape. With an equatorial perspective that intersects brownness and wildness, Wannam's iconoclastic and maximalist approach challenges mainstream narratives through photography, sculpture, and performance art. His multidisciplinary practice examines the impacts of immigration, systemic structures, utopian ideals, and family on both individual and collective levels.
Holding an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico (2020), a Diploma in Contemporary Photography from La Fototeca, Guatemala (2016), and a BA in Graphic Design from Universidad Rafael Landivar (2015), Wannam's work has been widely exhibited internationally. Highlights include exhibitions at The Latinxs Project at NYU, Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center (Chicago), El Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (Panama), 516 Arts (NM), and the XXIII Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City. He has also showcased his artworks at events like Photo Pride and Rotterdam Photo in the Netherlands.
Currently, Wannam serves as an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also a member of the Fronteristxs Collective, a group of artists advocating for migrant justice and the abolition of the prison-industrial complex through their creative practice.
Maryam Adib
Maryam Adib is an oil painter, clothing designer and muralist working in Ithaca, NY. In her painting practice she seeks to weave together the links of memory, history, family lineage, and dreams. She believes that by understanding our collective and individual histories and dream worlds, we can reawaken memories and pieces of ourselves that may feel lost to our subconscious. In her clothing design practice, Maryam sources clothing from thrift stores and vintage shops; she customizes these finds with her hand drawn designs via screen printing. Maryam wishes to encourage clothing reutilization by showing the possibilities that upcycling provides to refresh garments once considered old or unwearable.
Maryam graduated with her BFA from SUNY Cortland in May of 2020 after completing her thesis show, Alchemy of the Spirit. After graduating, Maryam was invited to develop a solo show in Albany NY in early 2021. This opportunity was presented by the Stage One Gallery BIPOC residency program run by community organizer, Jammella Anderson and the Stage One Gallery. In this time, she created the body of work, Dream State: Between the Conscious and Subconscious Mind. This was a series of 9 paintings and a site specific mural in the Stage One Gallery. Since then, Maryam has been a part of various group shows in Albany such as SEEN and the Mohawk- Hudson Regional show, both curated by the Albany Center Gallery. Along with the group show, Mixtape Vol. 1 curated by Collective Effort in Troy, NY. She was awarded the Christine M. Miles Award in May of 2021 and later received the Mona Brickman Artist of the Year award in December of 2021, both presented by Albany Center Gallery. Shortly after, Maryam attended the Saltonstall foundation for the Arts in August of 2022 for a 4 week residency. In that time she created various drawings and began developing a large scale 5 panel painting. Maryam was then invited for a solo show with The Rest Gallery in Ithaca, NY, titled, The Body Remembers in early 2023.
Over the course of the last two years, beginning in July of 2022, she and a group of artists working with Southside Community Center’s program CUMEP (Community Unity Music Education Program) were awarded the Creatives Rebuild New York grant. This grant provides each artist on the team with a salary to work for said program, while also working on their own personal practice. She has been responsible for developing art programming centered around Black and Brown youth in Ithaca. Her professional focus being both mural and screen- printing education and development. She has developed and screen-printed designs to promote the program (CUMEP), created art curriculum, and developed a kids mural program where children learn how to design and paint a community mural along with a fashion program for the youth.
Photo by EBRU YILDIZ
Michael Hambouz
Michael Hambouz is a multidisciplinary artist, multi-instrumentalist musician, and independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Hambouz creates chromaesthesia-influenced works – experiments in dimension and color made under the guidance of music – to process bouts of loss and reflections on life spent in the rural Midwest, New York City, and in the cybersphere as a first-generation Palestinian-American. Experimenting freely with mediums, he encourages unexpected results and mutations in compositional form to bloom in the studio, resulting in conceptually abstracted paintings and prints, intricate layered paper cut outs, sculpture, drawings and animations.
Hambouz received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH, and has been awarded two residencies with Wassaic Project in upstate New York. Solo/two-person exhibitions include Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), Calico (Brooklyn, NY), chashama (New York, NY), Elijah Wheat Showroom (Newburgh, NY), Future Fairs (New York, NY), Kayrock (Brooklyn, NY), The Krasl Art Center (St. Joseph, MI), Neighbors (New York, NY), 3S Artspace (Portsmouth, NH), Spring/Break Art Show (NYC), Troutbeck (Amenia, NY), and a 20-year survey exhibition at Antioch College in 2018. Select group exhibitions include Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY), The Centre for Contemporary Printmaking, (Bangor, N. Ireland), Club Rhubarb (New York, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (New York, NY), Dominique Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Eve Leibe Gallery (London, UK), The National Arts Club (New York, NY), Northern-Southern (Austin, TX), Print Center New York (New York, NY), and Standard Space (Sharon, CT). His work has been featured in Artnet News, Design Milk, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Two Coats of Paint, and Vice among others, and can be seen in the collections of Antioch College, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Niles History Center, and NYU Langone Medical Center.
Navin Norling
In his ongoing practice, Navin Norling examines classic Americana imagery and assembles miscellanea out of popular culture signifiers, sayings, folklore, and materialism. Both humorous and incisive, the painting-filled installations of Navin Norling juxtapose American cultural stereotypes, pop iconography, issues of race, gender, class, power, and economics. In his works, content-rich icons such as Moors, Black Power figures, consumer logos, blackface women, cheap signage, graffiti, and celebrities are layered one upon another in paintings that are stacked and hinged on the walls as charms. These pieces of rural debris tumble into the gallery space, creating a distinctly American cacophony. Drawing on a wide range of experiences, Norling's installations become a culmination of personal culture, and at times, a commentary on issues of power, class, geography, capitalism and inequality.
Photo by Khary Mason
Nandi Comer
Nandi Comer is the Poet Laureate of Michigan. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) andTapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in Green Mountains Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, and others. She is the co-director of Detroit Lit.
Paola de la Calle
Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia.
She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She’s a 2022-2023 KALA Fellowship Award recipient and previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY.
Her work has been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, Glasstire, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, and VOGUE among others. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Sahar Khraibani
Sahar Khraibani is a writer and artist whose writing has appeared in Montez Press, The Brooklyn Rail, the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Project, and Hyperallergic among others. Born and raised in Beirut, Khraibani is currently based in Brooklyn, and is preoccupied with the digital reproducibility of trauma, decentralization, and how political landscapes and networks of care influence artmaking practices outside of capitalism. They are a recipient of the Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship at The Poetry Project and a MacDowell Fellowship. Sahar teaches at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College and is a Critical Studies Fellow and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Studies Program. Sahar’s first book is forthcoming with 1080Pres.
Sebastián Davila
Sebastián Dávila is a Swiss-Puerto Rican artist born in 1992 who lives and works between Lausanne and San Juan. He spent his childhood between Puerto Rico and the United States before returning to Switzerland to study. Dávila's work addresses the legacy of colonialism which still impacts his native Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Conjuring up characters and rituals, fictional yet plausible, Dávila offered a form of critical, surreal escapism.
Shani Strand
Shani Strand is a multidisciplinary artist that uses sculpture, video, and installation to consider ungovernability in post-colonialism. She explores the unstable intersections between contemporary diasporic culture and historical narratives, between systems of violence and the administration of individual freedom. Strand has recently exhibited in SLIPPERY 4L (Harkawik, Los Angeles); Procession (Rachel Uffner, New York); A Walk Good, Act Bad (Deli, Mexico City). She has performed with Miho Hatori at The Broad (Los Angeles, 2022) and has been published by CARLA (2024), The Avery Review (2023) and Pin-Up Magazine (2021). She has lectured at Wesleyan University (2024), Santa Monica Community College (2024), and Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022).
Yumeng He
Yumeng He is a transdisciplinary artist, documentary director and sound designer.
Her background in Anthropology informs her storytelling. She is passionate about telling stories that focus on identity, diaspora, memory, land, the interwoven personal and collective experience, and the human and more-than-human relationships.
Her documentary works have been invited to screen at IDFA, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, NOWNESS Short Film Awards, Slamdance, Big Sky, Full Frame.
She holds an MFA in Documentary Film and Video from Stanford University, an MA and BA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Southern California.
Oregon Visual Arts Fellowship:
(funded by The Ford Family Foundation)
Garrick Imatani
Garrick Imatani is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, and print. His work seeks relief, seduction, and resistance away from ontologies based on lack, loss, and extraction. Imatani has exhibited or performed at Blaffer Art Museum (Houston), Triumph Gallery (Moscow), Art in General (NYC), ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Oregon Contemporary, and the Portland Art Museum. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Ragdale; and, he has received grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Maine Arts Commission, and Oregon Percent for Art.
Massachusetts Fellowship:
(funded by the Barr Foundation)
Photo by: Holli Margell/Native Light Photography
C.M. Green
C.M. Green (they/them) is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their poetry and short fiction has been featured in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere, and their creative nonfiction has been nominated for the Best of the Net. They are a graduate of GrubStreet's Novel Immersive for Queer and Trans Writers, and a participant in the 2023 StoryBoard fiction workshop at Story Studio in Chicago. Their short fiction was a semifinalist in Sundress's open reading period, and their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is forthcoming from fifth wheel press in February 2025. Their current projects include a poetry collection exploring faith, madness, and gender, and a historical novel about experiences of gender and sexuality in Leningrad in the 1980s.
Easton Smith
Easton Smith's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Sonora Review, The Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his partner, his friends, and three beautiful chickens.
Emily Rose
Emily Rose is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. Themes of home, identity, and memory are central in her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations. Surrounded by her family’s oral stories, a blend of cultures, food, celebrations, and spiritual beliefs, Emily Rose infuses these narratives using found objects, textiles, dreams, and memory into her work. In the retelling of these stories and memories, the artist borrows some of the original elements while changing other parts, straddling between reality, make-believe, and nostalgia.
Emily Rose is a recipient of the Wagner Impact Studio Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council Grants for Creative Individuals, and the Boston Media Arts Empowerment Award. Group exhibitions of her work included: Jean McDonough Arts Center, Worcester, MA; Elevated Thought, Lawrence, MA; ShowUp Inc., Boston, MA; Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge, MA; The Dodge House Gallery, Providence, RI; and The Urbano Project, Boston, MA. Publications of her work can be found in Raandoom, the Boston Art Review, and Artscope.
Eva Lin Fahey 张雯林
Eva Lin Fahey 张雯林 (she/her) is a visual artist born in Jingmen, China during the One Child Policy (in place from approximately 1979-2016). A transracial adoptee, she became a US citizen at age 3. Since completing a BFA Magna Cum Laude in Painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst within the Commonwealth Honors College, she has exhibited across Massachusetts as well as in El Dorado, Arkansas. With a studio based in Florence, MA, she is joining as an MFA Visual Arts candidate at Clark University in January 2025. Eva was a 2023 ValleyCreates Capacity-Building grantee through MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program and her work was recently featured in AGNI’s Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing.
“My work begins with a wiping of the slate—biologically, phonetically, and geographically—caused by the wide-reaching impact of China’s One-Child Policy. From this erasure, I move forward through intentional re-learning, centering my work around ancestral memory and loss. I draw past and future ghosts into the messiness of the present, exploring how loss shapes my experience within the Asian adoptee diaspora.
Contextualized by my experience of motherhood, my work also examines the implications of personal choice within broader systems of control, migration, and cultural identity. My work seeks to understand how personal autonomy intersects with broader narratives of belonging and displacement—flowing in liminal spaces of unresolved longings.”
Jo Nanajian
Inspired by the interplay of materials, narrative, and identity, artist Jo Nanajian’s creative journey is marked by a relentless exploration of form and meaning. Recently, her practice evolved from 2-dimensional painting to encompass wall-mounted sculpture. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, she moved to the United States in 2008 and holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Her exhibition history spans venues in Boston, New York, and Tokyo. Nanjian’s work was showcased alongside prominent artists and curators, including Hank Willis Thomas’ collective and For Freedoms, who featured her work at Praise Shadows Gallery. These exhibitions underline her commitment to pushing boundaries, from the introspective depth of Narration Within the Materials in Tokyo to the provocative engagement of Let Love Quiet Fear in Boston. Nanajian was awarded residencies at the Boston Center for the Arts and Fountainhead in Miami, which provided invaluable opportunities for immersion in new environments, collaborations with fellow artists, and the time and space to further refine her craft. Earning recognition from a notable base, Nanajian’s work is featured in the private collection of Miami arts patron Jorge Pérez. Her work has also been spotlighted in publications such as ArtScope Magazine and the Boston Art Review, recognizing her exploration of identity and innovative approach to sculpture.
Nirmal Raja
Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist who recently relocated to Cambridge, MA after living and working in Milwaukee for over 24 years. She had lived in India, South Korea, and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States thirty years ago. She holds a BA in English Literature from St. Francis College in Hyderabad, India; a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She has participated in solo and group shows in the Midwest, nationally, and internationally. She received several awards including “Graduate of The Decade” from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Raja received the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship for individual artists for 2020 and the Mildred L. Harpole Artists of the Year 2022 award from the Milwaukee Arts Board. Her art residencies include the Arts/Industry Residency at Kohler WI and Vermont Studio Center among others. She collaborates with other artists and strongly believes in investing energy into her immediate community while considering the global. She periodically curates exhibitions that bring people from different cultures and backgrounds together.
At the core of her practice is a compelling refusal to be defined by others. She is committed to letting curiosity and experimentation guide her path. Her work revolves around understanding the impact of migration on women, the weight of cultural responsibilities placed on women while traversing geographic boundaries, and material culture as a witness and testament to these experiences.
Sharinna Travieso
Sharinna Travieso is a self-taught Latinx muralist and painter based in Worcester, MA. Her work celebrates diversity, inclusion, and the beauty of human connection while raising awareness about environmental sustainability. Through her vibrant public art, Sharinna strives to unite communities and spark meaningful conversations. Her recent projects include murals at the Worcester Public Library, the DCU Center, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the AT&T building in downtown Worcester and the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Massachusetts.
Sharinna’s passion for sustainable art drives her to reuse recycled materials in her creations, reflecting her commitment to earth preservation. Her murals often depict themes of connection, community, and celebration, showcasing her ability to transform public spaces into vibrant, inspiring works of art.
Beyond murals, Sharinna has a strong background in community engagement and education. She works extensively with children in summer and after-school programs, fostering creativity and encouraging self-expression through art.
As an event coordinator, Sharinna has organized numerous community-focused initiatives, including the Creative Interlude series, Matheson Mural Project, and Catch Basin Mural Project. She is also a member of a local art collective that hosts free community art events and block parties. Her notable projects, such as the Diversity in STEM mural at WPI and “Our Planet, Our Future” AT&T mural, reflect her dedication to empowering communities, celebrating inclusion, and advocating for social change.
Whether working with acrylics, oils, watercolors, or sculptures, Sharinna uses art as a tool for healing, connection, and education. Her mission is to inspire future generations, foster meaningful conversations, and showcase the transformative power of creativity.
Veronica Melendez
Veronica Melendez is an interdisciplinary artist, publisher, and curator based in Greenfield, MA. Having been raised in Washington D.C amongst one of the largest Central American populations in the U.S, her work centers the intricate tapestry of ‘home’, investigating its multifaceted construction within the context of being born in the diaspora. She is a founder of La Horchata, an arts publication highlighting creatives from the Central American diaspora. She was selected for the 2018 Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for Documentarians of the American South by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Her work has been featured in the Washington Post, NPR, VICE, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. La Horchata has been exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, CA and the inaugural exhibition Presente! in the Molina Family Latino Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography, Creative Arts and Visual Culture at Hampshire College.
Iris Residency Fellowship
(in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center)
Luana Dias David
A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Luana Dias David is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer whose work has been presented globally, spanning over two decades and capturing the vibrant intersections of dance, cultural tradition, and storytelling. Her Brazilian cultural performances have been featured on national television, including Italy’s RAI Uno (2019) and Russia’s Rossiya 1 (2008), as well as in a prestigious performance for Italian President Silvio Berlusconi at Rome’s Piazza Navona.
Luana is the Creator behind the “Quilombo Experience” a showcase project that educates about the power of multicultural connections throughout Brazilian history. Her focus on this work deepens her exploration into Music, Dance and costume design, revealing rich cultural narratives and honoring ancestral aesthetics.
Selected as a 2025 MASS MoCA artist-in-residence, Luana will expand research and focus on the costume design part of the project.
Luana’s career has been profoundly shaped by her mastery in traditional dance forms, alongside her ardent belief in fostering community. She shares
“I create to celebrate belonging and to honor everything that brings us closer to one another.”
This vision is at the heart of the Quilombo Experience, embodying resilience and the beauty of shared heritage.
May Lee Tom
May Lee Tom knew from an early age that she wanted to be an artist. She attended classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Worcester Center for Crafts. The daughter of Chinese immigrants presents Asian American history through relief sculpture. Discovering and telling their stories offers a more accurate and fuller picture of our nation’s history. She is a Studio Assistant at the Worcester Center for Crafts.
Daniel Pabon Velazquez
Daniel Pabon Velazquez is a visual artist and educator, based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In his practice he explores memory, and its intersections between the individual and the collective, working mostly through painting, but also with sculpture, installations, and experimental photography. By collecting photographs of his own family albums as well as others found archives, he comments on remembrance through the effects of the passage of time. Based on personal experiences, his work turns photographs into objects of reflection on a supposed collective imagination of the past, simultaneously intertwined with the decay of the present and the uncertainty of the future in colonial context of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.Daniel received a BFA in Painting from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in 2020 and received an exchange fellowship to attend Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018. His work and research has been shown at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico. as well as multiple galleries and spaces both in Puerto rico and the U.S.
Heryk Tommassini
Heryk Tomassini is a trans-disciplinary artist who creates work focuses in installation, sculpture, photography, painting and drawings. He was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1974 where he is living and working. He obtained an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania where he got the Scholarship for Diversity. Also, he studied architecture at ARQPOLI, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. Tomassini’s work intersects between architecture and space in relation to displacements and transits in cultural history, memory, and migration. He uses symbols, iconographies and/or objects that represent the socio-economic layers and arguments of his cultural history of colonial extractions, and alliances. Also, Tomassini incorporates discarded materials as a mode of salvages and juxtapositions, to break the framing of a disempowered island, and to channel a new history of representation and exchange of the conditions of living in the Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico Since he was 8 years old the artist would gather materials, not as a hoarder but to make furniture out of necessity.
Tomassini attended to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023 and to the Vermont Studio Center in 2015. His artwork is being exhibited, at La Poli/Gráfica de Puerto Rico: América Latina y el Caribe, University of New England, Portland ME, the Cherry Street Pier, Philadelphia PA, The Museum of Bayamón, PR, Penn State University, PA, The Bronx Museum in New York as part of the 9th Biennale, David Nolan Gallery in Chelsea New York, Art Museum in Caguas, PR. In 2002 Tomassini participated in the international event PR 02’ [En ruta] in collaboration with the architectural firm from Finland Casagrande & Rintala, organized by M+M Proyectos.
Kristal Juan
Multidisciplinary artist and educator. Juan obtained her bachelors degree with a concentration in Printmaking at the School of Fine Arts and Design of Puerto Rico in 2019. Her artistic practice explores various topics related to anatomy, flora, fauna and the microscopic. Her work studies different ways to do mixed media using printmaking in a traditional, experimental and contemporary way.
Her work has been presented in different international spaces. Throughout the years she has participated in collectives in Puerto Rico, Greece, México, Portugal, Ecuador and the United States. For example, in 2024 she has exhibit in Instituto Leonés de Cultura, Spain, Centro de Difusión cultural del IPBA “Raul Gamboa”, Mexico, and Souvenir, Puerto Rico. In 2023 she showed her work in 11th international Printmaking Biennial, Portugal and Museum of Art Francisco Oller, Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
In 2019 she continued to develop her practice at La Casa de les Contrafuertes, where she managed the screen printing workshop. As part of the residency program in 2022 she had her first individual exhibition. As former co-founder of the collective project called Ciclos Graficos , Juan continued to promote artistic exchange and the tradition of the printmaking portfolio in Puerto Rico. She managed different printmaking theme portfolio projects and designed the package presentation. Currently, she works as a professor in the Printmaking department of the School of Fine Arts and Design of Puerto Rico and a professor at Liga Estudiantes de Arte. Additionally, she is also part of the Housing and Workshops Project for Visual Artists of the Municipality of Bayamón.
Monica Rodriguez Medina
Monica Rodriguez Medina (b.1980, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose research-based practice examines the ways in which narratives about historical events are created, preserved, and disseminated. Rodriguez received a BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in 2005 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2011. In 2012-203 Rodriguez was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. Rodriguez has exhibited her work internationally, group exhibitions include Contemporary Museum of St. Louis, Missouri; Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond, Virginia; TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; 19th Contemporary Art Festival Video Brasil, São Paulo; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas, Mexico among others.
Photo by Erika P Rodriguez
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. Sofía has been a fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Smithsonian Institute, Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and the Flaherty Seminar, among others. Her work has been shown in Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Savvy Contemporary, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and El Kilómetro gallery. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local. In 2023, she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship and published Observatorio de lagunas: notas de campo with Editorial Educación Emergente. In 2024, she was awarded the United States Artist Fellowship.
University Fellowships:
(In partnership with the following universities):
Lucia Reissig (Bard College)
Photo by Tirco Matute
The work of Lucía Reissig (Buenos Aires, 1994) transposes ideas about the memory of the body and objects into tasks of care, domestic work, informal work, and food politics.
In recent years, her work has focused on sculpture, where she uses materials and techniques that echo the processes and sensibilities of cooking, exploring diverse variants, textures, colors and compositions. Her artistic practice also extends to producing objects, installations, performative rituals, and photographs. She is interested in blurring the technical and conceptual boundaries between politics, food, work, and affections, combining these languages in her work, either collectively or in her studio practice.
Her artistic upbringing occurred in other artists' studios and DIY spaces and continued at the Programa de Artistas in the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires (2017/18) and the Escuela Incierta of Lugar a Dudas, Colombia (2018). She received her MFA in Sculpture from the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Bard College, New York (2024).
From 2015 to 2023, she was part of artist-run projects like Proyecto NUM; Caterine Full Love; Belleza y Felicidad Fiorito; and Servicio de Limpieza Integral.
In 2021, she published Sticky Floors with the Chilean publishing house HambreHambreHambre.
In 2018, she was awarded the Kenneth Kemble Fellowship for a Young Artist, and in 2019 the Premio en Obra at Arteba along with Selvanegra Galería.
Reissig lives and works between Buenos Aires and New York.
Yulia Spiridonova
(Massachusetts College of Art and Design)
Yulia Spiridonova (b. 1986) is a contemporary artist working primarily with photography, collage, and installation. Born in Moscow, Russia, she currently resides and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Her art has been exhibited in Russia, the United States, and various countries across Europe. Yulia holds an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University (2008) and a post-baccalaureate diploma from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2014). She earned her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in May 2024.
Oscar Chacon (Maine College of Art and Design)
Oscar Chacon (b.1984, El Paso, TX) is a Texas-based artist whose creative practices and processes focus on producing mixed media, paper-based drawings. His art draws inspiration from photography, performance, film, and the natural world. Oscar will often begin a drawing by deciding what it is he wants to see, and then gathers as much reference material as he can in order to realize that vision on paper. He holds a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MFA from Maine College of Art and Design. He was nominated for the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship in 2022 and participated in the group exhibition "Evening Botanist" at SPACE gallery in Portland, Maine, the following year. In 2023, he was selected for the Alumni Artist Residency at Maine College of Art and Design and was invited to exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art in 2024. When not immersed in his studio practice, Oscar shares his passion for art as an Elementary Art Teacher in Dallas, TX.
Simone Khanyi Hadebe (Rhode Island School of Design)
Born in Botswana and raised by her grandparents in Zimbabwe, Simone Khanyi Hadebe’s upbringing heavily informs her practice. Through illustration, animation, and sound, she explores the nuances of family dynamics, memory, nostalgia, language and the rich visual symbolism of African textiles. Her work as a Zimbabwean-Motswana multidisciplinary artist is informed by her in-betweenness. She considers herself a “third culture kid” - having been raised in a Zimbabwean household yet struggling to speak her family’s language of Ndebele or the language of her nationality, Setswana. These persistent feelings of detachment and a nostalgic longing for home influence her current project on Zimbabwean album covers.
Notably, she is keenly interested in ways of archiving and digitally preserving endangered indigenous languages in Southern Africa. Her career goal is to become a creative consultant/arts based researcher, using her education to assist indigenous communities worldwide in documenting their oral histories and language learning. These ideas include designing storytelling spaces, information design as patterned textiles, using AI for language revitalization and hosting live motion capture storytelling nights. Whilst her interests are vast, she feels that she has the dogged enthusiasm to achieve them all.
Molly Burt-Westvig
(Temple University - Tyler School of Art)
Molly Burt-Westvig is a visual artist with a practice spanning across modes and media, from painting and photography to video and installation. Her work questions the history of landscape painting and ideas of the sublime, bridging the immaterial experiences of the digital with the embodied presence of our physical world through projected video, sculpture and salvaged objects. Her practice takes shape between her studio in Philadelphia and the scrapyards beyond, drawing upon salvaged materials from the city itself like automotive parts, asphalt, and glass to make moments which blur the edge between beauty and danger. Molly has participated in numerous residencies including PILOTENKUCHE and Skidmore College Work+Space, exhibiting nationally and internationally. In 2023 she was featured in the MFA edition of New American Paintings, and in 2024 her work was published in Peer Review Volume II.
Sasha-Kay Nicole (University of Texas at Austin)
Sasha-Kay Nicole (She/Her, b. 1995) is a conceptual artist from Downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Through photography and performance, Sasha-kay employs self portraiture as a means of escaping reality, while exploring the nuanced, liminal state of Black femme existence. Leaning on the cultural traditions and mysticism inspired by the history of spiritual activism of Haitian Vodou and Jamaican Obeah and Revivalism, she is crafting a decolonized (visual) syntax that embodies the essence of Black femme spirit.
Sasha-Kay earned an honours BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performance Art in Kingston, Jamaica (2021) and is currently pursuing an M.F.A in Studio Art at the University of Texas at Austin. She has exhibited widely, including notable shows like "The Face of Us at the National Gallery of Jamaica" (2023), "Contours of the Interior" at VisArts Center (2023), and the impactful "Sighting black girlhood project" at New Local Space Kingston (2022). She is currently an American Association of University International Fellow and a recipient of the 2024 Prince Claus Seed Award for her socially engaged work.
Autumn Jefferson (University of Virginia)
Autumn Jefferson uses her identity as a black American to explore tensions existing in, and pushing against, systems that are designed to contain an individual's state of being. By its nature, the constant flux between being inside and outside a system unfolds itself in her work. The themes of pushing against confinement find themselves emerging as a mirror to her lived experience. Architectural motifs and vegetative imagery serves as proxies that are used to describe this tenuous experience.
Jefferson is currently an Aunspaugh Fellow at the University of Virginia where she graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art (correct me if I'm wrong here!) in 2024.
