Awarded Artists from Aug 1, 2025 Early & Alumni Application Deadline
The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awarded artists from our August 1, 2025 General Application Deadline. Each of these artists will receive a two or four-week residency during the July 2026 – June 2027 season at the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Congratulations to this season’s Artists:
Kevin Brophy is a visual artist, writer, and educator interested in dialogical power structures—rhetorical, visual, and social--with a focus on everyday language and non-dominant narratives. With a background in creative writing and interventionist performance, she creates visual and textual spaces, objects, and performances that evaluate how bodies are situated within asymmetrical systems using the aesthetics of mass appeal. Her practice includes text, new media, performance, installation, sculpture, and speculative design facilitated and informed by social technologies. Her collaborative work with Rosa Nussbaum, Housewives of the Queer Hearth, is grounded in analyzing and critiquing commonplace hierarchical power by aggrandizing the work of early utopian feminist architects and city-planners.
Brophy holds a BA in Studio Arts and Creative Writing from University of South Florida, and an MFA in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University. She has been named NEA Southern Constellation Fellow, Kala Art Institute Media Art Fellow, and a Regina and Marlin Miller Fellow. She has been artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, World of Co, Kala Art Institute, Villa Barr, Laboratory, FlussLab, Elsewhere Museum, University of Kansas and Penn State University. Her work has exhibited in traditional and alternative spaces including Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, Ringling Museum of Art, Arsenal Contemporary online, Tempus Projects and Quaid Gallery (Tampa, FL), Museum of Art and Miller Institute of Contemporary Art. Housewives of the Queer Hearth has most recently exhibited at Charlotte Street Foundation (US) and at Practice Lab for Melbourne Design Week 2025 (AU). Brophy is currently an Assistant Professor of Art & Art History in Design Studies at DePauw University.
Erin Shigaki
Seattle, Washington
Erin Shigaki is a fourth-generation Japanese American social practice artist and community organizer born and raised on the Coast Salish land of Seattle. She earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, did post graduate work in design at American University, followed by more than a decade of work as a graphic designer and art educator in New York City.
Now back in her hometown, she creates artwork that is inspired by and focused on the experiences of people of color—often grounded in the World War II mass incarceration of her community. She is passionate about highlighting similarities between that history and systemic injustices communities of color continue to face, and believes that art offers a way into these difficult conversations. In her public art and installations, she utilizes historic photography, ceramics, textiles, painting, printmaking and sculpture. She writes historic interpretation to provide education where it has been erased or omitted by design. Erin is the recipient of grants and commissions from the National Academy of Design, Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Washington State Arts Commission, 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Kip Tokuda Memorial Washington Civil Liberties Grant, and the Wing Luke Museum, among others.
As an organizer, Erin is a leader of an annual pilgrimage to Minidoka, the American concentration camp where over 13,000 Japanese Americans—including her family—were imprisoned. She is active with several abolition- and reparative-justice focused efforts. Hyper-locally, she strives to protect and preserve historic spaces of color.
Erin believes that wielding art and activism can educate, redress, and incrementally heal.
Leslie Barlow
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Leslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis, MN. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory, through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling. Her life-sized oil paintings are inspired by community and personal experiences, and often serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Barlow is a recipient of the 2021 Jerome Hill Fellowship, 2025 and 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, the 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, and five MN State Arts Board grants between 2016 and 2023. Her work can be viewed in collections around Minnesota including at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Weisman Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and US Bank Stadium. Barlow earned her BFA in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Stout and her MFA in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In addition to her studio practice, Barlow has taught at the University of Minnesota, Metro State University, and Carleton College. Barlow also supports emerging artists at Public Functionary as Director of PF Studios and is a founding member of the Creatives After Curfew mural collective. In 2023, Barlow founded and produced ConFluence, working with a team of artists and organizers to launch the first-ever ConFluence: A Cultured Multiverse art and science fiction convention. The second ConFluence convention happened in October 2025. Barlow is represented by Bockley Gallery.
Andrew Malan Milward
Lexington, Kentucky
Andrew Malan Milward was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Lawrence, Kansas. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the author of the story collections The Agriculture Hall of Fame, which was awarded the Juniper Prize for Fiction by the University of Massachusetts, and I Was a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2015), which was awarded the Friends of American Writers Literature Award. A book of novellas, You Are Loved, received the Nilsen Literary Prize and was published in 2024. His fiction has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, VQR, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Guernica, as well as Best New American Voices. His first book of nonfiction, Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball, was released in 2019. Milward has served as the McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Mississippi Review, he serves as Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Kentucky.
Brooke Middlebrook is a writer from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Bennington College and a BS in biology from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. In her visual essays and prose poetry, she explores the anxieties of trying to find a home in the certainty of science or the pleasures of art. Recent work appears in Best New Poets, The Citron Review, Fugue, and Hunger Mountain.
Alex Belardo Kostiw brings together poetic elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms in their artist’s zines, books, and “spatial books”—works that explode aspects of the book into a site. Rooted in firsthand observation, multifaceted research, and an iterative approach, they frame familiar realities as worthy of wonder. Constant streams of visual content demand our attention; brief and tender, quiet and dense, Alex’s work invites the reader to slow down and read closely. The reader must unfold, turn, traverse, or peer into the work to encounter its gestural, often fragmentary text and image. Reading becomes intuitive and multimodal, even as the story itself resists complete unravelling. Throughout their practice, Alex centers the human impulse to seek, expand, and transform our connections with the everyday, others, and ourselves through storytelling.
Alex has exhibited at numerous comics festivals and art book fairs internationally. Their work is in such collections as MassArt Zine and Comics Collection, MICA Decker Library, Pratt Institute Artist’s Books Collection, RISD Artist’s Books Collection, Tufts SMFA Library, and Yale University Haas Arts Library Special Collections. They have led workshops and given talks on print- and zine-making at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Wende Museum, Culver City; and Suffolk University, Boston, among others.
Alex is an Assistant Professor of Visual Communication Design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They also teach risography at Spudnik Press, a community print studio in Chicago, and design publications for art and culture institutions.
Alumni Application AWarded Artists:
Rachel Mannheimer
Brooklyn, NY
Rachel Mannheimer is a poet born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska and living in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, EARTH ROOM, was selected by Louise Glück as the inaugural winner of the Changes Book Prize and published in 2022. More recent poems have appeared in Poetry London and the Paris Review. She earned her MFA from New York University as a Goldwater Fellow and was also a Global Research Initiatives Fellow at NYU Berlin. She has received additional support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Stephanie Serpick
Nyack, NY
Stephanie Serpick is a painter whose work explores themes of isolation, grief, and healing. Her work has been shown in various exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally, and she is a fellow at several residencies. Most recently, she attended Cuttyhunk Island Artist Residency in Cuttyhunk, MA in 2022 and 2025. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Tambaran2 in New York City in 2025, the Buckham Gallery in Flint, MI in 2023, and at Sweet Briar College in 2022. She was awarded an Arts Council of Rockland Artists’ Support Fund Grant in 2025, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2020 and in 2018 she received the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant. Stephanie received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA from the University of Chicago.
Serpick’s work concerns the themes of isolation and grief. The challenges to our physical and mental health provide a shared experience from which to consider grief and eventual healing. In the work, feelings of grief and comfort are represented by unmade beds and tossed sheets on intentionally blank, somewhat rough backgrounds. In addition, images of windows, including blowing or transparent curtains, lend a feeling of being cut off from the outside world. These paintings are devoid of a human presence, and therefore feel lonely and isolating, reflecting what many experience during personal challenges. Both the empty bed and the windows represent a place for grief, solitude, and healing. Recent work has included split images of flowers. These are seen as companions to the beds and windows, offering a vision of color and beauty to offset the difficult themes in the other work, though the reconfiguration of the images provides a disrupted view of what otherwise might be soothing and uncomplicated.
Toby Kaufmann-Buhler
Lafayette, Indiana
Toby Kaufmann-Buhler (based in Lafayette, Indiana USA) explores history, memory, identity and sensory perception in relation to his family and himself, within individual lives and across broad sweeps of history and culture. This work takes form in video, film, found/composed sound, text, installation, performance and interactive media. In 2024 he installed the exhibition “Parallel to all truth” at The Arts Federation (Lafayette, Indiana USA). In 2022 he mounted the solo exhibition “Kingdom Loops 2002-2020” at Project DIVFUSE (London, England). In 2019 he mounted the solo exhibition “The Name of the Machine from the Moon” at Listen Hear (Indianapolis, Indiana USA) with a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. In 2023 Kaufmann-Buhler was an artist in residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts & Sciences, and was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA in 2021; he attended artist residencies at Signal Culture and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in 2017. Kaufmann-Buhler has an MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Fine Arts from the University of South Florida.