Welcome May Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: May 14 - June 10, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort of ten artists to the Studios at MASS MoCA. This group includes six artists from South Florida as part of the Oolite Arts Home + Away Residency.
Mark your calendars for the open studios on Thursday, JUNE 5, 5 - 7pm
Jamie Lehrhoff Levine
South orange, new jersey
I make art to impact the larger world beyond the fine art world. If my art won’t in some small way change the world, then why should I make it? From the time when I began making textiles and sculpture forty years ago at Syracuse University, to the manufacture of genetic hybrids that I created while at the Bio Art Lab at SVA, to the painting and sculpture I am doing now -- directly related to Monarch Butterfly migration and preservation -- I create work with a high degree of craftsmanship and a message. All of my material practice is intentionally labor intensive. Whether I am working with silicone, which I apply in transparent layers until it mimics real skin, or cast bronze, or applying individual hairs to a 12-foot sculpture, I am prolific and obsessed with attention to detail. I received an Excellence in Jewelry Award from Montclair State University, a Research Project from the BMW Guggenheim Lab that resulted in impactful programming at the intersection of urban ecology and architecture with ecological-artist collective SPURSE, and have participated in numerous group exhibitions regionally as well as overseas in London, Berlin, and Montecastello, Italy.
Le Hien Minh
chicago, illinois
Le Hien Minh is a Vietnamese artist currently based in Chicago, whose work is deeply shaped by her experiences growing up in post-war Vietnam. Coming of age in a war-torn country during a period of nation-building, marked by a myriad of political and cultural shifts in the 1980s and 1990s, profoundly influenced her artistic vision. These formative experiences continue to inspire her to create work that critically engages with social issues and explores alternative cultural paradigms, envisioning realities beyond the current framework of patriarchy.
Rooted in these influences, Minh seeks to create experiences that invite viewers to ponder the fluid relationship between actuality and potentiality, between what is and what could be. Central to her current practice is the female experience, through which she intricately weaves socio-historical and cultural narratives. Her contemplative yet provocative work blends mystical and spiritual elements with metaphysical and surrealistic concepts, encouraging reflection on the complex interplay between the tangible and the intangible, as well as the visible and invisible systems that shape and govern our lives.
Highlight exhibitions include the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts, Sculpture Expanded by the Association of Finnish Sculptors in Helsinki, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Brooklyn Rail, ArtAsiaPacific, Ocular Magazine, and Chicago Reader, among others. Recent fellowships include awards from the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Goethe-Institut, and the 3Arts Ignite Fund.
Headshot by Greg Jewett
Allie Tsubota
beacon, new york
Allie Tsubota (she/her) is an artist exploring intersections of race, visuality, and the formation of historical memory. Her projects join photography, video, photographic and cinematic archives, and text to examine the role of visual spectatorship across racialized space and collapsed historical time. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and presently teaches at Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute in New York.
Headshot by Andria Lo
Mev Luna
Brooklyn, new york
Mev Luna (they/them) is a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, film, new media, and text. Through an autoethnographic/anti-ethnographic methodology, their work reappraises history to identify fictions governing contemporary life and considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized groups are circulated and controlled. Recent exhibitions include the solo exhibition, Warped Terrain, at LaNao Galería in Mexico City, and the group show Empathy Fatigue at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Luna’s time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA (San Francisco, CA), Artists' Television Access (San Francisco, CA), The Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL), and Kino Moviemento (Berlin, Germany). They've given talks at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Luna was a 2020-2021 Queer | Art NYC Film Fellow; 2018 Art Matters Foundation Fellowship recipient; 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition; 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City; and a 2015–2016 Research Fellow at the Shapiro Center for Research and Collaboration. They are currently Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School, and a Visiting Critic in the MFA Painting Department at Yale School of Art, Fall 2024.
Beatriz Chachamovits
Miami, florida
My work explores the intersection of marine ecosystems, mythology, and material transformation, reimagining our relationship with the ocean. Drawing from scientific research and South Florida’s coastal landscapes, I create ceramic sculptures, drawings, and installations that merge natural history with fiction. Through coral-encrusted vessels, mythical figures, and immersive environments, I examine cycles of growth and decay, resilience and loss.
As an environmental artist and educator, I translate ecological narratives into tangible forms that invite engagement and reflection. Ceramics, with its ability to mimic the textures and structures of coral, allows me to highlight both the beauty and vulnerability of underwater ecosystems. My site-specific projects expand this dialogue, immersing audiences in spaces that evoke both urgency and wonder.
At the heart of my practice is storytelling—bridging scientific knowledge with ancestral wisdom and speculative mythologies. By crafting artifacts of an imagined future, I invite people to step beyond the role of observer, dissolving boundaries between art, science, and environmental advocacy. These works reframe marine life as both fragile and powerful, revealing the ocean as a sacred space of knowledge, memory, and transformation.
Carol Jazzar
el portal, florida
I am an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in El Portal, Florida.
The core of my work is centered on Nature, my inner Nature, and Nature at large, Mother Nature. To realize my artistic goals, I sustain two practices: one in the studio, which revolves around collages, drawings, and writing, and the other outdoors, where I employ photography and site-specific installation using organic materials such as leaves, plants, and tree branches and such. This unique blend of two distinctive practices allows me to delve into Nature in an immersive and holistic way.
I approach my work from a psychological and/or spiritual point of view. I use the power of images to question and challenge our perceptions, inviting viewers to reflect on a deeper level and then to find commonality between the inner and the outer, as well as between us, through an indescribable universal thread.
Yomarie Silva-O'neal
miami, florida
Yomarie Silva-O’Neal was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, and lives and works in Miami, Florida. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Florida International University in 2005 and is a Professor at Miami Dade College.
Silva O’Neal is a sculptor whose artistic practice focuses on small and seemingly insignificant biological forms. Her materials include ceramics, drawings, plaster, and wood. She uses repetition and abstraction of organic forms such as fungi and insects, often changing their scale and how viewers would typically encounter them.
She has had a small focus show titled observationis at LnS Gallery in Coral Gables, Florida, 2019.
Selected group exhibitions include:
58th National Drawing and Small Sculpture Show, Joseph A Cain Memorial Art Gallery, Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, Texas, 2024
Drawings From Nature – curated by Dainy Tapia and Carola Bravo, Hartvest Project at Pinecrest Gardens, FL 2023
In the Company of Women: At Large - curated by Dainy Tapia, LnS Gallery, Coconut Grove, FL, 2023
She has also received artists' residencies:
MASS MoCA Residency, OoLite Arts, Home + Away Travel Residency Program, North Adams, Mass., 2025 (May 14-June 10)
The Frederic Remington Museum in Ogdensburg, New York, 2022
The Deering Estate in Cutler Bay, Miami, Florida , 2010
Sepideh Kalani
miami, florida
Sepideh Kalani is a Persian artist who immigrated to the United States in 2021. She earned her B.F.A. from the University of Guilan, Iran, in 2015 with a tuition waiver scholarship and later completed her M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the University of Miami in 2024 on a full scholarship. Her deep curiosity about the intersection of art and science led her to study neuroscience from 2016 to 2017. Since 2015, she has been self-taught in ceramics and glazing, continuously expanding her expertise.
In addition to her artistic practice, Sepideh has mastered traditional Persian techniques, including ancient glazing methods, miniature painting, character design, woodcraft, carpentry, plaster molding, and pottery. Her work has been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries, with pieces held in collections across Iran and the United States.
Now based in the U.S., Sepideh creates sculptures that serve as visual storytellers, exploring themes of identity, gender, religion, and political transition. Drawing from her experiences as an Iranian woman, her work bridges cultural heritage with contemporary expression, weaving narratives that transcend borders.
Lucía Morales
north miami beach, florida
My work is concerned with how migration and immigration challenge notions of identity. I use textiles, paintings, video, and sculptural installations to create figurative works that speak to my identity as it exists here and now, as well as the to the moments that have shaped it. Figuration is important to my work as it allows for an immediate presence within spaces and inclusivity of those who I am most interested in reaching and speaking to. My practice holds the duality of inclusion and confrontation, and I lean into each as needed to convey the issues my community and others face.
The expression of dance and the relationship of the performer and audience has become of increasing importance to my practice due to my lifelong connection to Andean folkloric dance and traditions. The parallels of how we “perform” as immigrants, migrants, and artists, are topics I am exploring in my current work. Through structural installations I aim to create a place or home for collective memories and identities, and at the same time a shelter or place of protection for these. In my video or painted works, the figure is key in the presence and visibility of tradition and community.
Karen Rifas
miami, florida
Throughout all my work runs this common thread: I have never stopped thinking about the delicate balance that I find between man and nature, in structure and freedom, and that must be maintained if we are to survive. In my practice, I find that there is beauty in structure and geometry. It is this space in which my artistic play occurs.
Today, my works on paper, relief panels, architectural interventions, and sculpture reflect an environment that appears to be in a state of flux. Through my work, I create a space to explore the delicate balance between what we know and what we believe we know. Here unfolds a surreal, abstract, and fascinating world of color in two and three-dimensional forms.
