Awarded Artists from May 1, 2025 General Application
The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awarded artists from our May 1, 2025 General Application Deadline. Each of these artists will receive a two or four-week residency during the January – June 2026 season at the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Congratulations to this season’s Artists:
Photo by Mariah Moneda.
Casey Fletcher’s (American, b.1993) interest in the histories of the Abrahamic faiths steers him toward reoccurring themes and modalities: A concern with identifying better ways of loving, developing an orientation towards goodness, a reverence for the study of history, faithful devotion combined with intellectual discernment, and an emphasis on transformative experiences that beget transformative practices. Fletcher’s work is made in response to the question posed in the Torah “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and wrestles with this question to provide opportunities for love both to grow and to be critically analyzed. This analysis is something that Fletcher considers a critical need, particularly in a moment of distinct polarization regarding shared interpretations of truth, love, and justice. His work lives in the interstitial, and uses dissimilar-comparisons when approaching subject matter; it names things by what they are not rather than what they are. Fletcher’s work regularly deploys this strategy in part to avoid the roles of advocate, advertiser, or expert. Instead, the role of his work is to create moments that bypass conclusions in order to foster inquiry and reflection.
Victoria Dugger (b. Columbus, Georgia) is a visual artist based in Athens, Georgia. Her work wrestles with the complex intersections of identity, disability, and Southern heritage, weaving together personal histories and broader societal narratives. As a disabled Black woman, Dugger reimagines the Southern Gothic, confronting themes of isolation, desire, and visibility through a lens that is at once vulnerable, grotesque, and beautiful.
She has received major recognition for her work, including the Hudgens Prize for Visual Art (2024) and the South Arts Southern Prize for Visual Arts and its Georgia Fellowship (2023). Dugger was also named a Georgia Woman to Watch by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023) and awarded First Prize in the John F. Kennedy Center VSA Emerging Artist Award (2016). Her residencies and fellowships include the Studios at MASS MoCA (2026), the McColl Center (2026), and the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2024).
She has presented solo exhibitions at the University of Alabama, Shirley Fitterman Arts Center at CUNY, Hudgens Arts Center, Sargent’s Daughters, among others, and participated in numerous group shows nationwide. Dugger’s work is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Vogue, Hyperallergic, Artnet, ARTnews, Art Observed, Cultured Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, FRIEZE, The New York Times, Artdaily, Burnaway, The Georgia Review, NPR: City Lights, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Faucet Magazine, among others. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.
SunYoung Park (b. 1990, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores hybridity, memory, and cultural identity through ceramics, drawing, and mixed media. Weaving clay with fabric, rope, wood, and botanical elements, she creates sculptures that blur boundaries between body and object, domestic and organic, fragility and permanence.
Treating clay as a living archive, Park transforms materials to mimic one another—fabric stiffens with slip, wood bends like textile, and clay drapes with softness—inviting viewers into spaces of tension and transformation. Her imagery often evokes care and pressure, intimacy and unease, reflecting her experience navigating life between cultures.
Park holds BFA and MFA degrees from Hongik University in Seoul and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has held residencies at Clayarch Gimhae Museum, Charlotte Street Foundation, and the Wassaic Project, with exhibitions at the Jingdezhen International Ceramic Biennale, Alive & Unfolding: International Contemporary Ceramic Art Triennial in Andenne, Belgium, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Interdisciplinary Ceramic Research Center (ICRC) at the University of Kansas.
Homa Sarabi 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 place-based research, collaborative processes, and her roots in Iranian culture and literature.
Rui Yamaguchi (b. 1991, Ishikawa, Japan) is a multimedia artist who lives and works between Tokyo and Kanazawa. He completed his master's degree at Tokyo University of Art, Department of Intermedia Art. Yamaguchi's practice transforms subtle gestures and everyday objects into poetic and political metaphors, revealing the social structures embedded within daily life.
Yamaguchi's work emerges from deep research into urban contexts and history, combined with intimate interviews with individuals whose stories illuminate broader social conditions. His creative process extends across multiple media—text, dance, video, installation, and performance—creating dialogues between personal narratives and collective experiences. Through this interdisciplinary approach, he examines how ordinary moments carry extraordinary weight in understanding contemporary society.
His work has been exhibited across Japan and internationally in France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Taiwan. In 2024, he held a solo exhibition "Swept along, but not swept away" in Tokyo. Recent honors include Resident Artist at Singapore Art Museum (2025), Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators by Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan (2024), Next Young Artist Award Excellence Award (2024), CAF Contemporary Art Foundation Award Finalist (2023), and A-TOM ART AWARD Sonoaida Award (2022).
Daria Irincheeva is a female Russian-born, US citizen artist of mixed heritage, with North-Eastern European (Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian Jewish) and Indigenous Siberian (Buryat Khongodor tribe) roots. Her work examines the traumatic legacies of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russian repression, focusing on historical erasure, state violence, and political oppression. Irincheeva's current oil painting project reinterprets books by intellectuals executed or imprisoned during the Great Terror (1937–1938), highlighting voices from former Soviet republics. Through the deliberate omission of graphic design elements, she symbolizes the erasure of these individuals from society. This project is deeply personal, as at least seven of Irincheeva's relatives were executed by the Soviet state, and over twenty were exiled to GULAG camps.
Irincheeva holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (2013) and an MFA from Columbia University (2018). Her solo exhibitions include “Blanked Out” at Pushkin House, London (2024), “Pilling Wreckage” at Big Screen Space, New York (2023), “Continuous Function” at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2019), “Empty Knowledge” at Christie’s Moscow (2017), and “Circadian Rhythm” at Postmasters Gallery, New York (2014), among others.
Irincheeva’s work has been included in group exhibitions at major venues such as the Parallel Program of the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), the Albertina Museum, Vienna (2014), MAMbo, Bologna (2018), and Gavin Brown’s UncleBrother Space, NY (2018), among many others.
She has participated in residencies at AZ West, California (2017), and is a MacDowell Fellow (2025). Her work has appeared in "The New York Times", "Frieze", "Artforum", and other publications. She currently lives and works in Upstate New York.
Photo by Sean Kent.
Maris Van Vlack is an interdisciplinary artist from Massachusetts who combines digital and traditional textile practices with painting to build tapestries that explore architecture, memory, and history. She uses weaving to mimic the process of how architecture is meticulously built up, but is can be torn and weathered away, with each mark visually representing the history of what has occurred in that space. Maris 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). She has exhibited solo shows at Superhouse (New York, NY), Bromfield Gallery (Boston, MA), and Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA). Maris is a recipient of the Kennedy Center’s VSA Emerging Artist Award 2024, the St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and the RISD Textile Department Award for Innovation in the Textiles Field. Her work has been published by the Boston Globe, Interior Design Magazine, Google Arts & Culture, Dwell Magazine, Miami Living Weekly, and Warp + Weft Magazine.
Photo by Jeff McLane.
Katie Shapiro is an artist born, raised, and based in Los Angeles. Her artistic practice explores the invisible forces that shape our universe. She creates multi-layered, evocative works that reflect the complexity of the human experience across personal, historical, and cosmic dimensions. Blending photography with sculptural materials such as glass, obsidian, and mirrors, she blurs the boundaries between image and object, surface and structure. Sculpture becomes a way to embody unseen energies—memory, emotion, and psychological depth. Drawing from geologic forms, she uses natural topographies as metaphors for inner landscapes. Motherhood has profoundly influenced her perspective, deepening her connection to intuition, cyclical time, and embodied knowledge. Symbols such as the moon and fragments of her children’s bodies function as portals into psychic terrain. Her goal is to slow perception and invite deeper feeling, collapsing boundaries between media. Through this, she aims to give form to the unconscious, making the invisible felt—where photography becomes tactile, sculpture emotional, and the unseen intimately known. She aims to evoke that sense of the ineffable—the unseen, but deeply felt—where psychological, spiritual, and physical experience intersect. The work suggests that the world is always more layered than its appearances, that landscapes are repositories not only of geological histories but also of psychological and spiritual presence.
Shapiro holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from CalArts. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Huntington Library and Art Collection, and the California Museum of Photography in Riverside.
Jacobo Alonso is a Mexican artist whose work explores the opacity and versatility of the concept of the "Body" and its displacements across various contexts and disciplines. His practice challenges conventional boundaries, examining how the body interacts with and adapts to different environments and cultural frameworks.
Alonso’s work has been showcased internationally in countries such as Mexico, Finland, the United States, Iceland, England, Hungary, Italy, France, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Slovakia, Ukraine, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Germany, South Korea, Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, and China. He has participated in prestigious artist residencies, including Banff Creative Centre in Canada, ART OMI: Artists, Vermont Studio Center and BBAX Gallery in the USA, Viarco and Córtex Frontal in Portugal, SÍM Residency in Iceland, Serlachius Residency and ARTELES in Finland.
Alonso has won a number of international awards, including the Special Prize at the Cheongju International Craft Biennale in South Korea, the Sally Yunis Award for Innovative Use of Materials at Fibertart International in the USA, and the Career Award for Paper Performance at the Lucca Biennale in Italy.
In Mexico, Alonso completed Bachelor's degrees in Computer Systems and Fine Arts and studied at the University of Rennes 2 in France. He is a member of the National System of Creators FONCA (Sculpture, 2020–2023) and was a beneficiary of the Young Creators FONCA program in 2016–2017.
Photo by Andy Bernstein.
Navid is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Iran and currently 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. Working with personal and archival imagery, he responds to familial silences shaped by political rupture. Rather than seeking to restore what has been lost, the work reconstructs memory as a layered, unfinished terrain. By combining intimate family stories with broader historical contexts, he invites viewers to reflect on how collective memory is shaped, erased, and reimagined.
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. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Boston Center for the Art.
Guadalupe Salgado (Mexican) crafts her work as a direct response to her fascination with the human condition. The softness in textile language allows her to dislocate beliefs into tactile metaphors that highlight the absurd while straining the boundaries between the sacred and the common, the visible and the repressed. In a conceptual exercise that fuses humor, criticism, and the poetics of ruin, her works function as visual annotations of the false standards and shared fragility that characterizes us as a species.
Why do humans do what they do and how do they live with the consequences of their actions? How many lies can we hold to sustain a belief? What's the point of constantly searching for meaning? Are we more than the sum of our contradictions? Why do we find it so difficult to bear the weight of our own freedom? Who owns what isn't ours? At what point did we decide that the intangible was less important? Why does something exist rather than nothing? Generating a kind of archaeological artifact for the future, Guadalupe reveals the allegorical mechanisms that shape our contradictions and the emotional and social survival strategies that allow us to sustain them.
In 2014/24 she was awarded the Young Creators scholarship from the National Fund for Art and Culture (FONCA) in the category of Photography (2014) and Sculpture (2024). Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, NY, Paris, Basel, Quito, Berlin, Milan, Mallorca, Hong Kong. Guadalupe Salgado lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Shrimanti Saha (b.Kolkata, India) is an artist working in the medium of drawing, painting and animation. Saha creates layered story structures, with references from a range of sources like history, literature, mythology, science fiction, comic books, art history, miniature paintings, news reports as well as memory, conversation and personal experiences. In her works, different time periods amalgamate with each other; leading to the creation of a personal mythology or an alternative history; which delves into the themes of identity, gender, ecology, exploitation and control.
Saha has been part of artist residencies at Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center and at Bemis Center for Contemporary art in the US. She had a solo exhibition in New Delhi and has been part of group exhibitions in India and abroad. Saha has a BVA and MVA in Drawing and Painting from M.S. University, Vadodara, India.
Across my practice as an artist and image-maker, I utilize visual and historical research methodologies to articulate post-Soviet histories and secondhand cultural memory. Working in painting, drawing, and collage, I slice into an array of materials and fragmented historical records to negotiate the terms of their historical preservation or erasure.
Drawing from personal and communal archives—physical, digital, and oral—I transform these findings into layered, mobile art objects and expansive paintings. I begin my research by collecting an array of items and writing about them. This inquiry will then culminate in a series of paintings, or be transformed into an artist book. Chronicling photographic media, ephemera, and cultural artifacts through print serves as a key effort in preserving their futurity—since much of this historical or cultural erasure occurs as a result of material degradation, political censorship, or geographic displacement. There's often a chasm between how different generations perceive the lived experiences and impact of the USSR, so my aim as a post-Soviet artist is to re-shape what these records can represent for future diasporas.
My work explores the fluid intersections of storytelling, materiality, and cultural memory, featuring imaginative depictions of women, animals, and plants rendered onto hand-built ceramic objects. Taking storytelling as a meeting point of concurrent and past experiences, I investigate themes of adaptation, displacement, and transformation. Since moving to the United States in 2017, my practice has evolved into a negotiation between the culture I inherited from China and the realities of my immigrant experience. Building with clay becomes a metaphoric process—one that mirrors the emotional spectrum of adaptation, from intimidation and distortion to excitement, confusion, and, ultimately, celebration.
Central to my process is the use of airbrush techniques with vibrant underglazes, allowing me to build intricate layers of color, depth, and fluidity. This method not only departs from traditional ceramic surface treatments but also introduces an ethereal, almost cinematic quality to my work, where images seem to shift, dissolve, or emerge from the clay. By airbrushing, I blur the boundaries between surface and form, drawing attention to the interplay of control and spontaneity, opacity and translucency. The result is a tension between the permanence of fired clay and the ephemeral, shifting nature of personal and cultural narratives.
Born in Shandong, China, Hou is currently based in Providence, RI. She earned her MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. Since then, she has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Penland School of Craft, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and the Archie Bray Foundation. Hou is currently a resident artist at Harvard Ceramics and a Visiting Critic in Ceramics at RISD.
Alibaba Awrang is an established artist throughout Asia and the Middle East. In 2021, at the height of his career, he and his family were evacuated from his homeland of Afghanistan by the U.S. State Department, when the Taliban took control. In 2022, he resettled in Connecticut.
Soon after his arrival, he was commissioned by the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, one of the world's premier museums of Islamic art. On the floor of his new bedroom, he painted the12 x 20 foot triptych that is now installed permanently in the museum's entry gallery.
One of Awrang's work have recently been acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, CT (where he was also commissioned to paint a mural on the four walls of the entry hall); and by private collectors; and exhibited in the 2024 Sydney Biennale, at the 836M Gallery in San Francisco, CA (2024-25), and the Mattatuck Museum (2023) in Waterbury, CT.
While he was trained in traditional Persian calligraphy, Awrang's work has evolved into a contemporary art form. "While the poetic script is subtly embedded in my art, it is not meant to be read. My art is meant to offer an intimate connection with color, form, balance and harmony. Inspired by life experience, the beauty of nature and poetry, I wish to invite meditation and reflection, and communicate in the common language of mankind." He uses traditional tools: Japanese ink, acrylics, gold and silver leaf, applied with bamboo pens and brushes to paper, canvas.
Born in Ghazni, Afghanistan in 1972, Awrang received his Bachelor and Master of Calligraphy degrees in Iran. He taught painting and chaired the Calligraphy and Miniature Painting Department at the Turquoise Mountain Institute in Kabul, founded by The Price of Wales, now King Charles III of the United Kingdom.
Photo by Girum Adefres.
Gashahun Kassahun, a multidisciplinary visual artist (b. 1980, in Woliso, Ethiopia) His works manly raised the attachment between man and the land, related themes of racial justice, negative impacts of ethnic-politics, identity, economic and geopolitical.
The current political instability and crisis in his country; the displacements associated with crises are caused by land has led him to focus on these issues. To reveal and to challenge it smoothly; he served local traditional materials which had significant shared values as well as individual identities to his community. The 'ቁና'/traditional grain measurement (a basket covered with leather/skin) and its part leather are the material which linked with his subject, transforming them into works of art and serves as a metaphorical language.
Gashahun's works exploring the intersection of tradition and modernity by merging contemporary life and Ethiopian cultural tradition. His art speaks to the lived experiences of African people globally by infusing cultural knowledge with contemporary fortitude that reaches beyond the border of Africa and into the home of many.
He received his BFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts with Great Distinction at the AAU All School Fine Arts and Design, before he attends his BFA he obtained a diploma majored in painting from the Teferi Mekonen College, where he later served as an art instructor for two years.
His works has been featured in various exhibitions, selected exhibitions; at the Lela Ethiopian Contemporary Art Gallery, the Galeries Netzwerk Gallery in Germany, Hourglass Gallery in Nigeria, the National Museum of Ethiopia, and the Gola S/Jorge Gallery. He also participated on public art works across his motherland.
Photo by John Niekrasz.
Tyna Ontko is an artist and writer from the Kitsap Peninsula of Washington state, an area which informs her interest in handicraft futurism and rural infrastructure. In her practice, woodcraft is paired with various building materials and methods of display. The act of place-making is called in through visual cues such as theater scenery, industrial settings, and domestic interiors. In parts fact and fantasy, she considers sculpture as a form of sorting, bringing to light the experience of living between publics whose methods for setting boundaries, communally agreed upon superstitions, and algorithms for making meaning mark unconscious thought and affect daily trajectories.
Tyna is a 2025 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, holding an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media. Her work has been exhibited with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond, VA, Kunsthalle Kohta in Helsinki, Finland, and Below Grand Gallery in New York, NY among others. Recent residencies attended include those with Mildred’s Lane (Narrowsburg, NY), ACRE (Steuben, WI), and La Wayaka Current (Coyo Community of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile). She has work included in the publications Are.na Annual Volume 7, Curious 9, Ancient Tech News, and Provenance Research. Tyna was the recipient of a 2024/25 Cy Twombly Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and in 2022 was a finalist in the open medium category for the Neddy Artist Award through Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts.
Photo by Star Montana.
Woohee Cho is a visual artist, performer, and experimental filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Seoul. His work focuses on moments in everyday life where individual identity collides with or is subsumed by society, queering these experiences through installations, videos, and performances. Gathering, personalizing, and laughing are the primary methodologies of his practice.
He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2020), and BFA from Seoul National University (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at Vox Populi, PA (2025); Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (2023). His works have been shown at Torrance Art Museum (2025); Human Resources LA, CA (2024); Brussels Independent Film Festival, Belgium (2022); Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI (2021); Cork International Film Festival, Ireland (2021); OUTFEST Film Festival LA (2021); UCLA New Wight Biennial (2020); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2020); and REDCAT (2019), among others. He is a recipient of LAND MOHN grant (2025); Visual Arts Fellowship (Interdisciplinary field) from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2023); and Body and Tech Fellowship from School of Dance at CalArts (2019). He has participated in residencies at UCross Foundation, WY (2025); Alex Brown Foundation, IA (2024); NARS Foundation, NY (2023); The REEF LA, CA (2020-2021); and Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, NY (2019).
Yuki Maruyama's work is driven by the ever-expanding potential of drawing and by the elasticity of perception. Committed to in-person viewing experience and to low-tech modes of seeing and making, she aims to produce singular works whose full effect can only be witnessed first-hand. These days she is especially compelled by the double-edged nature of visual cognition, a tool for efficiency and survival yet rich with pitfalls and glitches: as it fills in missing information and discards unwanted data, the brain is constantly drawing. It is within these faulty and often hidden areas of seeing that she finds the most excitement and possibility.
In her latest project, Maruyama engages the effect of anaglyph 3D glasses through red-and-cyan drawing installations and smaller works on panel. The contrasting high-chroma hues clash and collide, generating a potent vibration to the bare eye. When seen through 3D glasses, the image now flickers relentlessly between background and foreground, positive and negative space, and flatness and volume. As each lens masks its corresponding color, the brain fails to integrate the picture as a complete whole. The resulting effect, disorienting both in the physical and psychological sense, is compounded by the spatially ambiguous compositions.
Maruyama holds an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2015, 2025), the Ucross Foundation Fellowship (2023), the Meta Open Arts residency (formerly Facebook Artist-in-Residence), the Kala Art Institute Fellowship (2017-2018), the Anderson Ranch Arts Center residency (2017), and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2016). She has exhibited in numerous galleries and project spaces in the Bay Area, New York City, and in Ibaraki, Japan.
Writers
(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)
Kathy Chow
Kathy Chow is a writer and editor from Taiwan. Her essays have been published by The Nation, POLITICO Magazine, The Washington Post, The Point, and The Walrus, among other outlets. She is working on a book about disenchantment.
She holds a PhD in Religious Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University, a MTh in Systematic Theology from the University of Edinburgh, and an AB in Politics from Princeton University. Her work has been supported by the National Book Critics Circle, the Writers' Room of Boston, Slough Farm, and MASS MoCA.
M. L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. An avid road-tripper and record collector, when she’s not on the hunt for her next big score, she lives in South Philadelphia with the world’s best road dog, Marlowe. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her bestselling first novel, IF WE WERE VILLAINS, has been published in 22 countries. Her first novella, GRAVEYARD SHIFT, was a USA Today and Sunday Times bestseller. Her second novel, Hot Wax, published in September 2025 by Simon & Schuster, was a USA Today and ABA Indie bestseller.
Photo by Nate Rodriguez-Vera.
Caroline K. Fulford is a librarian and writer from New Jersey living in Brooklyn. She received support from Sundress Academy for the Arts in 2024. In 2019, she won the Indiana Review Fiction Prize and an NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction.
Her fiction is speculative and historical, finding the porosity between humanity and nature. She is working on a short story collection and a novel.
Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MFA from Cornell University, where he was a university fellow, an editor of EPOCH journal, and a two-time recipient of the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize. He also earned First-Class Honours in Literary Studies and Psychology from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Best of Australian Poems, Australian Book Review, Poetry London, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, the Forward Prize (Best Single Written Poem), and has been nominated for awards by The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Best New Poets, and Palette Poetry. He has also received residency fellowships or support from institutions such as the Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). He is currently a lecturer at Cornell University, where he teaches creative writing and academic composition.
Syr Hayati Beker is a writer and 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. 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.
Photo by Ralph Sosa.
Jeff Cán Xicay is a contemporary Kaqchikel artist whose practice weaves ancestral knowledge with a community-based practice. Since 2020, he has focused on revitalizing traditional backstrap-loom weaving passed down by the women in his family, as a form of contemporary visual storytelling that interlaces textile practice with narrative and memory. Cán Xicay asserts that Kaqchikel textiles are not mere objects but living archives of encoded communication across generations. They are structured around symbols reflecting a non-linear conception of time and history.
Photo by Abdiel Segarra.
karen langevin osorio (b.1964 San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a movement and transdisciplinary artist based in San Juan. She is interested in the embodiment of philosophical concepts and sociopolitical issues, developing work that is site-specific, participatory and community building. As a kind of "movement linguist", she aims to question preconceived ideas about movement (dance), culture and human behavior juxtaposed to our relationship with the world. Her work is an invitation to experience impactful visual atmospheres that use body, text, movement, voice, video and architecture. For karen, space is laboratory, her body, the vehicle for experimentation. Her projects, extensively researched, work with concepts such as time, foretelling, adaptation, presence, rest, and planetary entanglement. She has a BA in Dance and Anthropology from Cal State Long Beach and an Alexander Technique certification from ACAT in NYC. Her work has been presented in New York City, Arizona, Puerto Rico, Denver, Mexico, Canada, and Paraguay. She has received grants from the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico, The National Endowment for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, Máquina Simple (Beta-Local), and commissions from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico. Recent works include SHEMAMMAL (2021), SHEMAMMALseries (2021-video), TOUGH SKIN (2023-24) and INTERview (2024). She is presently working with her daughter, artist Eva Rodriguez Langevin, in a new project, SMELL of METAL, TASTE of EARTH, to be premiered Fall 2026.
Yiyo Tirado-Rivera (b. 1990, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a multidisciplinary artist with a BA in Design and Graphic Arts from the School of Visual Arts and Design (EAPD) in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His creative processes explore the deconstruction of different aesthetic regimes associated with four fundamental axes: architecture, construction, the visitor economy and the designation of his Caribbean landscape as a paradisiacal image. Focused on investigations about Puerto Rico’s territorial status, public space and the socio-political geography that defines them, his works exhibit a critical perspective on the colonial history of his island. Tirado-Rivera’s practice analyzes the models that promote a social, political, and aesthetic molding of the public landscape at the behest of the industrial, economic and architectural infrastructure designed to serve the tourism industry. His sculptures, photographs, and paintings subvert the codes of representation of the constructed image of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, and reflect on the hegemonic cultural forms by which a colonialist and fetishized vision of the island was implemented. His works critically reflect the tourism industry’s deliberate economic, aesthetic and cultural model of colonialism.
Camila Buxeda Lugo
Camila Buxeda Lugo is born (1990) and raised in Santurce, Puerto Rico, where she lived until 2016. The artist has been exhibiting her art in Puerto Rico as well as in the United States. Camila Buxeda currently resides in La Quinta, California where she works full-time as an illustrator.
This series of watercolor still lifes AKA "Bodegones" is an exploration of memory and identity, inspired by my experiences growing up in a colonial context. Through the use of familiar objects and everyday scenes, I aim to evoke a sense of nostalgia and contemplation. By imbuing these seemingly ordinary objects with cultural and historical significance, I delve into the complexities of personal and collective memory. These paintings are not merely representations of physical objects, but rather portals to a world of emotions, memories, and shared experiences.
Born cuir (queer) and brought up catholic in the colonized archipelago of Borikén (Puerto Rico). The catholic slowly disappeared, the cuir stuck around. From their Caribbean trans body, Pati Cruz Martínez searches for poetry in the mundane through the camera and the pen. Sensitivity and curiosity drives their work with different mediums inside the filmmaking practice: writing, storytelling, video, and editing. The camera has been both a shield and a lens through which Pati engages with the world, navigating its violence toward marginalized bodies as well as its resistance through perseverance and joy.
Pati studied Film Directing at the International School of Film and TV in Cuba and obtained a Bachelor of Arts at Vassar College, New York. Their films have screened at international film festivals, such as Raindance Film Festival, Philadelphia Latino Film Festival (LOLA award 2020), trinidad+tobago film festival, Outfest Los Angeles LGBTQ+, and Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (Silver Image Award 2020). Their work has been a part of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, the Queer Cultural Center in the Bay Area. Pati is a Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellow (2020-21), Flaherty Seminar Fellow (2023), and EmergeNYC Fellow (2022-23). Their latest short documentary “Casa Laurel” is currently streaming on PBS. In 2020 they co-founded the trans boricua filmmakers collective, Colectivx Colectivx. Pati is currently working on their first feature-length documentary “Nació Simón”, which was part of Firelight Media’s Documentary Lab 2021-23.
Daniel Enrique Torres Marrero is a puertorican artist and designer. His work encompasses a wide variety of disciplines like sculpture, toy making, animation, drawing, painting, and furniture design. The language that links all of these is play, vernacular Caribbean folk art, and the visual heritage of the Latin American political left. The act of play is inseparable in Daniel's art practice; this is owed to the love and dedication of his grandfather, a craftsman and folk artist, who would make him a wooden toy each time he would visit as a child. His work primarily focuses on processing and reflecting on the history and baggage of US colonialism in Puerto Rico. He is driven by an insatiable desire to create rich meaningful objects imbued with a certain degree of sincerity and honesty, that each work contributes not only to forging a style unique to himself, but a reflection of his culture at large.
Daniel holds a BFA in Illustration and Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has also been awarded with the 2024 Jacob Reily-Wasserman memorial award, given to a student who embodies play and spirit in their work.
University Fellowships:
(In partnership with the following universities):
Morgan Grigsby
University of Texas at Austin
My work focuses on the history of a changing landscape that I have spent most of my life on. I grew up on the outskirts of a small town near Houston called Sugarland. It was established as a company town in the nineteenth century to produce sugarcane within a humid subtropical environment. Unlike other regions of Texas, this area is known for its sweltering summer days obscured by haze and sea fog. In the past, the climate was notoriously described as a “hell hole on the Brazos [river]” because of the unpleasant living conditions. As an adult, I learned that the town's success was made possible through a secret exploitation of black labor used during the Reconstruction era. With this information, it became imperative for me to reclaim these trails of history while upholding imprints of my heritage. This body of work exemplifies the importance of home and how the suburbanization of land that was once deemed untamable transformed my culture as a black Texan who still lives in the South.
My oil paintings explore the use of imaginative, swampy colors to render the subtle nuances of eerie light on canvas and wood panels. These colors embrace a delicate relationship between my subjects and the ominous environment. I utilize the ephemeral effects of light on the southern Gulf Coast to guide the overall mood of each painting I make. The distortion of light, whether present or absent, transforms the visual experience of my paintings. The fleeting memories of home that was once the center of my world, paired with the temporality of light, contribute to the inarguable sublime of the landscape, while embodying feelings of both alienation and privacy.
Todd Stong
TYLER SCHOOL OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Todd Stong (b. 1991, Trenton, NJ) is an artist, educator, curator, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. He makes images that elaborate on processes of queer cultural production and power. With focus shifting between the world-building capacities of visionary individuals and the tangle of the crowd, he constructs contradictory landscapes dedicated to forgotten figures of the past. Populating his imagery is a mesh of bodies and skeletons – some at work, some aroused, others in danger, still more making mischief. In addition to addressing larger political structures and biographies, these scenes represent his own experience as a gay man interacting with other men and the world at large, with all the accompanying risk and reward.
Stong received a BA in Visual and Literary Arts from Brown University in 2014 and an MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art and Temple Rome in 2022. He has held residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, The Lighthouse Works, The Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and he was a Post-Graduate Apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum. Group and two-person exhibitions include spaces such as Candice Madey Gallery, New York, NY; Dolan/Maxwell at IFPDA, New York, NY; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, DE; and SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, New York, NY. His solo exhibition, Becoming Hole, showed at Peep Projects in Philadelphia alongside a concurrent solo exhibition, Preamble, at Second State Press, where he was the 2023 Cindi Royce Ettinger Fellow. He is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Headstone Gallery in Kingston, NY.
Mai snow
Maine College of Art and Design
Mai Snow is a Trans/Non-binary artist born in Polevskoy, Russia. They split their time living and making work between Valentine, Texas and New England. Their work focuses on beauty and complexities of queer sexuality, trans gender and the non-binary body. Snow received their MFA from University of Texas at Austin in 2020 and their BFA from Maine College of Art in 2013. They have shown their paintings throughout Texas, New England, and in various parts of the Midwest. Snow is the co-creater of a local DIY Gallery space, Shedshows, in Austin, Texas.
Gabriela Passos
Corcoran School of the Arts & Design
Gabriela Passos is a Brazilian-American visual artist and multimedia storyteller whose work moves across photography, sound, video, and installation to explore themes of visibility, labor, and belonging. Rooted in a documentary impulse, but shaped by a life lived between borders, her practice dwells in the spaces where stories often go unspoken.
Born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and raised in Florida, Gabriela grew up surrounded by quiet acts of care and resilience, stories that rarely made headlines, yet built the world around her. Her studies in International Development and Latin American Studies, her time living in rural Cameroon, and two years traveling the U.S. in a self-built van taught her that listening is more than a method. It is a posture, a presence, a way of meeting others with humility and care. For her, it is both an artistic practice and an ethical promise.
These experiences have shaped a way of working that is slow, collaborative, and intentional. Her process centers trust, reciprocity, and the emotional textures of migration, labor, and displacement. Sound is a vital material in her work. Ambient recordings, fragments of conversation, and layered sonic textures become carriers of memory and mood, adding depth to still images. Through installation, she gathers these fragments into physical space, asking viewers not just to look, but to listen and feel what often goes unseen.
Now based in Dallas, Texas, Gabriela continues to cultivate a practice rooted in care, where art becomes an act of witnessing, a vessel for memory, and a reimagining of what it means to be seen.
Jo
Rhode Island School of Design
In an interview, jazz pianist Duke Ellington was asked where he found inspiration. His response has stayed with me: “I got a million dreams. It's all I do is dream. All the time.” When the interviewer countered, “I thought you played piano,” Ellington turned, played the piano in front of him and said, “No, this is dreaming.” That line resonates deeply with me and inspires my practice. I spend my days dreaming—transforming those dreams into short stories and making them into printed fabric. My work creates internal landscapes by using tie and dye, silkscreen, oil pastel, and anything else that feels right to explore and express those dreams. My process is intuitive, impulsive, spiritual, ritualistic, and reassuring.
Similarly to Ellington thinking about his work as a type of dreaming and a place to derive inspiration from, I use daydreaming as a mode of storytelling. I am using dreams as a way to envision a new way of existence. I approach dreams as liberation and a way to exist safely. In my dreams I do not have a body. I do not have bad days. I can explore possibilities in my fabricated realities. In these dreams there is no winter and it is easy to live. I do cartwheels in the tall grass and eat watermelon with my grandmother. My practice includes recreating these feelings via the process and begins to further realize them by creating a tangible object.
Influences: Sun Ra, repetition/ ritual, my grandmother, church, romance, John Coltrane, yearning, Jazz, unspoken words, impressionist paintings, Barry White, sunshine, angels, moon gazing, smelling a lovers unwashed scalp, warm lighting, Billie Holiday, Blues, skin, and dirt (v) (the act of being dirty)
朱高灿月 Zhu Gaocanyue
RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN
朱高灿月 Zhu Gaocanyue is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, printmaking, installation, and artist books. Viewing images as a form of visual vocabulary, Zhu Gao uses photographic language to excavate the unseen—probing beneath surfaces to engage with the layered realities of people, objects, and histories. Their recent research explores shifting definitions of value and investigates how humans relate to non-functional objects, obsolete knowledge systems, and marginalized forms of labor.
Zhu Gao earned an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and has since expanded their practice through fellowships, exhibitions, and international book fairs. They received full fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and The Studios at MASS MoCA, where they developed projects that integrated experimental image-making with archival research and expanded print-based practices. Their work has been exhibited internationally in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy, and has been featured in platforms and publications including PhMuseum, LensCulture, and The New York Times.
In 2024, Zhu Gao co-founded zug press with Zuya Yang—an independent publishing house dedicated to experimental approaches to fine art bookmaking and the expanded field of printed matter. zug press has participated in numerous book fairs, including the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), Press Play, Unbound Art Book Fair, Other Islands Book Fair, and Jersey Art Book Fair. Upcoming events include the ICP Photobook Fest, Seoul Art Book Fair, Taipei Art Book Fair, etc.
Mehdi Darvishi
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Mehdi Darvishi is a multi-disciplinary artist that his practice spans from traditional printmaking and wooden sculptures to interactive paintings and site-specific installations. He was born in the summer of 1988, coinciding with the Iran – Iraq peace resolution. In his war-stricken hometown, Mehdi grew up unexposed to art galleries and museums. In 2007 he left home to earn a BFA in Painting at the University of Tehran. After receiving his degree in 2011, his interest in printmaking grew into a life's pursuit. He has since exhibited in over 30 countries and has participated in more than three hundred global exhibitions, competitions, residencies, and as a visiting artist. His works have been widely collected by museums such as the China Printmaking Museum, the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Art, Jyvaskyla Museum of Fine Arts, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and the US Library of Congress.
He has served as a visiting artist at several renowned art institutions worldwide, including the New York Academy of Art, the University of British Columbia, the Katowice Academy of Art, and the University of Belgrade. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York–College of Staten Island.
His accolades include the Grand Prix of the 9th BIECTR, Second Place at the Premio Jesús Núñez, Special Award at the Premio Leonardo Sciascia, the Southern Graphics Conference Fellowship, and the Pritzker Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago among other honors. He was also nominated for the prestigious Prix Mario Avati from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2023. He currently lives and works in New York City, where he serves as a Studio Technician at MGC Community Print Studio at Powerhouse Arts.
Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College
Photo by Carolyn Lee Teston
Shemona is an MFA graduate of Bard College whose practice integrates sculpture, sound, text, and performance to explore belonging within conditions of displacement. Their MFA thesis, Conducting Jewish Futurisms: Sound, Object and Belonging, examines diasporic identity through the frameworks of conductivity, cybernetics, and ritual practice.
Working with conductive and industrial materials such as copper pipe, sheet metal, and electronic components, alongside experimental sound, Shemona develops installations that function simultaneously as sculptural circuits, sonic instruments and architecture.
Their work explores questions of belonging through conductivity, ritual, and material memory, particularly in metal. Drawing on Jewish intellectual traditions of multiplicity, debate, and ethical inquiry, proposing frameworks for belonging that are dynamic and decolonial. Their process of electroplating becomes a metaphor for transformation through contact—producing not addition, but a cybernetic third state for generative discourse that is both electrical and alchemical. Jewish ritual objects, often made of silver, carry memory, sound, and presence across generations. Metal holds marks and resonance; it becomes both archive and participant. Through sculpture and sound, the work seeks a plural, ethical space of becoming—where contradiction is held, memory moves, and ritual acts as a living technology.