The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees for 2023 Summer / Fall residency fellowships - our largest fellowship pool yet! Each of these artists will receive a fully funded residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.
Congratulations to this season’s fellows:
OREGON VISUAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIP
General Fellowships:
(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)
Andrea Ferrero
Mexico City, Mexico
“Through the study of monuments and architecture, my work critically considers iconographies of power and our relationship with them. It intends to challenge the way in which ideas of power have been inserted into built space and embedded into collective consciousness, reflecting on dominant political ideologies and fantasizing with fictional scenarios and alternate narratives to official histories. Using archival material, imprints, molds and digital processes such as photogrammetry and 3d models, my work unfolds in sculpture pieces, installations, instagram filters and digital experiences. Recently focused on researching food as spectacle, eating rituals as stagings of power and their relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics, it seeks to challenge colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction, creating edible pieces that focus on the process of eating, digesting, metabolizing and excreting.”
Andrea is a Peruvian artist who lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She was awarded the Hopper Prize in 2021, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award 2019 and is a finalist in the Taoyuan International Art Award 2023 in Taiwan.
Angeline Meitzler
Brooklyn, New york
Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. The 2nd daughter of a German scientist and a Filipino nurse. Her work is in dedication to the stories of Filipino American people and the questioning that asks which narratives can we monumentalize and which can we eradicate. She received her MFA through Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, A Drop of Sun. Her work has been exhibited at Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Her animated films have been shown at Diwa Filipino Film Showcase of Seattle (2023) and Cosmic Ray Film Festival (2022). Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA Residency Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Harvestworks Scholar, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm. Her work as a collaborator and environment artist has been exhibited at MUDAM Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, the New Museum, Rhizome, de Young Museum, Istanbul Biennial 2019, Koenig & Clinton, Ringling Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Basel, Rubin Museum, Sadie Coles HQ, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Clara Cruz
Richmond, Virginia
Clara Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, installation and performance to explore memory, memorials and the relational nature of meaning. She received a BFA in Painting from Hunter College. She lives and works in Richmond where she is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“I often invoke multivalent signs, such as folklore figures and border saints, in my work. I am invested in how flexible these symbols can be. They function as part of a system by which people orient themselves in a deeply disorienting world through an ongoing process of triangulation between archetypes, individuals and their social context. They endure precisely because they can be molded by groups of people to form the compass points required by a given place and time. Their meaning is fundamentally relational and social. I think of my own work as being norteada. This literally means ‘turned north,’ but implies a state of being disoriented in geographic space or lost within your mind in northern Mexican colloquial Spanish. I feel norteada as a white-passing, mixed-race Mexican American faced with the ongoing marginalization of brown people in the North East, the economic drive for northern migration, assimilation and death. Re-inscribing new meaning into historically potent symbols becomes a mode of cultural survival and a form of orientation.”
Cristobal Cea
Somerville, Massachusetts
“I work with different mediums — from 3D animation to oil painting — probably because I don’t believe in disciplinary boundaries, and also because I am particularly skeptical in regards to hierarchies of knowledge: my artmaking is a materially and conceptually diverse practice, and navigating the commons between digital and analogue practices is something that I appreciate immensely.
Perhaps that is why my work is rooted within the historical ambiguities and fluid boundaries that characterize my personal story and the history of Chile: abundant in myths, unspoken grievances and habits that seem really hard to break.
As if we were haunted.
My artworks are intent on dispersing this hidden spell: unwinding media bias and ritual violence, animating the ever-present specter of institutional violence, or conjuring the contradictions of democratic transition through the voice of a transitional human.”
Erick Hernandez
New Haven, Connecticut
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Cuba living and working in Miami, FL and Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2017) and has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), Oxbow School of Art (2018), and The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2018-19'). In addition, he has received a Scholastics Awards Alumni Micro-grant (2019) and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019).
"Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, my paintings are orchestrations of memories that have been fractured or reimagined in processes surrounding lived trauma. Rooted in traditional image making, my practice intends to disrupt classical vignettes within the genre of painting by inserting personages and spaces that are in flux. I populate my images with figures and amalgamations of figures from my own experience in order to explore various simultaneous histories of loss and displacement. In collecting from my own life and those around me I am able to emulate the labor of locating these bodies in a realm of physical and allegorical exile from representations of culture and home. As such, I am able to locate my own place amongst them."
Felicia Nez
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Felicia Nez is a Navajo multi-disciplinary artist with a strong emphasis on writing. Through the honesty of her writing, she processes words into the medium they want to be. She parallels writing with working with clay — harvested from her homeland in the southwest. The clay tells her what it wants to be, and she never plans her pots or sculptures. These two disciplines helped her form her spring 2021 MFA thesis show Transference. This exhibition showcases Nez’s ability to tell her story in her own form of tangible/intangible communication. Within the layers of her complex narrative, she makes historical references to how Pueblo Potters and other Native artists coded their pot designs and art to preserve their traditions from colonists.
Nez graduated with her MFA at the University of New Mexico in spring of 2021.
Folayemi Wilson
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Folayemi Wilson is an object and image maker who celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. She explores the Black Atlantic experience though sculptural and multimedia installations presenting speculative fictions that reference history, integrating inspiration from American vernacular architecture, literature, and science fiction. Using original sculpture, found objects, archival media, sound and video, her process utilizes training in art history and critical theory employing the archive and other research methodologies to mine history for use as material in her creative practice.
Wilson earned a MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, Theory & Criticism and holds a MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She is a co-founder and principal of blkHaUS studios, a socially-focused design studio founded in Chicago, now based in Philadelphia. Earlier in her career she worked as a graphic designer and art director in New York founding Studio W, Inc., working for clients such as Condé Nast Publications, Time Warner, The New York Times, Black Entertainment Television (BET), and Williams Sonoma. She has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Propeller Fund, and a two-time recipient of an individual artist grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies of the Fine Arts. Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, among other publications. Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships at ACRE, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Djerassi Artist Residency, Kohler Arts/Industry program, Haystack, MacDowell, and Purchase College/SUNY Purchase, New York.
Francheska Alcántara
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Francheska Alcántara is a queer Afro-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist based between The Bronx and Tulsa, OK. Their work explores material histories, detritus accumulations, and slippages between memories, fragmentation, and longing.
Alcántara holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2019), a BFA in Painting from Hunter College (2015), and a BA in Art History from Old Dominion University (2009).
They have participated in various residencies including Recess Art’s Session (2022), Wave Hill Gardens Workspace (2021), Creative Capital Professional Taller (2019), Vermont Studio Center (2019), Shandaken: Storm King (2018), Bronx Museum’s AIM Program (2017), and EMERGENYC (2016).
Francheska has shared their work at Lehmann Maupin Gallery (2022), Chashama Art Space (2021), BronxArtSpace (2020), Queens College Art Center (2019), Brooklyn Museum (2018), Queens Museum (2018), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017). Alcántara is a grantee of the OVAC’s Thrive Grant (2022), City Artist Corps Grant (2021), and Interchange Artist Grant (2021). Currently, they are a fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
Funlola Coker
New Paltz, New York
Funlola Coker is a metalsmith from Lagos, Nigeria. In 2007 Coker moved to Memphis, TN to pursue a BFA in Sculpture from Memphis College of Art. Funlola is fascinated by history, the evolution of culture and storytelling. Funlola creates narrative sculptures that call on nostalgic memories and moments of the mundane that are held dear. Coker has taught at notable craft institutions such as Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Funlola’s work has been exhibited at Brooklyn Metalworks, the Fuller Craft Museum, TONE Gallery in Memphis and the National Ornamental Metal Museum. In 2020, Coker received the Arts Memphis Arts Accelerator grant, and was a 2022 Thayer Fellowship recipient from the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government. Funlola holds an MFA in Metal from the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Tununak, Alaska
Yup’ik Artist, Golga Oscar was born and raised in a rural community called Kasigluk, Alaska. His first language is Yup’ik, and he learned English when he proceeded into the third grade. He successfully produced and led many projects with various mediums ranging from skin sewing to basket weaving, and quillwork/beadwork/walrus ivory carving exploring Yup’ik Native jewelry. He also explores digital photography that focuses on the beauty of Native identity. Oscar’s intent is to create and share his techniques within his tribal nation. His plans are to share his skills with his people who want to learn about the culture and revitalize their skills towards specified traditional/contemporary clothing. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Art and has earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts as well as a Business Entrepreneurship certificate; now he is a secondary cultural instructor at Akula Elitnaruvik. Oscar is going for his Master's degree in education and teaching certificate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Oscar’s goals are to pursue cultural awareness teaching and get into the fashion industry. He aims to showcase the Yup’ik cultural art and bring recognition to the “American” mainstream.
Jesus Treviño
Brownsville, Texas
Jesus Treviño (b. 1995, Brownsville, Texas) received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2018, and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting/Drawing at the University of Texas at Austin. His work is rooted from his experience being raised on the U.S./Mexico border and deals with the erasure of history, displacement of people, and its residual personal, emotional and social effects. He had his first solo exhibition at the Presa House Gallery, San Antonio (2019), has been included in group exhibitions at the Carlsbad Museum and Art Center, Carlsbad, New Mexico (2021); Rockport Center for the Arts, Rockport, Texas (2021); K Space Contemporary, Corpus Christi, Texas (2020); Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts (2019), where he was awarded Best in Show; and recently he curated a group exhibition titled, "Between Two Worlds" at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas (2020).
Howard el-Yasin
New Haven, Connecticut
Howard el-Yasin is a New Haven, Connecticut-based interdisciplinary (sculpture / installation / performance) artist / curator / educator holding degrees from Maryland Institute College of Art '16, Wesleyan University, and New England College. el-Yasin's interests include feminist and queer theory, decolonization and performative practices.
Previous exhibitions featuring their work include A-Space Gallery, Asnuntuck Community College, ALL Gallery, Artspace New Haven, ArtWell, ATOM space at Chinatown, Campbellsville University, City Gallery, Concord Art Association, Creative Arts Workshop, Crit Haven, Eli Center of Contemporary Art, Five Points Annex, Guilford Art Center, Hans Weiss NewSpace Gallery, Hygenic Art, Kehler Liddel Gallery, Lotta Studio, Maryland Institute College of Art, Mill Street Project, Norwalk Community College, Real Art Ways, The Institute Library, Washington Art Association & Gallery, and Wesleyan University.
They are currently an adjunct faculty member at MICA in the MFAST program, and the co-founder / curator of SomethingProjects (somethingprojects.net), an artist-run curatorial initiative, and a trustee of the Vermont Studio Center. They were a recipient of MICA's inaugural Leslie King-Hammond Award and the Faculty and Staff Queer Alliance Award. They have served as a volunteer leader with numerous Connecticut-based non-profit organizations, including the Director / Curator of Arts Literature Laboratory.
Kathryn-kay Johnson
Brooklyn, New york
Kathryn-kay Johnson (b. St. Andrew, Jamaica) is an emerging artist working in digital media, painting, and installation, making works that evoke experiences of collective effervescence and ancestral memory. Dance, and the movement of the body are central to her mark-making. Her practice is influenced by histories and mythologies remembered orally, spiritually, and rhythmically, while considering issues around class and autonomy, neocolonialism, and contemporary media practices.
She is curious about the world-building capabilities of everyday materials. And her visual language is rooted in the intergenerational ingenuity of the self-built. It is an ongoing “present continuous” practice of learning, making, building, and expanding.
Kathryn-kay Johnson was recently commissioned to create a large-scale installation for Marquand Chapel at Yale, installed until January 2023. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2022 where she won the Shickle-Collingwood Prize and the Phelps Berdan Award. She was a 2022 Beinecke Rare Book Library Research Fellow where she researched West African and African-Diasporic design philosophies. She received her BA in Studio Art, Digital Media from Florida State University in 2016.
Larí García
Richmond, Virginia
larí garcía (b. 1994 in Miami, FL) is an artist and writer who combines historical research, personal narratives, and magical realism through a comparative and ethnographic approach. Staging detailed assemblages reveals inherent limits of material meaning while subverting how we see objects and spirituality. garcía completed a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design (2017) and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2021). In 2022, garcía attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Their work has been shown throughout the US, recently in a collaborative exhibition, Snowing, at D.D.D.D. in New York City, NY (2023).
“Growing up in Miami, FL, I learned survival skills from immigration, familial conflict, policing systems, and natural disasters that influenced my interest in material scarcity and tactics. These moments became integral to approaching my creative practice through critical thinking, research, experimentation, and implementation. As a result, my art practice is born out of the assemblage of gathering, tradition, and mutation to see from a different perspective. At the moment, I am driven by concepts of loss, absences, and grief. A recent successful installation called Missing Pass highlights the personal narrative of my mother, Jacqueline Alvarez, who went missing in the summer of 2020. I gather evidence, material, and histories of where she could have gone.”
Laura Sofía Pérez
Bayamon, Puerto Rico
Laura Sofía Pérez is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, film, sound, and installation. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts. Her work draws from feminist and avant-garde cinema, phenomenological philosophy, Caribbean Postcolonial theory, and ancestral knowledge. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation with artists of varying disciplines and backgrounds to voice common perspectives on political, cultural, and social issues. Recent artist residencies include BAiR Emerging at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2020), the AfA Masterclass: Radical Care with Terike Haapoja (2020), and La Práctica at Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2019).
Lillie J. Harris
Clinton, Maryland
Lillie J. Harris is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator from Clinton, Maryland. Tension and empathy are notable themes throughout Lillie’s artwork, as well as theology, horror, and not “punching down". Their self-published graphic novel, Wilderness, debuted in 2021 and is currently circulating in bookshops and through online distributors.
They are interested in exploring stories that balance the mundanity of everyday life with a sprinkle of the supernatural unknown. Depth of character is of the utmost importance in Lillie’s work, with specificity given to idiosyncratic dialogue and accentuating features that are often stigmatized. Lillie shows a playful intentionality in flipping expectations within a story. Humor comes across in their energetic, gestural lines, just as much as a sense of foreboding does in quieter moments.
Most recently, Lillie has worked as a narrative designer for Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (2023), a Tabletop role-playing game published by Possum Creek Games. They were also an essayist for Black Josei Press’ Gladiolus Magazine (2023), and a comics contributor to the online literary magazine smoke and mold (2023). Their comics and illustrations have been published in The New Yorker, Burlington City Arts Gallery, and The Vermont Folklife Center's graphic novel Turner Family Stories.
Malaika Temba
Brooklyn, New York
Malaika Temba is a Textile Artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Washington D.C. of Tanzanian and American heritage, Temba grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the U.S (MD, RI, NY). Temba’s lens and creative process are global, nourished by these experiences. Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and is currently an adjunct professor there in the Textiles Department.
“Making art is my testament to the efforts of Black womanhood, interpersonal relationships, and undigested reflections; a monument to obligations of emotional labor; a record of vulnerability, sarcasm, and bliss. My art embodies the paradox of the physicality of textile materials: soft and ornate but unbreakable and resilient. The fabrics I make don’t wear under pressure, like the lineage of laborers, care-givers, aunties, femmes and artists of the diaspora honored through this work. I tell stories at scale – taking up space in ways I never saw my communities revere. This is a distillation of global, political and emotional ideas via innovative combinations of media and processes. Textiles, both as a utilitarian good and an artform, function as carrier, metaphor, and marker of time through the care and labor required in their production. My practice reflects the sense of responsibility, attention and patience societally expected of women and caregivers. At the core of my practice is the tension between contemporary, mechanized techniques and more ancestral, tactile methods and small-scale artisanry. I use paint, stamps, silkscreens, drawing media, hand looms, felting and spray paint with industrial methods of Jacquard weaving, Stoll knitting, digital embroidery, laser cutting, quilting, sublimation printing, and sewing.”
Maria Pinto
Quincy, Massachusetts
Maria Pinto is a writer, teaching artist, and mycophile. Her work has appeared in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Butter, and Dostoyevsky Wannabe Cities: Boston, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the Mass Cultural Council, The Writers' Room of Boston, The Mastheads, The Garrett on the Green, and Vermont Studio Center. She's a fiction editor at the multimedia journal Peripheries, a contributor to Roundglass Living, and the Community Programs Teaching Fellow at GrubStreet. She’s currently at work on a book inspired by fungi.
Nadia Taquary
Salvador, Brazil
“My work begins with the investigation of Brazilian Afro Jewelry (18th/19th century) the so-called “Creole Jewelry”, as symbols of identity, religiosity, female empowerment, and freedom. As my work developed, I expanded the materials in my production to include beads, as a resignification of the threads of beads used in religions of African matrices, the so-called “Jewels of axé.” An example of this material employment is the work “Igbawiá”, a large penetrable installation that makes reference to the great womb, the primordial waters, from which the world is born. I live in Salvador Bahia Brazil, one of the main cities of the African diaspora. The presence of black female protagonism in our history allowed us to access important understandings from pre-colonial Africa. Colonization and its Eurocentric thinking, along with patriarchy, violated, demonized, and marginalized this ancestral wisdom and the construction of other possible narratives. In “Ìyámi”, my last solo show, I speak of this driving force that generates everything that lives and that is related to the feminine creative power that is the very power of gestation of the earth.”
Rob Gibbs
Boston, Massachusetts
Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder who has transformed the cultural landscape of Boston through his powerful art and commitment to youth education.
Born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts during the Hip-Hop Golden Era, Gibbs saw the power of graffiti as a form of self-expression. As a teen, graffiti became a tool for him, and others in his community, to chronicle and immortalize their culture and history. Problak’s vision to beautify the predominantly Black and Brown communities of Boston is a driving force behind his artistic practice.
Gibbs has a strong focus on arts education. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity (AFH), an arts non-profit that hires and teaches creative skills to youth, Gibbs served in numerous leadership roles for 32 years. He has been an adjunct educator for Boston Public Schools, conducting countless workshops and panels at numerous colleges and high schools in Greater Boston. Gibbs also partners with Madison Park Technical Vocational High School’s Art Program to curate a rotating public art campus, offering emerging graffiti writers and muralists real-time opportunities to experience a guided practice.
Sergio Suárez
Atlanta, Georgia
Sergio Suárez (B.1995) is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. He graduated the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021 with a B.F.A in Drawing Painting and Printmaking. His practice, prompted by an interest in translation, uses different traditions of making to construct a visual language concerned with syncretism, temporality, and the porosity between objects, images, and structures.
His work has been shown around Atlanta, in spaces like Whitespace Gallery, Day & Night Projects, THE END Project Space, ShowerHaus Gallery, the Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, Take it Easy Gallery, and the Atlanta Contemporary. Internationally his work has been included in several group exhibitions such as the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London, the Haugesund Internasjonal Relief Festival in Norway, OPED Space in Tokyo, and the Ionian Arts Center in Greece; where he was an artist in residence in 2017 and 2018.
His work is also included in the SGCI archives of the Zuckerman Museum. He lives and works in Atlanta Georgia where he is part of the Studio Artist Program at the Atlanta Contemporary. He has two cats.
Sonya Lara
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sonya Lara is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. She was accepted for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop with Leila Chatti, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and the Shenandoah National Park Artist Residency.
She was a finalist for the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Frontier, The Pinch, X-R-A-Y Lit, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere.
Stephanie Simek has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2007. At that time, she began making and performing with instruments she built from deconstructed obsolete devices. She continued on the path of researching the inner workings of materials and systems with unique and exceptional properties, becoming an artist in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland. This engagement was dedicated to an inquiry titled "Jewels/Joules", and led to a research residency at Signal Culture in New York, where she studied the magnetic recording potential of minerals. Looking further into visualizing what is happening under the surface, Simek worked as a physicist’s apprentice making ultrasonic sensors in Oregon’s Silicon Forest. This two-year partnership allowed her to incorporate specialized skills into her practice and further develop her perspective on material relationships and how they can be used to resist or work around preconceived limitations. Using a wide array of materials, she makes works in two dimensions, three dimensions, sound, and performance.
Jessie Rose Vala
Cheshire, Oregon
Jessie Rose Vala (born 1977, Madison, Wisconsin) is an artist working in drawing, ceramic, and video. She received an MFA from University of Oregon and a BFA in ceramic sculpture and painting from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Her work explores non-linear narratives and environments through an ongoing investigation of the shifting relationships to ourselves and our surroundings. Installation and multi-channel video allows Vala’s work to negate hierarchy, allowing for multiplicity of connections and realities.
Vala’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is currently a member of Well Well Projects in Portland Oregon and is a career faculty at University of Oregon.
Massachusetts Family Fellowship:
(funded by the Barr Foundation and Sustainable Arts Foundation)
Rashin Fahandej
Framingham, Massachusetts
Rashin Fahandej is an Iranian-American immersive storyteller, futurist, and cultural activist. Fahandej's projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as a “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. Fahandej is an assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College and a Senior Co-Creation Research-Practitioner at MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Fahandej is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby, “ a multi-platform, co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
In the Spring of 2020, as Assistant Professor of Emerging and Interactive Media at Emerson College, Fahandej launched a pioneering initiative focused on mass incarceration using Emerging Technology and Community Co-Creation methodologies. This initiative brings together students from three different departments (Journalism, Visual Media Arts, and the Marlboro Institute), formerly incarcerated fathers, probation officers, and their children to co-create personal documentary projects that speak to the social challenge of mass incarceration using AR, VR, Volumetric Filmmaking and 360° technology.
University Fellowships:
(In partnership with the following universities):
Stephen Proski (Boston University)
Brighton, Massachusetts
Stephen Proski (they/them) is a blind/disabled artist, writer, and advocate. Their work addresses their own personal experience of blindness and takes the form of painting, installation, text, and compositional objects that explore themes of precarity, vulnerability, and the blurry territory between legibility and illegibility. Born and raised in the Arizona desert, they received their MFA in Painting at Boston University. Recent projects include a permanent installation for the Kansas City Museum, a commission for the Kansas City International airport, a site-specific mural for Ledger/Cache in Bentonville, AR. Their work has been shown in various venues in Kansas City, Boston, Chicago, and New York.
“I’m interested in communicating an awareness of something that happens in the world that affects all of us and that no one is separate from: the prioritizing of vision has made us blind to our surroundings. The ideology of ableism, specifically what is commonly considered normal or not normal, keeps us from creating meaningful changes that would be necessary for all of us to thrive as a society. I want to make art that addresses my own personal experience of blindness, while questioning and interrogating the imposing hierarchical structures that continue to shape, oppress, and favor the ocularcentric.”
Arnab Gan Choudhury (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Arnab Gan Choudhury (b. 1994, Kolkata, India) is an Indian interdisciplinary artist. He held his first solo art exhibition in 1999 at the age of four at the Nehru Children’s Museum, Kolkata. Arnab has had solo exhibitions in Birla Academy of Fine Art, Kolkata, Gaganendra Shilpa Pradarshashala, Kolkata and Gateway 1 Gallery, Maryland. He has been featured in group exhibitions at Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata, Karnataka Chitrakala Parisath, Bengaluru, Abanindranath Tagore Gallery of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Kolkata, Eastern Zonal Cultural Center, Kolkata, Monmouth Museum, New Jersey, Area 405, Maryland, Ann Bryan Gallery, Philadelphia, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka and La Galleria Pall Mall, London among others. Arnab executed his first public sculpture commissioned by Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Ministry of Broadcasting, Government of India in 2022 and in 2023. He was awarded the Edmund Stewardson Prize in Figure Sculpture. He completed his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art, USA in 2021 and is currently pursuing his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, USA.
Benjamin Spalding (Maine College of Art & Design)
Portland, Maine
Benjamin Spalding is an interdisciplinary artist, and DJ based in Portland, Maine. Taking inspiration from his Puerto Rican grandfather’s profession as a big band leader, Spalding’s practice is preoccupied with movement and the pageantry of the body, weaving together elements of club culture, sports, and nature with narrative. After living in New York for college, Spalding relocated to Berlin, Germany for 8 years to define his studio practice. It is in Berlin where he found a love for queer club culture and ecstatic dance. This has found its way into his practice, where each project is loosely viewed as if it were a nightclub, with a focus on tension and material embodiment. In this sense, Spalding remixes disparate personal narratives through material into visuals that celebrate and share his experience in the margin. The dance floor is a crucial social tool for both physical release and group experience and, for Spalding, it provides a conceptual space for radical, figurative storytelling.
Bo Kim (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Vienna, Virginia
Bo Kim is an artist-researcher, and educator who is based in both Chicago, IL and Northern Virginia. She was born in Busan, South Korea and holds an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as well as an MFA in Oriental Painting from Hongik University in South Korea. In 2009, she completed her BFA in Paintings from Dongduk Women's University.
Kim's work is deeply influenced by natural science research, ecology, and biology, and she has been producing a unique body of work that explores the intersection of her being for over a decade. Her art is notable for its combination of Western painting techniques with traditional Korean materials, such as natural stone-crushed pigments, animal skin glue, and Hanji [mulberry tree paper]. Kim's work showcases her unique perspective and the ways in which she incorporates diverse cultural and scientific influences into her artistic practice.
Elizabeth Burden (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Tucson, Arizona
Elizabeth Burden is a multidisciplinary artist blending studio work with practice. She uses drawing, painting, sculpture, video, coding, mapping, and other media and processes. Her recent work focuses on three interrelated themes: (1) geographies, space, and place; (2) contemporary state and societal violences; and (3) legacies and vestiges of history and historical trauma. Whether created through studio practice or through community-engaged process, the common thread that runs through all her work is to look at old narratives anew, to confront, reflect upon, shape, and transform.
She has been an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute (Revolution Residency, 2022; Truth and Reconciliation Residency, 2019), and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Trainings for the Not Yet, 2019), and was a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University (2020).
Ms. Burden holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Journalism, and a master’s degree in Geographic Information Science.
Luke Agada (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Chicago, Illinois
Luke Agada, (b. 1992, Lagos) is a Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. His practice examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world and its impact on neo-cultural evolution. He obtained an MFA in Painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023 and a DVM in Vet. Medicine at FUNAAB in 2018. In recent years, Agada has participated in several group shows in Lagos, Accra, New York, Abuja, Casablanca, etc. His work has been published in several journals and magazines including The Pinch Journal publication at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. He has also been a recipient of various awards including the Global warming international art prize, AII, New York in 2020, Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at The Art Students league of New York in 2022, and The Helen Frankenthaler award at SAIC in 2022.
Corrine Yonce (Maryland Institute College of Art)
Winooski, Vermont
Corrine Yonce is an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. Yonce
combines visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, household
objects, and photographs. Her story-centered figurative paintings and installations dig into the concepts of home and housing from a community and personal perspective. Corrine Yonce is currently completing her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a Leslie King
Hammond fellow and Alfred T. Granger scholar. She lives and works in Winooski, Vermont and teaches tenant skills and Fair Housing workshops with the Fair Housing Project of CVOEO.
Corrine founded Voices of Home, a seven-year partnership with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and statewide housing providers where she interviewed residents about “home” and co-created art installations and portraits. Her work has been shown across the East Coast including Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and CollarWorks (Troy NY), and featured in New American Paintings (164). She is currently a Generator Makerspace resident to produce works for the public art series, “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing,” which has support from Burlington City Arts.
Najee Haynes-Follins (Maryland Institute College of Art)
Baltimore, Maryland
“In my current work I am experimenting with the concept of spirits/entities that are created out of combined human energy and imagining anti-black racism as such an entity. These ‘Haints’ get between the viewer and the subject and distort the subject. The Black body is a fetish, a fantasy and a nightmare. I’m examining the layered perspectives, misreadings and misconceptions of Blackness. I am attempting to externalize what it can feel like to be interacted with as a Black body; living with the constant possibility for both psychic and physical violence because of the impossibility of being fully seen. I am currently working through several sets of ideas around this but planning to narrow my focus during this residency period to continue my experimentations with encaustic, photo and found object collage using photos from my youth growing up in Northampton Massachusetts. I am materializing and hopefully exorcizing the psychic material of otherness and monstrosity that was imposed on me as a child being black and isolated from other black people. The memories captured in these photos are joyful but tainted with the damage done from never fully belonging in these spaces. I am also currently pursuing an M.F.A. at MICA.”
David Askew (University of Virginia)
Virginia Beach, Virginia
“On a broad scale, my work is representational; it surveys and analyzes the idea of the human figure, with added elements of decoration through “destruction.” Portraiture considers the person, first; they are the forefront. My art is striving to claim my status as an artist and not jus a replicator of the human image. Ultimately, my goal is to diverge from this sense of iconography and ego that portraiture enforces, and I strive to destroy that in search of ownership of my own art and the adoption of the figure as my own. Ownership is the most prominent objective in my work, because without claiming myself in my work, there would be no reason to create. Leaving the existence of every piece an embodiment of self, no matter who I am painting whether a friend, a celebrity, or a self portrait, I am always reflecting on my own identity and existence making self-portraiture the true identity of my work. I paint to understand myself.”
David Peña (University of Oregon)
Chula Vista, California
David Peña is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer from the border region between Tijuana and San Diego. He is co-founder and organizer of Tijuana Zine Fest, a large-scale zine festival which celebrates self-publishing and independent art. He seeks to connect his visual practice with his commitment to people and place, exploring ways to bridge community and understand organizing as an art practice in itself. He investigates the many ways we enter into and through in-between spaces and the ways we are confronted with borders, geographical, internal, tangible and abstract.
His projects have been featured in Juxtapoz, LA Times, KCET and he has shown work at Centro Cultural Tijuana, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Northwestern University, University of California San Diego, University of Oregon, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Ensenada, among others.
Madison Donnelly (Yale)
New Haven, Connecticut
Madison Donnelly b.1992 is an American sculptor from Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work utilizes building materials, drawing from her childhood experiences learning from her carpenter mother and her childhood home that was her mother’s ever-evolving art project. Exploring humanity’s emerging relationship to work and materiality in the Capitalocene, Her work treats ‘universal truths’ as bendable. In 2018 she was an artist in residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art where she had a solo exhibition, Bath House. Currently she resides in New Haven, CT and will graduate from Yale University with an MFA in Sculpture in 2023.
”During my childhood in Utah, my mother was a self-employed carpenter. She treated our home like her art project and it was constantly in a state of flux. Our bathroom had green and black porcelain fixtures, and thick striped black and cream wallpaper leading up to an overhang filled with gargoyle sculptures and plastic ivy. One day when I was 12 I came home from school to find she removed all the furniture in my room in order to paint the hardwood floors periwinkle blue. In 2011 we lost our house due to the 2008 recession, housing crisis and predatory mortgage loans.
My work explores humanity’s emerging relationship to work, home, and materiality in the
Capitalocene — a historical era shaped by an endless hoarding of capital despite great human, animal and environmental cost.”
Natalia Mejía Murillo (Virginia Commonwealth University)
Richmond, Virginia
Mejia, a Colombian artist who currently lives in Richmond, VA, holds a BFA and Master in History and Theory of Art from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has obtained multiple scholarships, residencies and awards, among which the following stand out: Artist residency at the MünchnerKünstlerhaus (2021 - Germany); Artist residency at Fundación Joan Miró and La Casa de Velázquez (2020 - Spain); Artist residency award at the 18th Biennale Internationale de la Gravure of Sarcelles, France (2017) and the Colombia-Mexico Artist Residency (2016). In 2019 she was nominated for the Award Salón de Arte Joven of the Giberto Alzate Foundation. Mejia has exhibited her work in Colombia, Spain, Poland, Mexico and the US. Her publications include: Efemérides cotidianas (2020) and Atlas del centro deBogotá (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Fundació Joan Miró, Spain, and private collections in Colombia and the United States.
“Through media such as printmaking, drawing and installation, my work explores the perception and experience of the territory, as well as the containment and representation systems through cartography. I understand maps as devices through which we can approach unknown territory; a “portable” and simplified image of a complex space that we can cover with our eyes and contain in our hands. I reflect on concepts such as scale, time, distance and the reference systems used by science to describe and understand our place on earth. My recent research deals with the distortion of reality and fiction in cartographic representations and how they are presented to us as useful, reliable and accurate images of a territory. Images that are at the same time instruments of power and domination. One of the questions that has guided my work is: What is our “Terra Incognita” today? Under this concern, I focus my artistic practice as an exercise in cartography, in which fiction dialogues with the representation systems used in astronomy, geography and archaeology.”
Tammie Dupuis (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)
Bremerton, Washington
Tammie was born and raised in Northwestern Montana, on the Flathead Reservation. Her father was Qlispe' (Upper Pend d'Oreille) and Seli’š (Bitterroot Salish) and her mother was the daughter of non-Indigenous settlers who moved to the reservation in the 1920s. Her aesthetic is situated between these two cultural heritages and explores their complicated history as well as her own identity as a mixed blood person.
Using both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of making and seeing, her work ranges across several different processes and materials including but not limited to paint, wood, fabric, resin, hair, bone, paper, and beads.
Tammie earned her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, located in Boston, MA, in 2022 and her BFA from Cornish College of the arts located in Seattle, WA in 2019. Additionally, she holds a BS in Anthropology/Archaeology from Montana State University, located in Bozeman, MT. She and her art practice are located in Bremerton, WA.
Yana Nosenko (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)
Boston, Massachusetts
Yana Nosenko was born in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan in 1991, but was raised in Moscow, Russia. She studied design at Moscow Academy of Design and Applied Arts. After graduating in 2016, she worked for Strelka KB, an urban planning company, as a graphic designer. In 2017, she finished a major project — designing a font family “Mayak”, which is based on Soviet constructivist fonts of 1920s–1930s, which was released by ParaType Company. Throughout these years, starting from 2012, she also freelanced as a photographer, doing studio portraiture. In 2019, she started working as an event photographer for the Russian Jewish Congress, capturing show openings, conferences and concerts. That same year she was awarded a Director’s Fellowship to attend the Creative Practices program in the International Center of Photography in New York City. Yana obtained an MFA in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.