Welcome 2025 Residency Fellows: Part 2
The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees of 2025’s second 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)
Ainaz Alipour
Ainaz Alipour (b. Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores diasporic identity, gendered spaces, and cultural displacement through the interplay of digital and material forms. Drawing from Iranian cultural history and personal archives, they integrate soft sculpture, textiles, and digital media to investigate how marginalized bodies navigate contested geographies. Their practice merges traditional sewing and embroidery techniques from northern Khorasan with contemporary technologies such as digital fabrication, video, and interactive media. Through immersive installations, they reimagine architectural spaces shaped by exclusion and belonging, challenging colonial representations and asserting the agency of marginalized bodies.
Ainaz has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Vermont Studio Center, On::View Residency in Savannah, and MASS MoCA’s Studios Program, where they will continue expanding their research on textile-based architectures and embodied memory. Their work has been exhibited at the Ringling Museum of Art, the Mattie Kelly Art Center, and the Rochester Contemporary Art Center.
Carolina Bollaín y Goitia (b. 1995) is an artist from Saltillo, Mexico. Her work, rooted in the landscapes of northern Mexico, particularly the Chihuahuan Desert, challenges colonial and contemporary narratives that depict the desert as a barren place.
Incorporating the movement of the body, traditional dances, and elements from the semidesert—such as candelilla wax, sarape weaving, and stones—her work merges the materiality of the desert with the memory of the rituals she grew up with. Through these processes, she explores themes of mestizaje, belonging, and cultural resistance.
Carolina holds a Master's degree in Artistic Production and has presented solo exhibitions such as Deseo ser paisaje at the Museo Universitario de Arte Indígena Contemporáneo, Cuernavaca, Morelos (2023), and Mapa de Cierto Suelo at the Museo de Artes Gráficas, Coahuila, Mexico (2022).
She was awarded at the University Biennial of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (2024) and was also a grantee of the FONCA Jóvenes Creadores program (2021).
Bollaín y Goitia’s practice is driven by a desire to recognize the sacred in her everyday surroundings.
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 between ancestral art forms and contemporary experiences, revealing a dialogue between conquest and resistance.
His work has been featured in galleries and public spaces across the United States. He has developed installations for the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), where his work was exhibited in dialogue with the permanent collection, and encouraged community participation. Recent honors include Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship (2022-24), Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Semifinalists (2021 & 2024), Rubys Artist Grant recipient (2021), Keyholder Resident Artist at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (2021), and Bresler Resident Artist at VisArts (2021).
Esteban 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 paintings 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.
Samayoa’s work extends beyond self-reflection; it is a means of forging connections. By channeling personal experiences into visual storytelling, he creates spaces for dialogue, healing, and collective understanding. His art is not just a testament to his own journey but an invitation for others to see themselves within it—a celebration of community, transformation, and the enduring power of self-expression.
Greeshma Chenni Veettil (b. 1988, India) is a visual artist and educator based in Hartsdale, New York. Her practice involves recording, analyzing, and forming alliances with ordinary entities in her immediate surroundings. Using photography as an entry point, she works across a range of gestures, such as altering, assembling, and embedding to make her photo sculptures. In their new chimeric configurations, the photographic prints shed their hard-edged frozen state to make way for a visual sensuality that foregrounds the importance of an embodied experience in her work.
Greeshma holds a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York(2017) and an MFA in Art Photography from Syracuse University, New York(2024). She received the Creative Opportunity Grant from Syracuse University(2022 & 2023) and was the runner-up for the Graduate Award for Best Work at the Spring Show at Syracuse University(2024). Greeshma was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2024) 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).
Joanna Fuhrman, an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, is the author of seven books of poetry, Data Mind, (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press) To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021), The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015), Pageant (Alice James Books 2009), Moraine (Hanging Loose Press 2006), Ugh Ugh Ocean (Hanging Loose Press 2006) and Freud in Brooklyn (Hanging Loose Press 2000). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Believer, The Baffler, Conduit, Fence, The Georgia Review, and Plume, as well as on the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets (poem-a-day) websites, and in anthologies published by Soft Skull Press, HarperCollins, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Poems have also appeared in Best American Poetry (2023 and 2025), The Pushcart Prize anthology and The Slowdown podcast. Her essays on teaching poetry appear regularly in Teachers & Writers Magazine. She also creates poetry videos that are on her own Vimeo site and in literary journals including Posit, Triquarterly, Moving Poems Journal, Fence Digital and Requited. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Yetzirah, Willapa Bay, and Youngarts. In 2022, after first publishing with them as a teenager, she became a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press.
Photo by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Kearra Amaya Gopee is an anti-disciplinary visual artist from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York, NY). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. They render this violence elastic and atemporal - leaving ample room for the consideration and manipulation of its history, implications on the present, and possible afterlives.
Gopee has been developing an artist residency in Trinidad and Tobago titled a small place. They hold a M.F.A. from UCLA, a B.F.A. in photography and imaging from NYU, and are an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. They were a 2023 fellow at Queer Art, and a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Kseniia Bolshakova is an Indigenous activist and 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 and the village of Popigai. As one of the youngest keepers of the Dolgan language—spoken by only 800 people—she is deeply committed to preserving her native tongue and traditional knowledge, as well as advocating for Indigenous rights and social justice. Kseniia serves as the focal point for Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia, and Transcaucasia in the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus at the UN.
Her debut novel, Buluus da irer / All The Frost Melts, was first published in a bilingual Dolgan-Russian edition in 2024, with an English release forthcoming. The book was presented at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. It tells the story of a child growing up in a traditional reindeer-herding family, offering a poignant reflection on the Arctic’s disappearing way of life—its permafrost, tundra, language, and traditions. Through both a child’s perspective and an adult’s voice, the novel explores the enduring impacts of colonization and assimilation on Indigenous communities.
Kseniia is actively engaged in promoting Indigenous literature and cultural preservation. Her recent projects and contributions include:
- Editing and compiling An Anthology of Indigenous Literature from the Siberian Arctic, set to be published by Amherst College Press in 2025;
- Showcasing the interactive book Catching Reindeer, illustrated by Ripley Whiteside, at Banned Books Week 2024 (September 2024, Nashville, TN) and Unbannable Library (January 2025, Nashville, TN);
- Conducting a master class on the Dolgan language as part of the National Literatures of Siberia program at the 9th Baku International Book Fair (October 2023);
- Participating in a panel discussion on the Development of Indigenous Literatures at the XVII International St. Petersburg Book Salon on Palace Square (May 2023).
Lilan Yang (born in Chongqing, China) is an artist and experimental filmmaker. Their practice, rooted in the materiality of film, delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception. Featured in publications such as Boston Art Review and Little White Lies, their films and installations have been widely exhibited across the United States, including the RISD Museum, the Brattle Theater, Northwest Film Forum, Foxy Production, Ann Arbor Film Festival and MONO NO AWARE. Internationally, Yang’s work has been showcased in the UK, Japan, Canada, China, Latvia, Italy, France, Mexico, and Bolivia.
Yang holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BS in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They have received an Award for Excellence at Japan's Image Forum Film Festival, as well as artist residencies at MASS MoCA, Baltic Analog Lab, Millay Arts, Gallery 263, and I-Park Foundation. Their work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Interbay Cinema Society, and Interlace Grant Fund, among others.
Photo by Ben Zink.
Okyoung Noh is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seoul, South Korea. She visualizes and interrogates the impact of U.S. imperialist violence on the bodies of Asian women across the trans-Pacific. Through performance, video, community engagement, and multimedia installations, Noh creates spaces where the dis/mis-placed bodies of women connect and reclaim power, place, and presence.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at La MaMa (New York, NY), Wave Pool Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Athens, GA), Tribowl (South Korea), Hangaram Museum (South Korea), CICA Museum (South Korea), and Seoul Artist’s Platform_New & Young (South Korea), among others. Her videos have been recognized and presented in the Indie Short Fest (Los Angeles, CA), the Toronto International Women Film Festival (Canada), the Oakland Short Film Festival (Oakland, CA), and the Freep Film Festival (Detroit, MI), among others. Noh is currently an artist in residence at the Seoul Museum of Art (South Korea).
Paree Rohera is a painter from Mumbai, India, currently pursuing a BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She takes on Mumbai’s inherent chaos, yet finds it more beautiful than any other. Going back and forth between India and the U.S. throughout the year has become like switching between phases of inspiration and reflection.
Her practice is drawn towards beauty in the negative—the ‘negative’ often being her insecurities that are common in the South Asian community that are often overlooked. Physical insecurities like body hair and big noses are the most prominent in her paintings visually, however mental insecurities like anxiety and existentialism find a way into the foreground thematically. She commits these themes to canvas with the intention of transforming them into something visually captivating, finding peace in the vibrant hues and intricate patterns.
The caricatures serve as a compelling vessel for her storytelling, and is more recently becoming extensions of herself. The side profile view in her paintings offers a deliberate avenue to scrutinize the specific features— a strong face structure, sharp nose, long tapered eyebrow, and almond-shaped eyes—are integral to capturing the essence of their beings. By adorning these imagined figures with elements of Indian ornamentation—such as elaborate clothing, intricate wallpapers, and ornate jewelry—while deliberately exaggerating features traditionally deemed “ugly,” she create a tension that challenges conventional notions of beauty and ugliness. Placing them within imagined narratives that resonate with her inner self has become a cathartic practice for her, and almost blurs the lines between caricature and self-portraiture. She captures an essence where personal identity merges with cultural imagery.
Photo by Easton Green.
Prerna is a multidisciplinary artist born in Mumbai, India. In her most recent works she engages with familial archives and government documents to discern the overlapping elements of bureaucracy and superstition, arguing that they are two sides of the same coin. Prerna is interested in her relationship to being the subject and being subjected, using the materials and language found in government buildings, airports, classrooms, and other spaces where the body undergoes categorization and evaluation. Prerna earned her MFA from University of Minnesota. She has been awarded several global opportunities and residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Artists for Artists Edition 4: Language Is Never on the Ground, and Artists’ Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions (ACRE). In 2024, Prerna received an MCAD X Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Early Career Artists.
RIDIKKULUZ (b 1994) is a Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian multidisciplinary artist from NYC. Their figurative work memorializes family, chosen family, and the self while investigating religious, decolonial, cultural, and queer themes. They have been an Artist-in-Resident at XOL Gallery in Maryland; Rowaq Al Balqa in Jordan, and The Laundromat Project in Brooklyn, NY. RIDIKKULUZ received their MFA from Hunter College with research at Universitat de KünsteBerlin. They are aKhalil Gibran Scholar and have been a guest lecturer at SAIC, St. John’s & Stanford University. RIDIKKULUZ has exhibited in the USA, Europe, Western Asia & North Africa. They were featured in Habibi, Les Révolutions de L'amour, at Institut Du Monde Arabe: the first institutional exhibit intersecting Arabness and Queerness. RIDIKKULUZ’s artwork served as the album art forDJ Lorant, Lupe Fiasco and Kiing Sky. RIDIKKULUZ belongs to the underground ballroom community as a member of the Haus of Telfar and has been mentored by Benny Ninja.
Born in Ukraine, Slinko is a multidisciplinary artist living in the United States. Her 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 region during the final years of the Soviet Union, Slinko’s perspective blends personal narratives with scholarly insight. Keenly aware of the disillusionment and dispossession that mark her own lived experience of history, Slinko emphasizes resilience, hope, and humor to give tangible forms to personal agency.
Slinko earned her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and has been awarded the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. She has been an artist resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Contemporary Art Center, The Drawing Center in New York, RAIR in Philadelphia, BANFF Centre, and Santa Fe Art Institute, and Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University among many others. In 2024, Slinko was the inaugural Gene Zwozdesky Artist in Residence at MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada.thcoming
Steve Chang is a Taiwanese writer and MacDowell Fellow from the San Gabriel Valley, California. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, North American Review, The Southampton Review, etc. and been commended by the Granum Foundation, The Iron Horse Prize, the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship, and even by (some of) his friends. He is thankful for the support of MASS MoCA, Loghaven, Willapa Bay AiR, the KHN Center for the Arts, The Kerouac Project, and the Carolyn Moore Writers House. He edits fiction at Okay Donkey and holds an MFA from Cornell.
Family Fellowships:
Photo by Lisa Whiteman
Lauren Weinstein
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.
Photo by Silviu Guiman
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.
McKnight Fellowship:
Marjorie Fedyszyn
Visual artist Marjorie Fedyszyn (she/her) addresses the universal experiences of human vulnerability through her sculptural practice in textiles. Using traditional craft techniques such as paper making, hand stitching, and needlework, Fedyszyn’s abstract forms and installations emerge as emotional investigations encompassing ideas of control and loss. Her creative vocabulary is driven by careful attention to the inherent properties of materials within her process to address the realms of personal introspection and the human experience.
Fedyszyn is a 2023 McKnight Fiber Artist Fellow and a 2019 Jerome Visual Arts Fellow. She is the recipient of a Jerome Fiber Artist Project, as well as multiple Minnesota State Arts Board and MRAC Next Step Fund grants. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including The Robert C Williams Museum of Papermaking in Atlanta GA; The Morgan Conservatory of Paper, Cleveland, OH; DeVos Museum, Marquette, MI and South Dakota Museum of Art, Brookings. She is an active educator in the Minnesota textile community and is a founding member of the MN Felt Makers Guild and the artist collective, SD8.
Motherhood is the focal point of Renee Couture's work since becoming a mother five years ago. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Couture graduated from Buena Vista University (Storm Lake, IA) with a BA in Studio Art and Spanish. She moved to Oregon in 2004 after completing Peace Corps service in Bolivia, South America. She received her MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, VT. Couture taught in the Fine Art Department at Umpqua Community College for over a decade. She currently works as a project coordinator for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.
Couture’s work has been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions and as a solo artist. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship and three Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, and three Individual Arts Grants from the Douglas Country Cultural Coalition. Couture has been granted artist residencies at PLAYA Program, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and Ucross Foundation.
Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, five-year- old daughter, and dog. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot travel trailer-turned-studio space in her garden.
YoungArts Fellowship:
Salimatu Amabebe
Photo by Marcel Pardo Ariza.
Salimatu Amabebe (he/they), is a trans, Nigerian-American chef and interdisciplinary artist, working in food, film, photography, sculpture and installation. His work centers community activism, African diasporic performance traditions and Black queer/ trans liberation. Amabebe is the founder/ director of Black Feast - a culinary event celebrating Black artists and writers through food.
Salimatu received his Bachelor’s degree in Film Production from Bard College in 2010 and earned his Master’s of Fine Art degree in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2024.
Amabebe’s work has recently been presented at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Yerba Buena Center for Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, SOMArts,The David Ireland House and CounterPulse. Amabebe is a recipient of The Museum of the African Diaspora's 2023-2024 Emerging Artists Program Award, a 2023 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, the 2022 Black Immersive Creators Grant and the 2021 Eater New Guard Award. His work has been featured in Vogue, The New York Times, and Eater. Amabebe’s work and recipes can be found in A24’s cookbook, Horror Caviar, and Klancy Miller’s recent cookbook, For the Culture.
Topaz Winters
Topaz Winters is the Singaporean-American author of So, Stranger (Button Poetry 2022, winner of the Button Poetry Short Form Contest & a LitBowl Best Poetry Book of 2022) & Portrait of My Body as a Crime I’m Still Committing (Button Poetry 2019 & 2024, finalist in the Broken River & Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prizes). She serves as editor-in-chief of Half Mystic Press, an independent, international, & interdisciplinary publishing project, & has received fellowships from the Sundress Academy for the Arts & the National YoungArts Foundation. Topaz’s poetry, fiction, & nonfiction have been published by The Drift, Foglifter, & Passages North, profiled in Vogue, The Straits Times, & The Business Times, & performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre for Fiction, & the Singapore Writers Festival. She lives between New York & Singapore with a white dog named Hachii & a black cat named Volta.
University Fellowships:
(In partnership with the following universities):
Sylvie Mayer (Boston University)
Sylvie Mayer creates layered paintings that consider interiority and impermanence. Preoccupied by thresholds and in-between states, she depicts transitional spaces that mediate between public and private. Informed by her childhood spent backstage as the daughter of a ballet dancer and teacher, she is interested in the dynamics of revelation and concealment in theatrical settings. Interior scenes are a frequent subject of her paintings, imagined as spaces of suspended time imbued with traces of their inhabitants. Mayer holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Painting from Boston University.
Charity Be (Massachusetts College of Art and Design)
An embodied sculptor, Charity Be works four-dimensionally with video, sound, objects, space and gesture, to compose environments, score performative work and make sculpture. Drawing upon philosophical texts and field research, Be works contextually and often site-specifically to activate a deeper awareness for interconnectedness and is motivated not only to compose the experiential landscape, but importantly, to engage the sensory perceptions of the audience multiplicitly.
The tension of a push and pull between the body and machine, the felt and the conceptual plays a pivotal role in her work and life. With a professional background in commercial and independent film, Charity Be also has extensive practical experience in sound and performance in her art-making. Be spent many years practicing permaculture-influenced urban farming, initially as a means to balance a tech-dependent praxis. Ecological cycles have, in turn, influenced her art. Charity Be has worked and exhibited internationally, including in the USA, Scotland, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, South Korea and Germany. She has participated in international arts residencies and was one of two winners of the 2024 Bryan Robertson Artist Trust Award. Be holds a BFA in Intermedia Art from Mills College, Oakland, California (2017) and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2022). Hailing originally from Chicago, Illinois, Charity Be spent many years in San-Francisco/Oakland, California and is, since 2021, based full-time in Berlin, Germany.
Melissa Sutherland Moss
(Maryland Institute College of Art)
Melissa Sutherland Moss (b. Brooklyn, NY) is a Costa Rican American interdisciplinary artist working across collage, painting, video, sound, text, and installation. Her practice explores the construction of landscape, language, and the intertwined histories of the Caribbean and the United States, viewing landscape as a cultural and historical artifact shaped by memory, identity, and time. Through processes of accretion, erasure, and extraction, she uncovers hidden layers of stories and identities embedded in the land, creating a dynamic tension between what is visible and what is concealed.
Her work has been recognized and exhibited at The Biggs Museum of American Art, and she has participated in notable residencies including ArtCrawl Harlem, Chrysalis Institute for Emerging Artists, The Alliance of Artist Communities, and Zea Mays Printmaking mentorship program. Her artistic contributions have been featured in publications such as Black Enterprise, Forbes, Essence, Modern Luxury, and Refinery 29. Currently pursuing her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Moss divides her time between New York, and Baltimore, MD.
Merryn Omotayo Alaka
(School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Photo by Shaunté Glover
Merryn Omotayo Alaka (b. 1997, Indianapolis, Indiana) is a Nigerian and American artist whose work spans across sculpture, installation, performance, and fiber practices. Her interdisciplinary sculptural practice incorporates metal fabrication, bronze casting, fiber, found objects, sound, and ready-made materials. Using materials and objects as a form of "allegory" or symbolism, Alaka examines the constructs and fluidness of blackness, time, memory, and history– ideas that have been shaped by societal structures and colonial histories. Alaka's creative practice explores how Black diasporic histories and traditions are preserved across generations, oftentimes working with materials and processes that serve as vessels for collective memory.
Alaka locates her work at the intersection of Black material culture, family archives, and West African mythologies. Reconstructing found and inherited objects and textiles such as Mercedes Benz car parts, Yoruba Agbadas, Nigerian leather mats, and African headrests along with stories true and imagined, she creates visual language and landscapes that make space for contemplation and meditation.
At its core, Alaka’s creative practice offers up a critical space for the sharing and exchange of narratives, histories, and futures that are in a constant state of flux.
Alaka will graduate in spring of 2025 with a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited work at institutions such as the Phoenix Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. She is the recipient of a fully funded scholarship from the School of the Art Institute and in 2022 was awarded the emerging artist grant from the Phoenix Art Museum.
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez
(School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary Artist, Activist, and Public Speaker born in Michoacán, Mexico. She immigrated to Georgia at seven, grew up undocumented in Atlanta, and has been a DACA recipient since 2013.
Cambrón’s work explores the nuances of undocumentedness and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation. Through public art, she has served as a monument-maker asserting the humanity of immigrants in Atlanta, claiming barren walls to paint landmarks that belong to undocumented people. Her work institutes a space for immigrants within the South's dominant racial binary. From her first mural on Buford Hwy to her mural at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, she confronts the idea of who is worthy of public celebration in the home of the largest Confederate monument in the nation. She has worked to complicate the immigrant narrative beyond murals through portraits and site-specific installations. Cambrón has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina’s Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023), and has exhibited at Agnes Scott College's Dalton Gallery, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the High Museum of Art.
Cambrón received a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) fully funded by the Goizueta Foundation. In 2015, she became an educator and one of the first Teach for America DACAmented Corps Members placed in Georgia. She returned to Cross Keys High School, her alma mater, two years later to teach art. In 2019, Cambrón left the classroom to pursue art full-time. She is completing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a recipient of the 2023 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and is expanding her practice into fibers, sculpture, and discarded materials from her family's commercial furniture-making practice in Atlanta.
Afsaneh Javadpour (University of Oregon)
Afsaneh Javadpour (b. 1989) is an Iranian artist, curator, writer and researcher based in the U.S. Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes such as war, its victims, history, memory, and the distortion and erasure of truth from the past. Drawing from phenomenological theories, she employs installation and multimedia approaches to emphasize embodied perception and physical engagement with space in her work. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture (2014) and a master’s degree in art research from Tehran University of Art (2023). Currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Oregon (2024–), her work continues to explore the intersection of war, media, and human experience in displacement and exile through projects that challenge and question the normalization of violence.
Afsaneh’s work explores the fragility of truth and the complexities of historical narratives. She addresses the accumulation of lost time through destructive processes that reconstruct fragments from erased pasts, revealing fractures and absences within the established historical record. Her investigations examine the manipulation, rewriting, and censorship of history, particularly in the contexts of war, media, and collective memory.
With a decade of experience in the Iranian contemporary art scene in several solo and group exhibitions, Afsaneh continues to work as a curator while contributing specialized articles, interviews, and critiques to leading Iranian art magazines and newspapers. She also founded and produced the Iranshahr Podcast, dedicated to visual arts in Iran, where she served as the writer and host, focusing on contemporary Iranian art, artists, and theories.
Her background in the Middle East, a region long affected by various conflicts, deeply influenced her artistic approach. This background shapes her perspective on remembrance, loss, and trauma, as she seeks to uncover the lost or deliberately overlooked truths of history. Her work does not offer definitive answers but invites the audience to engage with questions about the complexities of historical absence and fractured narratives.
Hasler Gomez (Virginia Commonwealth University)
From the ground we walk on to the water embedded in the air we breathe to the shadows that cling to our feet, the work of Häsler Gómez (b. Guatemala City, Guatemala) is steeped in issues of desire, labor, and visibility. By building entangled systems of unseen performance, sound, light, architectural intervention, and objects, he creates speculative spaces and encounters rooted in the inherent realities of materials, objects, spaces, and bodies. Through strategies that reorient and disorient industrial and domestic materials, objects, and processes embedded within our bodies, he aims to coax out and all but exhaust the limits of their poetic and aesthetic potential.
His work has been exhibited extensively, including exhibitions at Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), Root Division (San Francisco, CA), The Holland Project (Reno, NV), Baitball Art Fair (Polignano a Mare, Italy), Other Places Art Fair (San Pedro, CA), Sky Lab Gallery (Columbus, OH), Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), Axis Gallery (Sacramento, CA), and Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Gómez holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno.
Chaewon You (Yale University)
Chaewon You works within the realm of modern architecture and the modernized human experience, examining how repetitive, standardized, and therefore normalized structural forms, sounds, and practices inscribed in architecture respond as a pathological obsession to traumatic modern experiences. Engaging with architecture as an art practice, You explores how to dwell within a modern place where one is compelled to live yet does not obey the laws of the place.
Drawing on You’s upbringing in South Korea and academic studies in Paris and the United States, You’s practice has evolved through experiencing a wide range of architectural aspirations. You’s work revolves around themes of architectural nostalgia, colonial legacies, and modern clinical development, prompting critical reflection on the underlying beliefs driving modern architecture. You is a candidate for an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art, a recipient of an award at the National Art Center Tokyo, and recently attended an art residency at SOMA.
