Welcome February’s Artists-in-Residence! (Early Session)
Meet this SESSION’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: February 12 — 24, 2026
Sarah Pfohl
Indianapolis, INDIANA
Sarah Pfohl is a dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher. She makes work about the value, power, and complexity of: a rural New York hill, the disabled body, and classroom teaching. Sarah serves as Associate Professor of Photography and Art Education Coordinator in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Indianapolis. She lives in Indianapolis.
Lola Ayisha Ogbara
cHICAGO, Illinois
LOLA AYISHA OGBARA is a Nigerian American conceptual artist and arts manager from Chicago, Illinois. She earned a BA from Columbia College Chicago and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her practice explores haptic (sub)conscious frameworks, utilizing the body form, as well as its absence, to contemplate the complexities of emotion, belonging, looking/seeing, labor, time, and space through clay, installations, and sonic experiments. Ogbara has exhibited in art spaces across the country, including The Luminary, Kavi Gupta, Kemper Museum, Mindy Solomon Gallery, and Kristen Lorello Gallery. She has also received residencies, fellowships, and awards from Alfred University, Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, the Coney Family Fund, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, and many other institutions.
Ogbara, as an arts manager, is also the former Curator for the South Side Community Art Center and currently serves as the University of Illinois Chicago Social Justice Initiative’s Program Director and Gallery Manager. Ogbara’s curatorial-based practice serves underrepresented artists and is committed to fostering equity and integrity in the art world. “My practice is rooted in the belief that artists deserve a platform for their expression, irrespective of societal constructs or historical biases.” Driven by a belief in arts advocacy, Ogbara has actively curated numerous relevant exhibitions and participated in initiatives and programs that foster inclusion through diverse narratives. She has partnered with Independent Curators International, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Pulitzer Art Foundation, Artadia, and numerous other organizations.
Ogbara continues to contribute to Chicago’s rich arts landscape, striving to create meaningful connections and facilitate transformative experiences through the power of art. She is currently based in Chicago, Illinois.
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I practice art visually and sonically through a haptic framework using the body form, as well as the absence of the body, to contemplate complexities of emotion, belonging, looking/seeing, labor, time, and space. I explore collective memory through form and sound. The haptic sub/consciousness becomes a parasol within my praxis. My practice incorporates elements of the trickster, the teacher, chaos, and clay as a means to categorize the interdisciplinary nature of my work. This looks like using obscurity as a lens to subvert the power dynamics inherent in looking/seeing through image making (trickster), critiquing and disrupting sociopolitical rhetorics and structures that uplift oppression through the use of communal convivial pedagogies through research (teacher); emphasizing the power of echoic memory through sonic experiments that imagine the haptic sub/conscious as a shared spatiality that communicates and collaborates across differential relationships to space and time through musical means (chaos); and re-imagining resistance through the materiality of sculpture mediums (clay).
Mariana Noreña Gutiérrez
Chicago, illinois
Mariana Noreña is a multidisciplinary artist from Bogotá, Colombia, currently based in Chicago, IL. Her work explores how humans relate to place through ecology, history, and mythology. Through a research-driven, site-responsive practice, she investigates the material memory of landscapes and natural phenomena, creating echoes between geological processes and daily life. Working with earth matter and locally sourced materials, she reveals intimate and collective stories that speak to the symbiotic relationship between humans and their environment.
Rooted in close observation and material exploration, her process intertwines formalist composition, embodied sensing, and direct engagement with the places she studies. Through sculptural installations, she creates subtle yet immersive experiences that examine how materials bear witness to a place’s layered histories and interconnected collective memory.
Mariana holds dual bachelor's degrees in Design and Fine Arts, with an emphasis in Painting and Drawing, from La Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), for which she received a merit distinction for her thesis project, “You Were Here,” which explored the landscape of the body through alternative portraiture. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited, published, and collected nationally and internationally. Mariana's latest solo exhibition was “Territorio Ceniza” in Murmuration (Chicago, USA). She has also exhibited “Instructions for a Walk” in Garage 04 (Karlsruhe, Germany) and “Reflections of Place” at UNAM (Chicago, USA). She has participated in group exhibitions in Colombia at venues including La Feria del Millón Art Fair, the Contemporary Museum of Art of Bogota, and SGR Gallery. In the United States, her work has been shown at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University (New York City), Krasl Art Center (St Joseph, Michigan), Co-prosperity, Gallery 1922, SAIC Galleries, RHAA, The Franklin, and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago). Her work is in the collection of the Museo Bolivariano de Arte Contemporáneo. Mariana is a 2025 Re / Match Artist Award recipient and a 2025 International Sculpture Center Innovator Award recipient; she was a 2023 Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and a 2022 Luminarts Cultural Foundation finalist.
Syr Hayati Beker
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Syr Hayati Beker is a writer and immersive experience creator in search of the queer love language of climate change. Their book, What A Fish Looks Like, a novella in mutated fairy tales, is out now from Stelliform Press. Syr is the co-founder of Queer Cat Productions performing arts company and The Escapery Collective. Their work appears in Foglifter, Joyland, Fairy Tale Review, F(r)iction, Michigan Quarterly Review, Spunk, Gigantic Sequins, Home is Where you Queer Your Heart (Foglifter Press, 2021), and in theaters, pirate ships, galleries, and queer bars near you.
Homa Sarabi
Newton, massachusetts
Homa is an Iranian-born artist, educator, and curator, living in the U.S. Working across film, installation, and socially engaged practices, her work explores the intersection of personal and political, investigates collective memories, and researches contemporary histories. She teaches media and visual arts, and her curatorial interest spans from experimental cinema to international, independent, and documentary films. Her practice bridges the poetic and the political, often drawing from research, collaborative processes, and her roots in Iranian culture and literature.
Maris Van Vlack
MANSFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
Maris is an interdisciplinary artist from Massachusetts who combines digital and traditional weaving practices with painting to build tapestries that explore memory and history. Growing up in New England surrounded by remnants of stone textile mills inspired her to explore the connections between architecture and textiles, and to investigate how the ruins of a building tell a story about a landscape and the people who lived there. Studying Textiles and Drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design taught her to think of a thread as a drawing material that can be used to create pictorial spaces. She has exhibited in the USA and Europe, including shows at the U. S. Capitol Building (Washington, DC), NADA New York (New York, NY), the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), the Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), the Icelandic Textile Center (Blönduós, Iceland), and FOG Art Fair (San Francisco, CA).
Alibaba Awrang
NEW MILFORD, CONNECTICUT
I am an artist who was trained in traditional Persian calligraphy - an ancient manuscript art meant to be read. This lies at the core of all my work. I love the graceful, elegant, fluid shapes of Nastaliq letters, often referred to as the “bride” of calligraphy.
While the poetic script is subtly embedded in my art, it is not meant to be read. My art is meant to offer the viewer an intimate connection with color, form, balance and harmony. It invites meditation and reflection. My art is informed by the beauty of nature and by my own life experiences. I wish the viewer to reflect on the feelings the works convey, as I attempt to communicate the common language of mankind.
My process resembles collage, ranging from four to eight layers in which the script and the forms are intertwined. My painting expresses experimentation and self-expression. I start with a letter, a form or a pattern without knowing where it will take me. I often get lost in the layers and am surprised by the final work.
Materials include traditional tools used to create contemporary expression - Japanese ink, acrylics, gold and silver leaf. These are applied with bamboo pens and brushes, to paper, canvas or wood. The bold black ink offers a link to traditional manuscript calligraphy - a link that anchors me while I explore the universe of emotions.
Navid H.Mood
Jamaica Plain, MASSACHUSETTS
Navid is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Iran and based in Boston. His practice engages with personal and collective memory, censorship, and erasure, often drawing from family archives and the sociopolitical ruptures that followed the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Through photography, montage, and experimental printmaking, he explores the tension between what is preserved and what disappears, creating works that speak to the fragility of history and the resilience of memory. His current project reflects on missing photographs and fragmented narratives through handmade photographic processes, including iron-silver printing and photomontage.
Navid holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2018). He has taught in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is part of the permanent collection at FOTOHOF Gallery in Salzburg, Austria. Navid is currently an Artist in Residence at Boston Center for the Arts.
Ester Petukhova
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Ester Petukhova is a painter and material cultural researcher whose work engages with the post-Soviet affective space and visual ethnography. Through expanded painting applications—historical records, artifacts, and memory reservoirs serve as the primary site for her ontological inquiries in asynchronous history (Alexievich, 2013), multi-directional memory (Tlostanova, 2018), and plurality within embodied archives.
Kathy Chow
Toronto, Canada
Kathy Chow is a writer and editor. Her work has been published by The Walrus, Toronto Life, The Point, POLITICO Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. She has a PhD in religious studies from Yale University and a master's in systematic theology from the University of Edinburgh. She did her undergraduate work at Princeton University, where she studied political theory. Her work has been supported by the National Book Critics Circle, the Writers' Room of Boston, Slough Farm, and MASS MoCA. She is currently working on a book about disenchantment.
