Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
April 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
March 30 - April 26, 2022
Aliana Grace Bailey
Baltimore, Maryland
Photo credit: Danielle Finney
Aliana Grace Bailey was born and raised in Washington, DC. She is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, socially-engaged art practitioner, and passionate advocate for radical self-love, wellness, and healing. In 2014, she graduated from North Carolina A&T State University, where she double-majored, earning a Bachelor of Social Work and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Arts Media Design. In May 2020, Aliana earned her MFA in Community Arts and a Certificate in the College Teaching of Art from Maryland Institute College of Art.
“Through my art, I am deepening connections to love, spirituality, intimacy, and healing. I am exploring these themes through a series of investigations in materials, space, and relationships. While intimacy is not something to force, it is something that can be intentionally explored, better understood, practiced, celebrated, and strengthened between individuals and communities. Intimacy is one of life’s greatest treasures and fears—an essential part of living, loving, survival, and healing. Through material, I weave layers of interconnection, comfort, and conversations; exploring mark-making and abstraction.”
Feda Eid
Quincy, Massachusetts
Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist. Her work explores the expression of heritage, tradition, culture, identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US. She believes in the telling of personal narratives to broaden our perspectives and to ultimately help us feel the universal emotions that connect us all.
Luiza Folegatti
North Adams, Massachusetts
Luiza is a Brazilian artist based in North Adams (USA). She spent five years in Berlin (Germany) integrating artistic practice, teaching, and social advocacy work around the rights of women immigrants. Luiza’s artistic practice focuses on gender and migration, and she applies photography, video, performance, and visual anthropology methods. She also designs and facilitates photography workshops for youth and women groups and strongly believes in projects that combine photography, education, and community building. Currently she is producing a photo essay about mothers and daughters and their experience with migration, as well as experimenting with photo books formats.
Breslin Bell
Concord, New Hampshire
Breslin Bell is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in print, sculpture, and installation. She has exhibited widely since 2016 in a number of exhibitions in London, Edinburgh, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and Japan. Bell is a recipient of the American Cities Internship Award with EFA RBPMW and Center for Contemporary Printmaking Artist-in-Residence. Bell earned her MFA from RISD and her BA from Wellesley College.
Breslin Bell's practice operates across intersections of feminisms. She aims at de-telling by way of drip, sap, mar, bleed, and smudge. Her process acts as an echo narrative searching for legibility. Bell’s making considers body autonomy, public health, and gender-based violence. Her work often explores environmental issues, womxn’s rights, and the intersections between.
Alexis Day
Portland, Oregon
Alexis Day is a Portland based, mixed media artist, originally from the coastal town of Bandon, Oregon. Utilizing her background in psychology, she investigates the themes of perception and memory, and how these processes relate to both individual and cultural identity. Working with a variety of mediums including paint, photographs, fabric, thread, and drawing media, Day creates artworks that resist categorization, and communicate through both their rendered subject matter, as well as the materials and processes used to create them.
Yi Hsuan Lai
New York City, New York
Yi Hsuan Lai is a visual artist from Taiwan currently working in New York. Her graphic design and live theatre documentation background led her to develop an artistic process that combines staged self-portraiture, still-life, sculpture-based photography, and installation. She incorporates photography, sculpture, and found objects to create work that speaks to the physical and psychological experiences to reflect the complexity of self-identity, the fluidity of the body, and the Otherness. Lai also experiments with the materiality for presenting her photographs to create a dialogue between tangible sensibility and tactile ambiguity within a space.
Her work has been shown at If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now at Wassaic Project (2021, Wassaic, NY), Unmute 10002 residency group show at Austrian Cultural Forum (2021, New York), Anonymous Town at SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2020, New York), The Thing in Itself at NARS Residency (2020, New York). Seasonal Repression at Field project (2020, New York), In Visible Space at Here Art (2020, New York), Body Language at Deer studio (2020, New York), Break a leg in Photo emphasis at Sugar gallery (2019, Fayetteville) and WONDER FOTO Day (2019, Taiwan).
Taylor Apostol
Newton, MA
Taylor Apostol was born in 1987, in Washington, D.C. and spent her formative years living in Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and the suburbs of Philadelphia. Two years living in Florence and Carrara, Italy ignited her passion for stone carving and plaster casting. Apostol earned her BA in Studio Art at the University of Vermont and MFA in Sculpture at Boston University. She has attended residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center and Sias International University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Hotel Commonwealth in Boston, MA and Sias International University in Xinzheng, China. Recently, Apostol received a Matched Savings Grant from Assets for Artists. She currently lives and works in the Boston area.
peat szilagyi
Richmond, Virgina
Peat Szilagyi is a Richmond, Virginia based artist creating colorful, sensorial works exploring consciousness, belief and spirituality. Raised in Hollywood, CA, the queer, campy cult-ridden aesthetics of the tinseled boulevards inform their style, alongside Peat's decade of devoted practice in West African and East Asian spiritual traditions. They received their undergraduate degree from Williams College and their MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Minga Opazo
Ventura, California
Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. Opazo’s recent work questions the textile industry by creating a series of cultural works that explore the idea of solastalgia, a term which describes the mental or existential distress caused by environmental change and living in an era of excess, constantly consuming and throwing away. The cycle of our ancient textile industry is broken from beginning to end. In her practice, she is dedicated to researching and studying this industry further and to creating work that exposes, reflects and finds a solution to the current situation of our broken system. Opazo completed her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. She’s exhibited works across the US and Latino America, including the Museum of Visual art of Santiago, Chile,ACRE gallery in Chicago and the Architectural foundation of Santa Barbara. In Los Angeles, her work has been shown at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Dab Art CO. gallery, and CalArts. She has been awarded with various residency including Banff art center, ACRE residency and Haystack mountain school of craft, The Reef residency, Anderson Ranch Art center and Mass Moca. She recently had her work published at Artforum and Lumzine art magazine.She is the Co-founder of Textile Resource LA a developing community fiber studio and a curatorial initiative.
grace (ge) gilbert
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania
Writer grace gilbert is the author of two forthcoming chapbooks: NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK, a poetry collection which won Antenna::Paper Machine’s 2021 Open Chapbook Contest, the closeted diaries, an essay collection that will be hand-bound and published by Porkbelly Press in 2022, and two digital micro-chapbooks: whom, which will be featured in Ghost City Press’ 2021 Summer Series, and no sharp things, featured online in NAILED in 2020. grace also won the 2021 New Delta Review Experimental Nonfiction Contest for their book-in-progress, “Holly.” They received a Rona Jaffe Fellowship to attend Bread Loaf in 2021. Their poems and essays can be found in The Adroit Journal, Ninth Letter, ANMLY, Hobart, Pithead Chapel, Pidgeonholes, the minnesota review, the Penn Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere.
Karen Dias
New York, New York
Karen Dias an interdisciplinary artist from Mumbai, India living in New York City. Her practice spans across sculpture, photography and installation. After over a decade-long career as a photojournalist, her recent work is rooted in the investigation of the role of documentary photographs in truth-telling and their relevance as a reliable document of our time. This investigation into the function and responsibility of images informs her sculptural practice. Her work deals with representations of state violence, nationalism, power, and death while exploring its often illegible and obscure manifestations in our daily lives through the use of domestic objects and images. Her work has been exhibited at Gulf Photo Plus (UAE), Tisseurs d'Images Festival (France) and Serendipity Arts Festival (India) among others. Karen teaches at the International Center of Photography, Josephine Herrick Project and at New York University.
Savannah Reich
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Savannah Reich is a playwright and screenwriter based in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied with Rob Handel. Her plays have been commissioned or developed by Walking Shadow Theater Company, the University of Minnesota, SuperGroup, and the Playwrights Center, and produced by Available Light Theater, Bedlam Theater, Baltimore Annex Theater, FaultLine Theater, and many more. Her screenplay “Beebe and Barton” was the winner of the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize in 2015, and her short film “Men Among Men” was the winner of the Bill Murray Comedy Award at the Twin Cities Film Festival. She was a 2020/21 McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights Center, and she currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting at the University of the Arts.
Amanda Moore
San Francisco, California
Photo by: Clementine Nelson
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (Ecco 2021), was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and her essays have appeared in Catapult, The Baltimore Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Poetry Co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and a reader at VIDA Review and INCH, Amanda is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.