Welcome October Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: October 29 — November 10, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Emily Somoskey
WALLA WALLA, WASHINGTON
Emily Somoskey is a mixed media painter based in Walla Walla, WA. Her work explores the complexity of perception through layered combinations of oil paint and collaged photographic imagery, weaving together moments of clarity and ambiguity that mirror how we experience the world. Balancing representation and abstraction, her paintings often bring the familiar into dialogue with the mysterious, opening up new ways of seeing and understanding our place within a shifting world.
Her work has been exhibited nationally, including recent exhibitions at Terrain Gallery in Spokane WA and SAM Gallery in Seattle, WA, Boise State University in Boise, ID, and Eastern Washington University in Cheney, WA. She has been awarded residencies at the Golden Foundation for the Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and was a 2025 nominee for a Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Originally from Akron, OH, she holds an MFA from Michigan State University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Whitman College.
Salimatu Amabebe
Oakland, California
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.
Amabebe’s work has recently been presented at the San Francisco Art Commission, The Headlands Center for the Arts, 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 Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship, 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.
Anique Jordan
Toronto, Canada
Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Jordan’s work considers different logics of time, the black surreal and the marvellous as it relates to the black Atlantic experience. Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community-engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited at The Armory, The Peabody Essex Museum, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Art Gallery of Windsor, Saatchi Gallery, and at the Photobook Museum. Her work is included in national and private collections. Jordan is an AICAD Fellow and Assistant Professor of Art Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design.
San Gabriel Valley, California
Steve Chang is a Taiwanese writer, editor, and MacDowell Fellow from the San Gabriel Valley, California. Much of his work investigates the relationships between criminality, capitalism, and catastrophe. He is a very fun and normal person. His writing has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, North American Review, The Southampton Review, etc. and been supported by Loghaven, Willapa Bay AiR, the KHN Center for the Arts, The Kerouac Project, and the Carolyn Moore Writers House. He’s the fiction editor at Okay Donkey and co-founder of writers community Lit Match Collective.
Okyoung Noh
TUSCON, ARIZONA
Okyoung Noh is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tucson (Arizona), Los Angeles, and Seoul (South Korea), working across performance, video, multimedia installation, and poetry. Her practice explores the transgenerational and transnational residues of forced migration, loss, and survival—particularly among women affected by U.S. militarism and imperialism across the trans-Pacific.
Noh has exhibited and performed internationally at LA MAMA (New York, NY), Wave Pool Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), Ann Arbor Art Center (Ann Arbor, MI), the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (Athens, GA), Tribowl (Incheon, South Korea), the Nanji Art Studio at Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), Hangaram Museum (Seoul, South Korea), CICA Museum (Gimpo, South Korea), Seoul Artist’s Platform_New & Young (Seoul, South Korea), among others. Noh is currently teaching video and performance at the University of Arizona.
Renee Couture
Glide, oregon
Since becoming a mother six years ago, Renee Couture has created work that addresses her desire to understand her relationship with motherhood. She realized she needed to completely change her art practice if she wanted to keep an art practice. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice that encompasses sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Couture is a member of Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR, and has exhibited in the Pacific Northwest. She has received an Individual Artist Fellowship and three Career Opportunity Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission. She has been granted artist residencies at PLAYA, Djerassi, Jentel, and Ucross Foundation. She currently works as a project coordinator for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.
Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, six-year-old daughter, and two dogs. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot camper-turned studio space located in her garden.
Lilan Yang
boston, massachusetts
Lilan Yang (b. Chongqing, China) is a moving image artist merging analog filmmaking with computational processes. Rooted in the materiality of 16mm, their practice explores the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception. Through experimental filmmaking, machine learning, and data visualization, Yang examines the liminal spaces between seeing and unseeing, remembering and forgetting.
Yang’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the RISD Museum, Foxy Production, Galerie Met (Germany), and featured in festivals such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival (UK), and MONO NO AWARE. A recipient of the Award for Excellence at Image Forum Film Festival (Japan), Yang has been awarded residencies at MASS MoCA, Boston Center for the Arts, Baltic Analog Lab (Latvia), Millay Arts, among others. They have received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Puffin Foundation, City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, Interbay Cinema Society, and Interlace Grant Fund.
Yang holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ridikkuluz
Yonkers, new york
Ridikkuluz is a Palestinian–Egyptian–Jordanian multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between painting, sculpture, performance, and writing to honor family, chosen family, and queer futurities. Their figurative work transforms personal memory into collective testimony, weaving together religious iconography, decolonial thought, and the aesthetics of the ballroom community.
Their work has traveled internationally, from Columbia University and Times Square Arts in New York, to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Beyond the gallery, Ridikkuluz’s murals and community projects—such as tributes to Layleen Polanco and Black Lives Matter—carry their practice into public space, insisting on visibility, dignity, and joy. They are a Khalil Gibran Scholar and have been a guest lecturer at SAIC, Columbia, St. John’s & Stanford University.
Ridikkuluz belongs to the underground ballroom community as a member of the Haus of Telfar and has been mentored by Benny Ninja. Their contributions have been recognized with fellowships and residencies from Queer|Art, Art Omi, The Laundromat Project, and NYSCA, and their work has been covered by The New York Times, DAZED, Smithsonian, Vogue, Elephant, Apollo, Flaunt, and GLAAD.
Ridikkuluz earned their MFA from Hunter College with research at Universität der Künste Berlin, following a BS in Business Management at St. John’s University.
Prerna
Saint Paul, Minnesota
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.
