Welcome July Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: July 16 - August 11, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Mark your calendars for the open studios on Thursday, August 7, 5 - 7pm
Rachael Fowler
Hattiesburg, mississippi
Rachael Fowler earned her PhD (Fiction) from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers where she is currently an Assistant Teaching Professor of English, Editor of Mississippi Review, and Coordinator of the Young Authors Academy. Her work has been published in The Literary Review, North American Review’s Open Space, Southern Humanities Review, Deep South Magazine, Prime Number Magazine, and Fugue. In addition, she has been awarded residencies with Vermont Studio Center, Nocefresca, and Yaddo.
She is drafting a novel that explores the role of art institutions in small, isolated communities and questions whether a collective experience of nature and/or art can become as sacred and fulfilling as conventional spiritual practices. Typically, her prose features a fragmented form, intertextual references to other forms of art and story, and ekphrastic moments. What excites her most about ekphrastic work is the dependance on interdisciplinary conversations, on conversations between novelists and painters, between poets and sculptors, between writers and musicians.
Lauren Cardenas
baton rouge, louisiana
Lauren Cardenas is a second-generation Mexican-American print media artist. Her work employs analog print techniques, such as lithography and letterpress, to challenge the connotations of the everyday. Her current body of work investigates her bifurcated identity as a second-generation Mexican American, exploring how religion, rituals, and the blending of cultures impact the ever-changing societal challenges of social identity.
Cardenas holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting, Printmaking, and Drawing from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. She is a graduate of the Tamarind Institute Printer Training Program and holds an MFA in Visual Art with a focus in Print Media from Washington University in St. Louis. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was awarded the University of Nevada, Reno Black Rock Press Redfield Fellowship (2016-2018). She created a limited edition artist book titled “Things You See in the Dark,” which is a collaboration with poet Daniel Enrique Perez. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Louisiana State University.
Romie C. You
new haven, connecticut
Romie C. You is an artist whose work explores the intersections of modern architecture and institutional control—investigating what it means to live in spaces one is compelled to inhabit, yet does not fully conform to the laws of these places.
Drawing on lived experiences across South Korea, France, and the United States, her practice centers on how built environments—often shaped by colonial legacies—have been aestheticized as neutral or objective spaces. She works within unregulated architectural margins—whether physical gaps, infrastructural seams, or sites where building codes lose clarity—as potential zones of ambiguity, soft resistance, and leakage. Through site-specific installation, sound, and film, she seeks to push against boundaries of containment and explore forms of transgression.
Romie C. You received her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art (CT, USA) and her B.F.A. from Konkuk University (Seoul, Korea). She is a recipient of an award from the National Art Center Tokyo, where she also exhibited her works, and recently participated in the SOMA Summer Residency in Mexico City.
Julia Csekö
somerville, massachusetts
As a first-generation American, visual artist, community organizer, and educator, my practice connects to several communities. I was born in America because my parents were in self-exile during the Brazilian military dictatorship. When I was only two months old, my parents returned to Brazil after the 1979 Amnesty Law was passed, and I grew up in Rio. After living in the US for about 15 years, I have increasingly questioned ideas of global instability, American interventionism, belonging, and displacement. It is perhaps unavoidable that my work is deeply influenced by the vibrant Brazilian culture and landscapes, while also bearing the generational trauma of the country's complex history. Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire's Critical Pedagogy has taught me that dialogue is the only genuine form of education, and this principle consistently influences my creative practice.
In every aspect of my professional endeavors, I strive to listen and learn, inviting communities into conversation and encouraging participation, agency, and critical thinking. Through listening, learning, and adopting a collaborative mindset, we can avoid adhering to authoritarian, colonialist, and imperialist discourses, narratives, behaviors, and practices.
I am driven by the belief that fatalism can be overcome and that alternatives are plentiful. I envision a future where no one will dare say, "it has always been this way," to justify the unthinkable.
charity be
Berlin, Germany
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.
Approaching this potentiality of experiences in body space through scale, with a curiosity that is akin to a pulsation, I am looking for how and where energies are transferred. These energetic boundaries relate also to the hegemony of relationships and infrastructures which I see as the underlying consideration in my work. Where to encourage; where to interrupt.
Employing both digital and analogue tools to undress the liminal spaces between the infosphere and the biosphere and the tensions for the body worked out there, I seek through art to offer potential solutions towards sustainability, if not, to borrow the phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, a re-territorialization.
Be has a professional background in film and television, as well as in sound and movement arts. She also spent many years learning and practicing permaculture-influenced urban farming while working in tech-dependent professions. The tension of a push and pull between the body and machine, the felt and the conceptual plays a pivotal role in her work. Charity Be has worked and exhibited internationally, including in California USA, Korea and Germany. She has also participated in international arts residencies. Charity 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, Be is a modern nomad who, after many years in Oakland, California is now based full-time in Berlin, Germany.
Saberah Malik
warwick, rhode island
Saberah Malik bridges a cultural passion for textiles with BFA and MFA (Graphic Design) from Panjab University, Lahore, Pakistan, and Industrial Design (MID) from Pratt Institute, New York.
Based in Rhode Island, she has taught her proprietary method of molding cloth at Penland School of Craft, NC; Haywood Community College of Art, NC; Stonehill College, MA; Wheaton College, MA; Panjab University, Lahore, Pakistan. Recent awards include 2023 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts three-year General Operating Support for Artists grant; the McColl Johnson Fellowship 2020; Wassaic Project Residency, 2022; Creative Capital 2025 short list. Her work is included in Fidelity Investments Collection, MA; Danforth Art Museum, MA; Akdeniz University, Turkey, and private spaces internationally.
“My work is anchored in cross-cultural spaces addressing heritage, fractured lineages and socio-environmental injustices. My passion for textiles derives from age-old family traditions of preserving and repurposing cloth, whence an innate respect for cloth and its makers was instilled early on. Pakistan and India’s 1947 partition severed these traditions by splitting this cultural coherence. Collapsing time between contemporaneity and cultural inheritance, I stitch, mold and assemble textiles to symbolically reconstruct our divided family. Dyeing, embroidering or engineering flat fabric into luminous, ethereal, architectural or biomorphic forms, I create luminosity and material reflectivity to garner self-reflection, identity, possibility and change. I am drawn to transparency, material luminescence and reflections, whereby I transition the hope of light into the joy of life. With empathy as a catalyst of understanding, I promote calm amidst chaos, serenity and hope amidst loss and destruction. Addressing time not as linear, but as dimensional continuum, I am connected to universal communities of women, who have sustained and enriched lives through the ages with the magic and innovation of needle and thread.”
Headshot by Ruth Clegg
Yulia Spiridonova
brookline, massachusetts
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.
Marjorie Fedyszyn
minneapolis, minnesota
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 Grant, as well as multiple Minnesota State Arts Board 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 has participated in residencies at Mass MoCA and Grand Marias Art Colony and is an active educator in the Minnesota textile community. She is proud to be a founding member of the MN Felt Makers Guild and the artist collective, SD8.
Paree Rohera
brooklyn, new york
Paree Rohera is a painter from Mumbai, India, currently pursuing a BFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Living between India and the U.S. for the past four years has programmed a categorical method of artistic research for her practice—a storage of themes and iconography in Mumbai, and then, a transfer of ideas at RISD. This rhythm of inspiration and introspection has been extremely fruitful, consistently allowing her to paint in some sort of a reflective space. Geographically, composing art in a western environment has initiated an enjoyment of making work that rejects the white-gaze as the primary lens, while also being able to remotely contemplate on the discourses of white supremacy in India and the effects of its colonial past. In a way, the retrospection of home gives her strong equipment to feel security within an idea or visual image as it becomes woven into larger themes like standards of beauty, gender and class.
More than a colonial gaze, her work is affected by a South Asian gaze shaped by coloniality—a legacy of Westernization that permeated notions of physical beauty. From ads promoting “brighter faces” and smoother legs to products for whiter, hairless armpits, these ideals relentlessly pushed whiteness and smaller, “feminine” features as aspirational. She recollects the normalization of nose clips and massages to shrink noses, and the painful methods of hair removal introduced to her at 15, all reinforcing the idea that beauty required manipulating the body to align with Western ideals. It wasn’t until she left this environment and came to the U.S. that she began to see these narratives with greater clarity. Distance from those ingrained standards made it essential for her to create work that pushes against them, exploring and celebrating South Asian features and beauty beyond the constraints of colonial influence. It was within this context that the caricatures in her work came to life. The consistent side profile of these figures became powerful, allowing an emphasis on the features she aim to foreground—especially the big nose, a feature often scrutinized in her narrative, often, by her own self. She is most confident to commit to a painting when a theme she is momentarily grappling with coordinates with the visual imagery she is inspired to create. These side profile caricatures have been reliable to her in this way, serving as a bridge between concept and aesthetic, supporting the visual lexicons of surrealism and sometimes, the political narrative she aims to convey.
Kelli Williams
elkridge, maryland
Kelli Williams is an animator and visual artist. She uses stop-motion animation, photography, augmented reality, installation, and humor to create work that comments on society through the lens of social media and technology. She is an alumna of Morgan State University where she majored in Fine Art, with a concentration in photography. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art in Design. She is a professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been featured in the Huffington Post, Columbus Live, Hyperallergic, Artnet, Baltimore magazine, and Netflix’s Cops and Robbers.
Ainaz Alipour
parkersburg, west virginia
Ainaz Alipour is an Iranian artist and educator based in the United States. Their interdisciplinary practice spans textiles, soft sculpture, video, and interactive media, exploring diasporic identity, gendered space, and cultural displacement. Alipour has exhibited nationally, with recent presentations at the Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, FL), the Mattie Kelly Art Center (Niceville, FL), and the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (Rochester, NY). They have been awarded fellowships and residencies at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Surel’s Place (Boise, ID), among others. Alipour received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and a BFA from the Tehran University of Art. Their recent projects merge traditional Iranian embroidery techniques with digital tools, XR environments, and interactive projection mapping to reimagine architectures of memory and resistance.
