Lu Chekowsky, 2024 Literary Arts

Lu Chekowsky is an Emmy-winning writer and creative director who built a successful career in media through gut, intuition, and addiction to approval. Lu’s essays and poems have appeared in journals including: The Rumpus, Pigeon Pages, The Maine Review and her work has been supported by Mass MoCA, Tin House, SPACE on Ryder Farm. She is a 2023 New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Nonfiction Literature.

Sonya Huber, 2024 Literary Arts

Sonya Huber is the author of eight books, including the essay collection Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, the writing guide Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto, the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and the activist memoir-in-a-day Supremely Tiny Acts. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program. More at www.sonyahuber.com.

Zora Ilunga-Reed, 2024 Visual Arts

Zora Ilunga-Reed is a textile and performance artist from New York City. She is curious about radical imagining, collaborative dreaming, and how the stories we tell can alter our realities. Her work has been shown at Westbeth Gallery and Spirit del Art Gallery in Manhattan. Learn more about her and her work at zilungareed.com or @zipzapz0p on Instagram.

Laura Chessin, 2024 Visual Arts

Laura Chessin is faculty in the Graphic Design Department at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. She has a BFA in studio arts from Cornell University and an MFA in Graphic Design from RISD. Her creative practice ranges over many disciplines including typeface design, fiber arts, video, and publication design. She plays traditional Appalachian fiddle and is an avid outdoorswoman. She was raised in Schenectady and developed her love of mountains in the Adirondacks. Her website is laurachessin.com.

Jen Parsons, 2024 Literary Arts

Jen Parsons is a Colorado-based writer and mother of two children who bear a strong resemblance to her but are infinitely wiser at a younger age. A selection from her memoir received the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books Nonfiction Literary Award. Jen’s work has brought her residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Wellstone, and Writing by Writers. She also participated in the Writing by Writers DRAFT program. She has received awards for her humor from The Erma Bombeck Writing Workshop, which she brings up at the dinner table when her kids let her know she is not, in fact, funny. She is at work on a pre-invention memoir: after the loss of her young husband, she took her kids to the mountains where she first found love, to show them how to find a life they could love, too.

Leena Janmohamed, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Leena Janmohamed is a ceramic artist and visual designer currently working and living in Los Angeles, CA. In her ceramic practice, she primarily works with large-scale sculptural depictions of the human form. Her work centers around the human experience: deliberations on the overlap of mind and body, conversations about the ways that humanity and technology stifle and amplify one another, and simply— her own emotional and physical experiences translated tangibly. Leena is drawn to the human form in its ability to deeply capture and relay emotional ideas; every gesture, bend, and fold can be laced with meaning that is innately understood by viewers. She started working with clay and focusing on the figure in 2020 but has oscillated between artistic mediums for most of her life. From spoken word poetry to ballet, creation has always defined her experience in the world and served as an outlet and form of expression. Leena completed a double degree program at the University of Washington Seattle in 2022, graduating with a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts and a BBA in Marketing. Recent group exhibitions include “The Collaboration: LA” in Los Angeles, and “Tidal 3” and “Am I Unmuted?”, both in Seattle. Her most recent series, “Body Prison”, explores the constraints and freedoms of a physical body from the intersectional perspective of a brown woman in the US.

Christienne L. Hinz Ph.D., 2024 Literary Arts

Christienne L. Hinz is a Ph.D. in modern Japanese history and has published articles on entrepreneurship among 19th to 20th-century Japanese women. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essay nominated memoirist, a poet, and a Master Gardener specializing in organic gardening, orcharding, and sub/urban ecosystem restoration. A beekeeper, a ceramicist, and a textile artist, Christienne enjoys life with her partner of 25 years, and her two children.

Shawndel N. Fraser, 2024 Ceramic Arts. 2024 John Brown Lives! Fellow

Shawndel N. Fraser is an Environmental Psychologist, Public Intellectual, and Artist whose work and words catalyze transformation through interdisciplinary engagement. She creates a new nature–culture imagination by developing pragmatic solutions rooted in the social and natural sciences, esoteric wisdom, artistic practice, and healing modalities to create safe(r)environments. As a generalist / multi-disciplinary artist, Shawndel may employ ceramics, fiber art, digital media, writing, bookbinding, metals, jewelry, papermaking, and traditional crafts as needed. As a social scientist and open “Ajna” thinker, she weaves connections between philosophy, current events, (socio)cultural norms, aesthetics, pride, and practices. Her goal is ultimately to uncover opportunities for “inner-personal alchemy” to drive cultural transformation and consilience rooted in ecofeminist deep-ecology.

Magalí Morales, 2024 Literary Arts. 2024 Trillium Fellow

Magalí Morales is a mother, writer, spiritual counselor, and bridge builder who has always lived in the space between worlds, translating languages, cultures, and worldviews. She is Mexican and Guatemalan. She grew up between the big city and her grandmother's farm. She loves science and spirituality. She was a psychotherapist and became a spiritual healer. Magali´s work takes place at the intersection of healing trauma, dismantling oppression, and using ancient spiritual tools to solve today´s problems. She is a passionate climate and social justice activist. Magali has completed the first book in a duology, Daughter of the Mountain, which retells the story of Regina Teucher Pérez, a Mexican priestess akin to Joan of Arc, or Harriet Tubman, whose birth was foretold by Mexican shamans and Tibetan lamas. Regina was trained in old Tibet, imprisoned in China, and became the spiritual leader of the Mexican student movement of 1968. Magalí blogs about parenting in the Anthropocene, healing, and telling stories to regenerate our world. She lives with her family in the Redwood forests of California, in the unceded territory of the Zayante tribe of the Awaswas nation, and you can find her at www.magalimorales.com.

Nathan Blum, 2024 Literary Arts

Nathan Blum is an MFA Candidate in Fiction at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches creative writing and serves as editor-in-chief at Nashville Review. Originally from the Hudson Valley, he graduated with a degree in English from Bowdoin College, where he received the Micoleau Family Fellowship. Selected by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and shortlisted for the Iowa Review Award, his writing appears or is forthcoming in Westchester Review, Jewish Book Council, Cagibi, and Ploughshares.

Sam Hutner, 2024 Literary Arts

Sam Hutner (she/her) writes fabulist fiction from her home in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in Blink-Ink, and she won Cleveland’s first Story Wars After Dark competition. She has also been a guest on the RadioFreeWrite podcast. She earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Georgia College and State University. She can be found at @s.a.m.hutner on Instagram.

Juliet Phillips, 2024 Visual Arts

Juliet Phillips is a teaching and visual artist from Brooklyn, NY living in Pittsburgh, PA whose work follows a narrative that winds its way through painting, drawing, animation, papermaking, and ceramics. Her work explores myth, memory, and family lore through forms, figures, and stories that fit together in a curious dream-logic to tell a tale of real and fantastical worlds. She received a BFA in painting from Boston University. www.jrp.cool.

Michele Parker Randall, 2024 Literary Arts. 2024 Teaching Fellow

Michele Parker Randall reads and writes poetry and prose and has authored The Museum of Everyday Life (Kelsay Books) and A Future Unmappable, chapbook (Finishing Line Press). Her work can also be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Tampa Review, Bangalore Review, and elsewhere. Michele gets to teach Poetry, Personal Essay, Fairy Tales, Reading Lyric, and Literature of Mental Health/Neurodivergent Literature at Stetson University. She will happily talk for hours about all things Poetry, and she feels strongly that neurodivergent narratives and art can make a difference in reducing the stigma imposed on those living with mental illness.

Fanxi Sun, 2024 Visual Arts. 2024 Teaching Fellow

Fanxi Sun (b. Huzhou, China) works with moving and still images, sound, and installation. While constructing her own dynamic mechanism in an experimental narrative style, Sun studies the body, the mind, and the subjectivity. She explores and experiments with the concept of time and space in multi-layered audio-visual experiences. The physical and the psychological closely interact in her practice, where the intense reality consists of all of the apparatus of representation. Sun’s works have been shown at film festivals and exhibitions across the world, including Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival (Charlottesville VA), VIDEOAKTION #4 (Berlin, Germany), SPE Combined-Caucus Exhibition (Denver CO), Three Shadows Photography Art Centre's "Unbounded" (Xiamen, China). She was the finalist of the 21st Trawick Prize at Bethesda Urban Partnership and artist-in-residence at the Alex Brown Foundation. Sun holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she now teaches as an adjunct professor.

Katherine Orfinger, 2024 Literary Arts

Katherine Orfinger is a writer, artist, and recent graduate from Stetson University, where she earned her BA in English. She will go on to study at Rosemont College. Her work has appeared in Touchstone, Aeolus, Beyond Words, Outrageous Fortune, and others. Katherine’s writing is influenced by her Jewish faith and queer identity. Her hobbies include tinkering with analog cameras and spending quality time with her best friend, who happens to be a cat.

Emilia Gonzalez, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Emilia Gonzalez is an emerging ceramic artist. As a Colombian-Canadian, she is constantly exploring questions around hybrid identities, belonging, and community. She began to play with clay at a young age in her grandmother’s pottery studio and has recently re-connected with the practice. Her work is inspired by nature’s textures, shapes, colors, sounds and cycles. Emilia is also a community facilitator and an action research scholar, where she weaves popular education and arts-based methods into social transformation processes. She is an introvert with a passion for meaningful social connections, who loves experimenting in the kitchen, bikepacking, climbing rocks, and drinking tea.

Fran Hoepfner, 2024 Literary Arts

Fran Hoepfner is a writer and teacher from Chicago living in Brooklyn. She got her Bachelor’s in English from Kalamazoo College and her Master’s in Fiction Writing from Rutgers University in Newark. She is the senior editor for the independent film magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, and her other nonfiction work and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Slate, and Gawker. Her short fiction has appeared in Peach Mag, Burrow Press, and Joyland. She is currently working on a novel about Antarctica and a nonfiction book about classical music.

Bessie N. A. Mbadugha, 2024 Literary Arts

Bessie N. A. Mbadugha delights in the power and beauty of the written word and has been an avid reader and multidisciplinary writer for as long as she can remember. Born in Tanzania to a Nigerian father and an American mother, Bessie began her writing life-tapping stories on her father’s typewriter. As an undergraduate student at Lafayette College, she authored an English honors thesis and served as the Editor-in-Chief of AYA, a Black literary journal. Bessie published her Chemistry doctoral thesis at Emory University and has written several funded grants as a chemistry professor and as a volunteer for local nonprofits. Most recently, Bessie was an award-winning education journalist for Evanston RoundTable, before returning to the classroom as a guest educator. Bessie enjoys composing poetry and weaving stories and is currently working on a compilation inspired by her mother, a poet.

Sue Ellen Herne, 2024 Visual Arts

Kononwa'tshén:ri ión:kia'ts Onkwehonwehnéha. (Kononwa'tshén:ri is my indigenous name.) Sue Ellen Herne ión:kia'ts Kiohrhénsha. (Sue Ellen Herne is my English name.) Wakhskaré:wake, Ahkwesáhsne nitewaké:non. (I'm Bear Clan from Akwesasne.) I have over forty years of experience in creating thought-provoking paintings and installations with a focus on Haudenosaunee (specifically Mohawk) culture and Language. Images of my work may be found in: Iroquois Arts: A Directory of a People and Their Work Johannsen, Christina B. and John P. Ferguson & The Association for the Advancement of Native North American Arts and Crafts, 1983. Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art - a collection of Essays edited by J.C.H. King and Christian F. Feest, 2007 Iroquois Art, Power and History by Neal Keating, 2012. I’m an artist who spent 23 years working at the Akwesasne Museum as the program coordinator. I have been a lifelong learner of culture and language, and I have shared what I have learned in classrooms, through my art, and in my work as a museum program coordinator. In 2018, I left my job to study in a full-time Kanién’keha (Mohawk) language program sponsored by the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. I’m continuing to study, and have the skills to teach the basics. I have been a Kanien'keha Educational Assistant for the Ahkwesahsne Mohawk Board of Education's Skahwatsi:ra program and I'm currently studying in the Ratiwennahní:rats program sponsored by the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center in Kahnawake. I continue to make art in a variety of media.

Holly Friesen, 2024 Visual Arts

Holly Friesen was born in Saskatchewan, studied Visual Arts at John Abbott College in Montreal and painting at York University in Toronto. After many years of travel and study she settled in Mont-Tremblant, QC and opened ArtBeat Studio where she painted and taught for 15 years. Four summer seasons saw Holly as artistic director and curator of The Art Barn in Mont-Tremblant. In 2010 she was curator and project manager of Ateliers du Village, an artist run gallery in Mont-Tremblant village. For three years she worked as the Montreal curator for the daily online art auction ArtBomb which featured Canadian artists and their artwork. The artist’s current studio is based out of Montreal QC and her paintings are collected internationally as part of both corporate and private collections. Holly’s passion is painting vibrant landscapes from the inside out while collaborating with other artists to make art more visible in our everyday world.

Beth Reitmeyer, 2024 Visual Arts

Beth Reitmeyer is a visual artist who likes to make people happy with her colorful installations. Her work investigates landscapes and the joy of unexpected yet beautiful spaces and places that are discovered as one explores the land and structures within it: clouds, rivers, caves, geodes, and stars. These environments allow viewers to explore the land and get to know one another in a more profound way, providing a space for renewal and hope for persevering. Beth attended Northwestern University (MFA), The School of the Art Institute (Post Baccalaureate program), and Pennsylvania State University (BFA). Her work has recently been exhibited at the First Art Museum, Nashville; ChaShaMa, New York; The Elizabeth Foundation, New York; OZ Arts, Nashville; 1708 Gallery/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; FIGMENT, Chicago; The Downing Museum, Bowling Green, KY; Kindling Arts Festival, Nashville; Zg Gallery, Chicago. Beth has been an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA, ChaNorth, Pine Plains, NY, the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New Berlin, NY; The Ragdale Foundation, Lake Forest, IL, Mineral House Media, and CONVERGE, Nashville, TN. Recently awards include the Tanne Foundation award and grants from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission/National Endowment for the Arts.

Christie Gardiner, 2024 Literary Arts

Christie Gardiner is an award-winning author, poet, writer, and performer. Her literary oeuvre includes four ecumenical books (one, currently in its ninth printing), four anthologies, journal publications, booklets, articles, and the writing of her own videocast/podcast. Additionally, Christie has made numerous appearances as a regular contributor to local media, has cohosted two successful podcasts, has performed on stages across the United States, and serves as a facilitator of writing retreats for women. She works in poetry acquisition for Inscape literary journal and holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Utah Valley University. Christie’s current focus is poetry and creative nonfiction that explores the intersection of spirituality, nature, trauma, and healing. Recent and upcoming publication credits include poems and essays in Humana Obscura, The Poetry of Travel, The Dewdrop, Wild Greens Magazine, Reverie Literary Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, and Inscape Journal. Christie has received generous support from Craigardan’s Interdisciplinary Residency Program in 2024, New York Writers Institute in 2023, Utah’s Best in State Nonfiction award in 2020, the Ivory Futures Award 2022-2023 and the Capitol Reef National Park Field Station in 2023.

Emily Caris, 2024 Literary Arts

Emily (E. A.) Caris is a queer writer, educator, and recent graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Rutgers University-Newark. Currently a high school teacher, Caris has also taught creative writing and literature for several universities and nonprofits, including the New England Literature Program, a cooperative education program based out of the University of Michigan, and juvenile justice organizations where she organized poetry workshops and readings. Her work has been recognized with fellowships and residencies from Kenyon Review, Fine Arts Work Center, Art Farm, and the Sitka Fellows Program. Her writing appears in Sweet Tree Review, Arkana, and elsewhere. An organizer of a queer basketball community and a frequent backpacker, she currently lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their mutt.

Abraham Francis, 2024 Scholar

Abraham Francis is Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) from Akwesasne and Deer Clan. He has a BSc in Microbiology, 2014, and MSc in Natural Resources, 2019, from Cornell University. Recently, they became a Ph.D. candidate at Clarkson University studying Environmental Science and Engineering. Previously, Abraham was the Environmental Services Manager for the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. The position allowed him to develop and implement projects inspired and directed by community needs and influenced by his research interests. His research interests are at the intersection of environmental studies, Indigenous methodologies, community engagement, education, health, social services, law, and cultural foundations as a means for empowerment and healing within Indigenous Communities. He hopes to bring all his research interests and passions together within his dissertation, which is targeted at creating tools to support other Indigenous Communities to care for their environments from their biocultural contexts. Abraham has cultivated their expertise around their research and grown an extensive network of Indigenous Scholars/Knowledge Sharers, and Allies that carry a variety of expertise. Their expertise and network inspired the founding of the Aronia Collective, which seeks to align Indigenous Communities with experts to meet their unique needs and non-Indigenous organizations to engage Indigenous peoples meaningfully.

Cédric Jamet, 2024 Scholar

Cédric (he / him) joyfully teaches Human System Intervention at Concordia University, building capacities of change practitioners to host meaningful dialogue processes. He weaves 10+ years of experience in the community innovation sector, leveraging dialogue and complexity-based approaches to help teams, organizations, and communities as they invent new ways to think, do, and live together. A seasoned Art of Hosting practitioner, Cédric is thoughtful in all his work, be it with Indigenous communities, university stakeholders, or emerging non-profits. His teenage daughters push him to find ways to become a good ancestor and build meaningful relationships with the world around him, be it through teaching, having good conversations, swimming in lakes, or making pots in his community studio in Montreal.

Tessa Holmes, 2024 Culinary Arts

Tessa Holmes is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily with oil paints, photography, and food. Inspired most by the seasons and plants of Vermont, she often employs bold colors and thick textures in a post-impressionistic manner to create an exaggerated view of the natural world around her. Being a professional photographer, and always with her camera, she finds the world a constant source of glorious ready made compositions to capture. Sometimes the photographs are beautiful enough on their own, but usually, she prefers cutting up her prints to create new dreamscape collages or painting directly from the photographs using heavily applied paint to the canvas with only a pallet knife. She likes rich vibrant colors and quick gratification. Details hold little appeal unless they are found by accident. Joy, beauty, and nourishment are the goals. Tessa is also a chef who owns and runs her own catering company and culinary academy. She cooks the same way she makes art - the whole is greater than the details and the feeling of nourishment lasts. She has been cooking and making art professionally for over 22 years. What began as a hobby and love for creating and preparing delicious recipes, happily developed into a professional career and business. She specializes in whole food cooking with a focus on vegetarian and plant-based dishes. The focus has been working primarily as a retreat chef but this past year she is turning her attention to writing and illustrating a cookbook and starting the Blossom Culinary Academy.

Amanda Kelly, 2024 Visual Arts

Amanda Kelly is an artist, miniaturist, and educator. She recently graduated with her Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Radford University. Kelly’s award-winning artwork has been exhibited in various art galleries and museums including The Museum of Museums in Seattle, WA, the Var Gallery in Milwaukee, WI, and the Olin Galleries in Salem, VA. She has also been featured in The Common Reader’s article by Jeannette Cooperman “What Miniatures Can Reveal”, Esquire’s article by Scott Huler "Inside the Weird and Wonderful World of Miniatures”, and The Book of Mini by Kate Ünver. Her commercial work includes creating miniature sets and content for clients like Coca-Cola, Disney, XBOX, and General Mills. Originally from New York, Amanda currently lives in Virginia with her wife and 3 cats.

Emily Eileen Carter, 2024 Literary Arts

Emily Eileen Carter has been writing since she was seven years old, documenting the world around her, spinning yarns, and conjuring up creative characters for fiction. Her writing has a strong sense of place and equally complex characters conjured from her upbringing in North Carolina. In addition to fiction, she writes web content, news stories, poems, and essays. Writing is a sacred spiritual practice and passion that inspires her each day.

Emily Sullivan Smith, 2024 Visual Arts

Emily Sullivan Smith is an Associate Professor and Foundations Coordinator at the University of Dayton’s Department of Art and Design where she is also a Sustainability Scholar through the Hanley Sustainability Institute. Her studio practice is multidisciplinary and includes sculpture, printmaking, and fibers-based work. She focuses on the reciprocating behaviors between humans and the natural world, using materials and methods in support of ideas. Recent exhibitions include; a solo exhibition, Universe, at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, OH, a group exhibition, More is More at the Akron Art Museum, and, Earth Matters at Watermark Arts Center in Bemidji MN where she was awarded a juror’s prize. Her work is included in several collections including, Sherwin Williams Global Headquarters in Cleveland, OH, the Lincoln Financial Group in Fort Wayne, IN, and Summa Health’s Arts Collection in Akron, OH. Sullivan Smith views both art making and teaching as an all-encompassing, integrative, and critical human experience.

Hendree Milward, 2024 Literary Arts

Hendree Milward is a poet from West Hartford, Connecticut. A math professor by trade at the state community college, he is often drawn to formal aspects of writing. His themes touch on imagination and the contradictions of thought. Formerly a poetry DJ at a couple of college radio stations, he now archives those recordings on buzzingwire.org.

Kiki Liu, 2024 Ceramic Arts. 2024 Teaching Fellow

I blend diverse mediums to create captivating work that sparks contemplation. Through visual storytelling and design, I celebrate aesthetic beauty while challenging conventional norms and inviting viewers to experience art. I continuously seek to redefine the boundaries of design, shaping the world around us through my work.

Emily Olick Llano, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Emily is a Colombian-American ceramicist, printmaker, and fiber artist. She began making pottery in 2020 and has a strong affinity for whimsical surface design techniques. Emily’s previous works in fiber, pulp, and ink have drawn from her maternal lineage and explored themes of bicultural identity, Colombian heritage, and indigeneity. She formerly attended the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine, and holds a B.A. from Bowdoin College and an M.A. from Stanford University. Emily currently resides in Northern California with her cat, Alfie.

Jessica Mendoza, 2024 Literary Arts

Jessica Mendoza is a writer, tutor, and professor in Long Beach, CA. She holds a B.A. in Screenwriting and will earn her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at CSULB in the spring of 2024. She has been previously published in The Good Life Review, Streetlight Magazine, The Dillydoun Review, and La Piccoletta Barca. Jessica spends most of her time feverishly grading essays and raving about the semicolon's usefulness to her students, who kindly humor her fits of punctuation passion. She can be found on Twitter/X @JessMProse.

Audrey Blood, 2024 Visual Arts

Audrey Danze Blood is an artist and printmaker based in Austin, TX. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking and a Certificate in Collegiate Teaching in Art and Design from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and her Bachelor of Arts in Visual Art from Bowdoin College in 2013. She has worked as an educator at The University of Texas at Austin, Rhode Island School of Design, St. Mark's School, and at the deYoung Museum. She has worked as a printmaking lab technician at The University of Texas at Austin, as a research and studio assistant at Zea Mays Printmaking and Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and as a farmer in Sunderland, Massachusetts, and in Austin, Texas.

Jennifer Steil, 2024 Literary Arts

Jennifer Steil is the British-American author of the novel Exile Music, which won the Grand Prize in the Eyelands 2020 Book Awards and the Multicultural and Historical International Book Awards. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Lesbian Fiction Award. Previous books include the novel The Ambassador’s Wife and the memoir The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New Orleans Review, Saranac Review, Kenyon Review, World Policy Journal, Best Women’s Short Fiction 2023, Gay & Lesbian Review, Action, Spectacle, The Week, Time, Life, The Washington Times, and Vogue UK.

Karina Yanes, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Karina Yanes is a ceramic artist whose work addresses her experience existing at the intersection of three cultures as a Puerto Rican-Palestinian-Midwesterner. Her work explores how living between cultures impacts a person’s development of identity and understanding of belonging. Karina was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. She received her undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Denison University and is currently a graduate student in Ceramics at the University of Florida. Karina is a recipient of the 2024 NCECA graduate fellowship and has participated in the Open Studio Residency at Haystack School of Craft and the CIRCA Graduate Residency Exchange.

Seemi Choudry, 2024 Literary Arts

Seemi is a Pakistani-Venezuelan American Muslim. The story of immigrants has been a throughline in her professional career and within her written work. For over a decade, she has joined fearless leaders across the country to ease the burden of migratory resettlement. As an immigrant and first-generation South Asian Latina woman, she understands the challenges when taking up space in places that were not designed for people of color. What matters to her most is sharing the authentic stories of minority voices. She believes literature is meant to liberate and hopes to do that through her published work.

Michiko Theurer, 2024 Visual Arts. 2024 Master Artist Fellow

Michiko Theurer is a multimedia artist, performer, and community transformation facilitator who loves geeky dancing and shared pots of tea. As a biracial and multi-modal artist, she is drawn to in-between spaces, and to the ways that these in-between spaces (of disciplines, of media, of cultures) can support joyful engagement with ecological and social complexity. She holds a doctorate in violin performance from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is completing a second doctorate in musicology at Stanford University through a transmedia autobiographical project that cultivates space for collective presence, grief, and gratitude. She has performed and created installations at public libraries and music venues across the United States and Canada, and she adores every single dog she’s ever met.

Karla Krupala, 2024 Visual Arts

Originally from Houston, Texas, Karla Krupala is a New York-based painter who works in acrylic and gouache on surfaces like wood and paper. She received a BFA in Painting and Literature from the University of North Texas and an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Informed by her queer identity and experience being a single parent, she has been an art educator for over two decades. She currently teaches art to middle school students.

Brian Mihok, 2024 Literary Arts

Brian Mihok is a writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Fast Company, American Short Fiction, Cagibi, The Disconnect, Vol 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. His novel, The Quantum Manual of Style, was released in 2013. He also edits matchbook, an online literary magazine of short prose. Find him, his writing, and his films at brianmihok.com.

Leanne Rabesa, 2024 Scholar. 2024 Teaching Fellow

Leanne Rabesa is a violist based in Jamaica Plain, MA, and is active as a performer, composer, arranger, and teacher. Her wide-ranging interests span from arranging obscure works for the viola ensemble and revising the viola curriculum for the American String Teachers Association to researching connections between music and visual art. In whatever time is still left, she can often be found knitting, cooking, or reconstructing the orchestra parts of Klebanov’s viola concerto from the solo part and the single extant recording. Leanne earned both BM and MM degrees from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied viola with George Taylor and chamber music with the Ying Quartet, Zvi Zeitlin, and Charlie Castleman, among others. She lives surrounded by her personal library and a lot of yarn with her two spoiled cats.

Allison Dobbs, 2024 Scholar. 2024 Teaching Fellow

Allison Dobbs is a freelance violinist and visual artist based in Boston, MA. A passionate teacher and chamber musician, Allison has enjoyed developing curricula offering flexible and unusual entry points into learning. She was a recipient of a Mass Cultural Council Grant in 2021 for her Play Together Go curriculum, a chamber music program that commissioned original works from composers of underrepresented communities. The program blended music, art, and gaming, partnering with student designers and programmers in the Experience Game Design 1 and Game Design Studio courses at Northeastern University. She was also part of a curriculum cohort for the Castle of Our Skins organization, creating multidisciplinary lesson plans for Anthony Davis’s opera X and Anthony Green’s chamber work Catto’s Courage in 2022 and 2023.

Michael Heyman Ph.D., 2024 Scholar

Michael Heyman is a scholar and writer of literary nonsense, poetry, and children’s literature. He is a Professor of Literature at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he teaches courses on children’s literature and music, poetry, performance poetry, monsters, and Arthropodiatry. He is the head editor of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense (Penguin). His poems and stories for children and adults can be found in the journals Poetry International, The Dirigible Balloon, Voicemail Poems, Solstice, and FUSION; and in the books The Puffin Book of Bedtime Stories, The Moustache Maharishi and other unlikely stories, and This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse, the latter of which he also edited. His scholarship has appeared in the ChLA Quarterly, Bookbird, The Horn Book Magazine, European Journal of Humour Research, and The Lion and the Unicorn, where he was also a judge for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. He has lectured around the world on nonsense literature and performed for adults and children when the fancy strikes. He is currently co-editing a new edition of Alan Watts’ Nonsense (1967).

Samuel Bowser Ph.D., 2024 SCHO

In 1984, Samuel earned a Ph.D. in Cell Biology. Over the subsequent 40 years as a biomedical researcher, he investigated the movement of cellular organelles, cellular membrane surface dynamics, the mechanism of chromosome separation during cell division, the function of non-motile cilia in kidney cells, and the adaptation to low temperatures by free-living cells inhabiting marine habitats in coastal Antarctica and Svalbard, as well as in the deep sea. Samuel is now “retired” and has rekindled his childhood fascination with fossils (substituting dinosaur bones with fossilized cells). Samuel has been an art enthusiast and during his career, he collaborated with many filmmakers, poets, and painters. He has used "sciart" to educate lay audiences about science and hopes to do so until he, too, is a fossil.

Harri Nourse, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Harri's work primarily focuses on texture, whether that's through developing their own glaze that crackles off and 'exposes' the ceramics or creating an ultra-smooth surface with its own unique pattern. Where texture is concerned the possibilities are endless! They also take inspiration from the work of their great-grandmother, who was also a ceramicist, and other 20th-century women potters who may not have been recognized at the time for their contributions to the development of modern-day ceramics. Harri has celebrated their work in several projects, most notably in their collections “Romance and Gamble” and the “Ruth Duckworth Series” both of which I was lucky enough to exhibit at Ceramic Art London.

Chad Lange, 2024 Literary Arts

Chad Michael Lange is a San Francisco-based fiction writer who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Lange has received two residencies at MacDowell and Millay Arts. The Jentel Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, Hambidge Center, and Dorland Mountain Arts have also given him fellowships. He has been awarded grants from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the California Arts Council (to teach creative writing to LGBTQIA+ youth). His short fiction has appeared in Catamaran, Fourteen Hills, and ZYZZYVA.

Betsy Power, 2024 Ceramic Arts

Betsy Power is a recovering businesswoman and sculpture artist with a focus on large-scale outdoor work. She has found a form of healing in the curves and contours of sculpture - a poetry of self in physical form. Through the medium of clay, she explores the intricacy of emotions that go hand-in-hand with being human and that often feel indescribable through words. Transformation through the discovery of self, layers as a reflection of the complexity of life, and erosion as an analogy of the nature of memory, are themes that continue to fascinate and find their way into her sculptural work. Betsy lives and creates in Portland, OR.

Molly Hurley, 2024 Visual Arts

Molly Hurley (she/her) has a Master of Fine Arts in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Rice University. From previous work with organizations such as Beyond the Bomb, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Women Cross DMZ, Daisy Alliance, and Reverse the Trend, she has garnered experiences in advocacy, philanthropy, social media and website development, and research. She serves as a Youth Advisor to The Prospect Hill Foundation’s Nuclear Committee and co-runs a monthly column for Inkstick Media with Lovely Umayam, founder of Bombshelltoe Policy x Arts Collective, in which they critically analyze pop culture phenomena and their ties to national security. She’s also published multiple times in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In her artmaking practice, she most often comes back to explorations of connection: connections between humans, animals, and nature; connections both long-lasting and fleeting. As a community artist, she believes it is the connections between the individual and the community that, in union, form the basis of both individual and community identities.

Suma Nagaraj, 2024 Literary Arts

Suma Nagaraj is a writer, editor, and content consultant with over 15 years of experience in print, digital, and social media. She has an MFA in creative writing (fiction) from the University of San Francisco and is currently hard at work revising all that she submitted to earn her master's degree. She dabbles in poetry when prose weighs her down and vice versa. She lives in Bangalore, India, purely only in the physical sense. Mentally, she can always be found luxuriating in wordland.

Hannah Roberts, 2024 Literary Arts

Hannah Rose Roberts holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, where she received the Chancellor's Distinguished Fellowship. The winner of the 2022 Master's Review Flash Fiction Contest, her nonfiction is forthcoming in Ploughshares and her fiction has appeared in HAD, Earth & Altar, and Major 7th Magazine. She lives in Los Angeles and spends too much time at Costco.

Chauna Craig, 2024 Literary Arts

Chauna Craig is the author of the story collection The Widow’s Guide to Edible Mushrooms, winner of a Next Gen Indies award for short fiction, and Wings and Other Things, both published by Press 53. Her fiction has appeared most recently in the anthologies Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton) and Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene (WVU Press), and her creative work has been recognized in the Pushcart Prize anthology, and by Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading.

Linda Pagani, 2024 Visual Arts

Linda Pagani is an interdisciplinary artist whose early photographic work initiated a career-long inquiry into the sensorial experience of an environment. Her ethereal images extract the space between, transforming architecture into compositions of line and light, and landscape into dream-like states. In recent work, she reconstructs the built structure, adorning walls with sculptural elements while continuing in her investigation of emotional connection with our surroundings. Early exposure to artisanship has greatly influenced Pagani’s process and materials. Working with older technologies (analog camera, paper-making, enameling) and materials (copper, porcelain, glass), she bases her work on quiet and studied form. Having studied Interior Architecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pagani went on to complete a four-year Studio Diploma in Fine Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has received awards and fellowships for her work, including the Karsh Prize in Photography, and her alma mater’s prestigious Traveling Fellowship. Her work is held in private and public collections, including the Brigham Women’s Hospital Collection, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Pagani lives and works in Lexington, MA.

Virgina Chang Ph.D., 2024 Literary Arts

Virginia Chang, Ph.D., is an end-of-life doula, educator, and writer. She supports the dying and their families/caregivers to approach the end of life in a positive, meaningful, and affirming way. She works as a doula privately and volunteers for VNS Health. She teaches for the University of Vermont End-of-Life Doula Professional Certificate program, as well as is an established mentor in the field. Virginia has been featured in the media, such as CNN, AARP, and PBS, and has written on death, mortality, and doula work in magazines and journals, such as Scientific American and Intima. She is inspired by her work as a doula and writes to remember the stories of the dying. She is grateful for their words of wisdom on living a life with meaning and purpose. Virginia lives, works, and writes in New York City.

Elise Jeanmaire, 2024 Literary Arts

Elise was a finalist for the Ploughshares Emerging Artist Contest and the Queer-Art Mentorship with Torrey Peters. She has attended the 2022 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, was awarded a fellowship for the GrubStreet Novel Generator program, and will begin querying her debut novel, WAITING FOR PROVIDENCE, in early 2025. When she isn't writing, Elise rides a moped from the 70s, plays in a punk band called Long Stories, and practices yoga. She lives in Providence with her wife, Kristen, and their dog, Gustavo.

Lauren McElroy, 2024 Visual Arts

Lauren McElroy is a queer, Black multidisciplinary, and experimental fiber artist currently working in fashion design, dyeing, punch needle embroidery, and on themselves. It is Lauren's highest intention that their work be meaningful, and healing, and to change the world with thought-provoking words and imagery. Lauren creates art that has integrity and stands for peace, truth, justice, and purpose. With their work, they support communities, sustainable agriculture, and people doing good work in the world. They can be found on the internet as Mother of Purl or some variation thereof.

Elissa Lash, 2024 Literary Arts

Elissa Lash (@eemlenlash) has published pieces in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, Memoir Monday, Silver Rose Magazine, the MV Times, Edible Vineyard, and the anthology - The Covid Monologues MV. Recently she won the Flash Fiction contest for Silver Rose Magazine and was featured on the podcast WrenCast. She’s workshopped writing with Sabrina Orah Mark, Nick Flynn, Margo Steines, Beth Kanter, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Elissa is completing work on a memoir about her years as a sex worker which was a finalist with the Kenyon Review’s Editorial Fellowship Contest. She founded the theatre company Double Helix and is a founding member of TBD Improv. She currently lives in a small rural town in Massachusetts with her partner and their children.

Carly Marie DeMento, 2024 Literary Arts

Carly Marie DeMento is a poet and writer for climate-change startups living in Encinitas, California. She recently began to submit her poetry at the age of 40. Her work has appeared in the North American Review, Kestrel, and Green Hills Literary Lantern. A 2023 finalist for the James Hearst Poetry Prize and a 2023 finalist for the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

Dr. Lise Deguire, 2024 Literary Arts

Dr. Lise Deguire is a clinical psychologist, author, and burn survivor. After being severely burned as a four-year-old, she spent much of her childhood in the hospital, undergoing countless surgical procedures. Dr. Deguire is the author of the multiple award-winning book, Flashback Girl: Lessons on Resilience from a Burn Survivor. Dr. Deguire attended Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her doctorate in clinical psychology from Widener University and is in solo practice in New Jersey. Dr. Deguire has appeared on NPR, NBC, ABC, FOX, and Sirius XM. She is a TEDx speaker, and a national keynote speaker and has presented for The American Psychological Association, the World Burn Congress, The Security and Exchange Commission, and The American Burn Association. She writes for Psychology Today and has been featured in Huffington Post, Thrive Global, Tiny Buddha, Grown and Flown, and The Elephant Journal. Dr. Deguire blogs regularly about psychological resilience. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and her website, LiseDeguire.com.

Hannah Plummer, 2024 Visual Arts

Hannah Plummer is a New Jersey-based multidisciplinary artist who focuses on process-driven and site-specific practices. Graduating in 2023 with a degree in Fine Arts from Gordon College, Hannah discovered great peace in creating land art in the Chebacco Woods and rocky coastline of the surrounding North Shore of Massachusetts. With her degree concentration in Studio Art, Hannah incorporates sculpture, paper craft, painting, sketching, and printmaking into her practice, but takes a special interest in creating immersive and interactive mixed-media installations. Through her practice, she explores the intrinsic value of creative expression and experimentation in our daily lives - a restorative and generative act that fosters connections with others, material surroundings, and the intangible. Her work embodies a reverence for the interconnectedness of art, nature, faith, and human relationships, offering glimpses into the beauty of making.

Katherine Orfinger, 2023 Literary Arts

Katherine is a writer, artist, and recent graduate from Stetson University, where she earned her BA in English. She will go on to study at Rosemont College. Her work has appeared in Touchstone, Aeolus, Beyond Words, Outrageous Fortune, and others. Katherine’s writing is influenced by her Jewish faith and queer identity. Her hobbies include tinkering with analog cameras and spending quality time with her best friend, who happens to be a cat.

Christina Rivera, 2023 Literary Arts

Christina's essays are published at The Kenyon Review, Orion Magazine, Catapult, Bat City Review, HuffPost Personal, Atticus Review, and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things. She won Pacifica Literary Review’s 2019 CNF contest judged by Melissa Febos and her essay “The 17th Day" (at Terrain.org) won the John Burroughs 2023 Nature Essay Award. Christina also recently won a Pushcart Prize. Christina’s book of essays MY OCEANS—ecofeminist reflections from the confluence of motherhood and marine life—was selected as a finalist for The Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature as well as longlisted for the Graywolf ‘22 Prize. MY OCEANS is now forthcoming from Curbstone Books / Northwestern University Press in the spring of ‘25.

Kalika Kulukundis, 2023 Place-based

Kalika is a British artist/maker currently studying for a Bachelors degree at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. Kalika comes from a multicultural background and has lived between the United Kingdom, India, and Ireland. Her main interests are the natural world and making things. She satisfies these interests through learning about geography and biology as well as making and studying art. Kalika is fascinated with how we use the natural world to produce craft. Her ideas are grounded in an anticapitalist thinking that puts the environment first. With roots in the countryside, she is inspired by the community nature of rural spaces and how this way of living creates an innate understanding of the environment and the species that cohabit different ecologies. Her work is process-led, and centers around the meditative nature of producing art and craft.

Radhika Iyer, 2020 - 2021 Bookgardan, Literary Arts

Radhika is an award-winning writer-poet based in Michigan, USA. She has conducted interviews, and published poems, short stories, and essays.

Her writings are her musings on life's longing for love. Her preferred genre is creative fiction with generous touch of magic. Being normal is never her thing, whimsical is more like it.

Her writings can be found at the Poetry Society Of Michigan, East By Northeast Literary Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Sterling Clack Clack Literary Journal, India Currents, and the news section of F Scott Festival Website.

She loves flowers, books and writing utensils, and when she is not meddling with them, she can be found sprinkling magic spells on her family, friends and her dogs.

Carrie Hall, 2023 Literary Arts

Carrie lives in Brooklyn, where she is writing director at a large public university. Aside from writing fiction and essays, Hall studies how trauma in early childhood affects literacy learning in adulthood. She has recently published stories in Pleiades and Barren Magazines, has an essay forthcoming in New Letters and is working on a memoir called "The Boredoms," about what we can learn when we're not paying attention. She will be a writer-in-residence at UCross Foundation in September of this year.

Arlene Plevin, 2023 Literary Arts

Arlene is an Emerita Professor at Olympic College where she taught creative writing and technical writing. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and her MFA in Poetry from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. Plevin was awarded two Fulbrights (Taiwan and India), where she taught ecocriticism and the literature of immigration and diaspora. Nominated for Washington State Environmental Educator of the Year, she has presented at national and international conferences on sustainability and written about modern slavery. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and academic work has appeared in journals, anthologies, and academic collections. Recently, one of her poems circled the city of Seattle as part of their Poetry on the Buses program. A former travel writer, Plevin’s work includes a column on bicycling and two very-out-of print books on bicycling. She is an open water swimmer and has swum in Alaska, Mexico, Italy, Finland, and India.

Gayle Burnett, 2023 Literary Arts

Gayle has been leading and facilitating courageous conversations regarding diversity, race, and equity for much of her lifetime. She founded Peace of Culture, in 2018, as an expression of her commitment to the work. Gayle is the co-author of Peace in Everyday Relationships (Hunter House Publishers, 2003) which provides information, practical tools and real-life examples to support readers in the development of conflict resolution skills within diverse environments. From 1990 to 2004, she worked with a wide array of diversity and leadership clients, including Ernst & Young, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and the NCAA, supporting increased understanding and effectiveness amongst their employees.

Gayle’s career choices have also been diverse. She began as an assistant vice president and analyst for a Wall Street clearinghouse bank, where she worked in the international markets of Singapore, Australia and London. She gained a first-hand understanding of the subtle difference between people that can create misunderstanding, conflict and poor performance. As a past partner and principal of Inter-Change Consultants (1989 – 2003) and as the Atlanta Coordinator for the National Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (1995 – 2000), she worked tirelessly towards ending violence and racism in the world. She joined the Atlanta Public Schools, in 2003, where she served in several capacities, including the Executive Director of Innovation. Gayle joined the boards of KIPP Metro Atlanta (May 2019), the Georgia Charter Schools Association (September 2019), and Wesley International Academy (June 2021) to continue her service to the children of Atlanta. Gayle Burnett holds an MA in Economics from the City College of New York, is a Fellow Alum of Harvard University’s Strategic Data Project, and a Gallup-certified Strengths Coach.

Sarah Mock, 2023 Literary Arts

Sarah is on a mission to prove that it is possible to feed people without exploiting farmers, farmworkers, the environment, or communities. That mission required her to become an agriculture and food expert, and today she writes, podcasts, researches, and advises on everything from farm production, strategy, and marketing to ag history and economics to logistics, supply chains, and climate impact. She’s worked in and around agriculture across the country and around the globe, with non-profits, the US Department of Agriculture, Silicon Valley companies, the national news media, and directly with farms. Her work has culminated in a number of award-winning projects, including her best selling book Farm (and Other F Words) and her latest, Big Team Farms. Raised on her family’s farm in Wyoming, Sarah is now rooted in Albuquerque, NM.

Melissa Dickey, 2023 Literary Arts

Born and raised in New Orleans, Melissa now lives in Western Massachusetts, where she teaches high school English. She is the author of two books of poetry published by Rescue Press and another forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her writing has appeared in Bennington Review, The Spectacle, Laurel Review, jubilat, and Interim, among other publications. She is also the mother of four children.

Tal Beery, 2023 Place-Based Arts

Tal is an artist, independent curator, and co-executive director of the Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre in the Catskill Mountains, just two hours north of New York City. He is co-founder and administrator of Arts & Ecology Incorporated, a nonprofit exploring the connections between nature and culture through artist-centered projects, consulting services for organizations, and fiscal sponsorships for artists. His published articles, artistic research, and curatorial projects explore human relationships with their environments and arts institutional design. Previous projects include Eco Practicum, School of Apocalypse, and Occupy Museums. Tal’s independent and collaborative art works have been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, El Museo Del Barrio, and others.

Sarah Balakrishnan

2020 - 2021 Bookgardan + 2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Sarah Balakrishnan is a Canadian writer based in Richmond, Virginia. She is the 2022 Narrative Prize winner, the 2021 winner of Narrative Magazine's Below 30 contest, and a 2021 finalist for the Cecilia Joyce Johnson Award for Short Fiction from the Key West Literary Seminar. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from Craigardan, American Short Fiction, and Hedgebrook. She is a fiction editor at the Canadian literary magazine, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement.

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, 2023 John Brown Lives! Fellow, Literary Arts

Gloria has written many books and articles. She is working on her first novel titled Wicked Prayers. Her book She Took Justice: The Black Woman, Law, and Power is about The Black Women’s journey from Queen Nzingha to today’s activists. Gloria has an upcoming docuseries titled She Took Justice. She authored The Voting Rights War and Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present, a book that discusses race and education, voting rights, criminal justice, civil liberties and protest, the military and internationalism concerning African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans. Gloria Browne-Marshall is a playwright with seven produced plays. Her recent play SHOT: Caught a Soul depicts a Black teen haunting the White police officer who shot him, and Dreams of Emmett Till takes that tragic encounter into the 21st century. She attended the MFA program in playwrighting at Sarah Lawrence College. She is working on a stage play titled Crossroads about murderous White rage and Black ambition.

Donnaldson Brown

2020-2021 Bookgardan + 2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Donnaldson Brown is a former attorney and screenwriter, and student of theater (and clowning). She’s been awarded multiple residencies, and has performed her spoken word pieces for The Deep Listening Institute’s Writers in Performance and Women & Identity Festivals in New York City, and in the Made in the Berkshires Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A longtime resident of both Brooklyn, New York and western Massachusetts, she grew up riding horses on a family ranch in northeast Texas and in her native Connecticut.

Certified to teach meditation and several forms of yoga, Ms. Brown is currently a facilitator and trainer with The Equus Effect, offering somatic based experiential learning with horses for veterans, first responders and others struggling with post-traumatic stress injuries. A proud mother, Ms. Brown also loves to sing, and cycle, and hike with her dogs.

Loren Michael Mortimer, 2023 Intellectual Arts + Teaching Fellow

Mike holds the Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Native American History at Emory University. A public scholar, digital humanist, and interdisciplinary historian, Mike has devoted his career to training creative history-makers to address global challenges at a local level. He received his PhD in History with a designated emphasis in Native American Studies from UC Davis in 2019. From 2020-2021, he was the American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Race, Migration, and Indigeneity at Indiana University Bloomington. As a community-engaged scholar, he has worked on collaborative digital mapping workshops on local Indigenous foodways for Hamilton College.

His current book project, Kaniatarowanenneh Crossings: Indigenous Power and Presence in the St. Lawrence River Watershed, 1534-1842, is the first transnational study of the Seven Fires — a confederacy of Catholic Mohawk, Wendat, Wabanaki, and Anishinaabe mission communities along the US-Canada border that had shared ties to the lands and waters that now comprise the Adirondack Park. As an expert in the Indigenous and environmental history of the Adirondack Park, Mike’s research has been recognized by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, while his digital history projects have received support from Mellon Public Scholars and the American Philosophical Society.

Colin Bonini

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Colin Bonini is a writer from San Jose, California and a current MFA candidate in Fiction at Arizona State University. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Under Review, The Adroit Journal, Wig-Wag, Glassworks Magazine, and elsewhere.

Michael (aka Yoko) Amos

2023 Artist-in-Residence + Storytelling Fellow. Literary Arts

Michael “Yoko” Amos spent High School in the Bronx cutting class and learning to mix music in his bedroom: a collection that stretched from his mothers eclectic taste: Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Dizzy Gillespie; thumbed thru Aretha Franklin to Carmen McRae with splashes of Odeta, Richie Havens and a strong dose of Calypso! Michael now travels through life writing his own soundtrack. He became a DJ for family reunions, local parties, clubs, and working the wedding circuit. He can now be found spinning at parties on the east coast from Upstate NY to Florida, and from Columbia, South America to northern Minnesota. He currently resides in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Reflecting back on the musical arc of his life, Michael spreads love through assisting any being who connects to the vibration and is moved in some way with the music he plays. Michael considers himself a 64 year-old “working DJ” who has developed a knack for deep moving and connecting with crows and music.

Marlena Murtagh

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Visual Arts

Marlena Murtagh is a photographer and artist living with chronic pain in Baltimore, Maryland. In 2023, she will be launching programming designed to help those in chronic pain distract and disengage from the pain cycle. Her downloadables incorporate authentic self exploration, mark-making, and pain education as one method of pain management. In addition to her chronic pain work, she’s spent the past 10 years as a photography and design teacher.

Donelle Wedderburn

2023 Artist-in-Residence + Trillium Fellow. Literary Arts

Donelle is an audio producer with a special love for sound and product design. She has contributed to producing and developing a range of broadcasts and podcasts for ABC News, 10% Happier, Blind Landing, and NPR. In her free time, she loves to write poetry, watch movies, and obsess about architecture and industrial design.

Katharine Wyatt

2017 Farm Intern + 2023 Artist-in-Residence

Katharine Wyatt has been practicing art in a variety of mediums throughout her life, but during the Covid-19 pandemic she reconnected with painting, which remains her focus. Having worked in regenerative agriculture for the last seven years, her time spent farming and painting inspires her process in each. She considers her home state of California her home base.

Angela Cho

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramic Arts

Angela Cho teaches architecture and design at the Daniels Faculty at University of Toronto and the School of Interior Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her own research is driven by a preoccupation with the ethics and ironies of preservation efforts in architecture, which she primarily investigates through casting processes. In her ceramic work, her pieces tend to evoke bodies — human bodies, plant bodies — without crossing into being representational. Across all disciplines, her interest is in material itself and in letting her work bear figural and textural signs of manual process and manual thinking.

Angela holds a Master of Architecture degree from U of T and a Bachelor of Interior Design from TMU. She continues to collaborate at Office of Adrian Phiffer on a variety of projects including sculptures, stop-motion animations, and shortlisted architecture competition entries. She lives and works in Toronto.

Felicity Sheehy

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Felicity Sheehy’s chapbook Losing the Farm (Southword Editions, 2021) won first place in the Munster Literature Centre's international chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Daily, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Blackbird, 32 Poems, The Common, Literary Matters, and elsewhere. Her work has received an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Jane Martin Prize for U.K. residents under the age of thirty. She was a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the 2021 Galway Kinnell Memorial Scholar at the Community of Writers, a 2022 Thomas Lux Scholar at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, and the 2022 Margaret Bridgman Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She has also received support from the Fine Arts Work Center, Narrative Magazine, Smartish Pace, the York Poetry Prize, and the Ledbury Poetry Festival, among others. In 2019 and 2020, she was named one of Narrative Magazine's 30 below 30 emerging writers.

Max Gray

2023 Artists-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Max Gray is a writer, journalist, and nature lover. His fiction, nonfiction, and music criticism have appeared in Cutbank, Mount Hope, Jelly Bucket, and The Rumpus. He is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and a former resident at The Lillian E. Smith Center in Clayton, GA.

Patricia Zaballos

2018 - 2019 Bookgardan + 2022-2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Patricia Zaballos is a writer and reformed educator in Oakland, California. Forever obsessed with how people learn, her essays on the subject have appeared in Salon, Literary Mama, Life Learning Magazine, Mothering Magazine, and home/school/life magazine, where she wrote a column for several years. A former third-grade teacher, she went on to homeschool with her three now-grown children for twenty years, the experience making her a fierce advocate for learner-guided education. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about those years, which is not so much a homeschooling story but an impassioned plea for agency in the lives of all children.

Mia Vodanovich

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Mia Vodanovich is the cross-pollinated child of farmland and Bay Area ‘burbs. Mia is a writer, teacher, podcast co-host, and semi-avid ABBA fan. She received her MA in English at Notre Dame de Namur University and has had work published in The Bohemian, Leaf by Leaf, House of HASH, and Unstamatic Magazine, with a piece forthcoming in Healthline Zine. Her chapbook Not Long for This World was published in February 2023 with Bottlecap Press.

Natasha D’Souza

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Natasha D’Souza is a business journalist, leadership coach, speaker and contributor to Fortune Magazine and the Harvard Business Review. She forayed into journalism following an almost 15 year high-octane career spanning business intelligence, international news, investor relations and strategic communications at leading institutions in London, Washington, DC and Dubai. Natasha has interviewed some of the most brilliant minds of our time including former CEO of Apple, John Sculley; bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, Founder of Acumen and one of Forbes Greatest Living Business Minds, Jacqueline Novogratz; among many others. In her writing and speaking, she is committed to a fresh, global perspective on how we can achieve domain-changing innovation, future-forward careers and transformational leadership by tapping into powerful capabilities of the human “higher mind,” namely creativity and intuition. Her insights on topics spanning modern-day careers, entrepreneurship, leadership and resilience have been featured in Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review. Natasha was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where she now lives and writes. She attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was a North Carolina Fellow, studying public health and international economics.

Brad Shingleton

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Brad Shingleton now devotes his time to writing as an independent scholar after a career in law. His work had recently concentrated on law, ethics and society, topics on which he has recently published a book and several journal articles. He has also written on aspects of moral reasoning and ethical conflict. Brad has authored personal essays on nature and naturalists that have appeared in The Washington Post and literary journals such as The Snowy Egret. He lives in Maryland.

Jenny Cosgrove

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramic Arts

Jenny Cosgrove is a ceramic sculptor and painter whose work explores archetypal imagery and culturally significant topics through dreamlike renderings of the figure. Delusions, dreams, and explorations of the taboo drive the work and a tension is held between the tender and lewd, transcendent and ordinary. Jenny graduated from Alfred University in 2022.

William Camponovo

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

William Camponovo’s poetry has appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Seattle Review, The Los Angeles Review, Best New Poets, and online at Poetry Northwest. Through Lost & Found, the publishing house of the Center for the Humanities at the City University of New York, he published “Jack Forbes: ‘Yanga Ya,’ Selected Poems and The Goals of Education,” which curated pedagogical materials from Indigenous scholar, activist, and poet Jack Forbes. William has studied poetry and poetics at Johns Hopkins, the University of Washington, and the Graduate Center at CUNY. He teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative.

Lisa Rizzo

2019 - 2020 Bookgardan + 2022, 2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Lisa Rizzo is the author of Always a Blue House (Saddle Road Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 National Federation of Press Woman Awards, and In the Poem an Ocean (Big Table Publishing, 2011). Her poetry and nonfiction have also appeared in a variety of journals including Calyx, Longridge Review, The MacGuffin, Rain Taxi and Brevity Blog. Newly retired from a long teaching career, she lives in Portland, Oregon. Visit her at www.lisarizzowriter.com

Dennis Delay

2022 + 2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Dennis Delay obtained a B.A. in Studio Art from SUNY Plattsburgh in 1996 and studied with the South African artists Rosenclaire while in residency in Italy. In 2007 he earned a M.S. in School Counseling at UVM and currently works with young children in Vermont schools.

In February 2020, Delay stumbled upon maps that recorded the presence of his Irish immigrant ancestors farming on the very same land that Craigardan resides on. This marked the beginning of a growing body of work that investigates the intersections of genealogy and place. His work touches on a variety of themes (childhood, family systems, history, religion, the environment) while also posing questions about place/displacement, native/non-native, erasure/documentation, and growth/loss.

Howard Fishman

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Teaching Fellow

Howard Fishman is a 2023 Teaching Fellow. Howard is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, where he has published essays on music, film, theater, literature, travel, and culture. His bylines have also appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Telegraph, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Artforum, San Francisco Chronicle, Mojo, The Village Voice, Jazziz, and Salmagundi. His play, A Star Has Burnt My Eye, was a New York Times “Critics Pick.” As a performing songwriter and bandleader, Fishman has toured internationally as a headlining artist for over two decades. He has released eleven albums to date, and is the producer of the album Connie’s Piano Songs: The Art Songs of Elizabeth “Connie” Converse. He is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Dane Mainella

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Dane Mainella is a poet-orchardist from the southeastern coast of New England, who writes and gardens with living communities in mind. Dane has published several books of verse and fiction. Lately his writing has been inspired by the ecologies of forest succession, and the ways in which humans interact with these timescales. Dane keeps a small nursery of useful perennial plants, and helps people design, establish, and care for orchards, gardens, and food forests.

Chelsea Catherine

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Chelsea Catherine has lived and worked all over the country. In 2018, they won the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction through the Southern Indiana Review and their second book, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. In 2022, they won an Emerging Artist's Award from Creative Pinellas and spent a month in Alaska at the Alderworks Artists Retreat. They are part of a cohort of ValleyCreates artist grantees in Western Massachusetts and their story, The Not-Deer, is forthcoming in an anthology out of London, UK.

Kristen Tauer

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Kristen Tauer is a writer and arts and culture journalist based in Queens, NY. Her work has appeared in NYU’s Dovetail, WomenArts Quarterly, The New York Times, and The Coachella Review. In 2016, she helped launch the independent food publication Counter Service. She’s originally from Ithaca, NY and graduated from Cornell University. You can find her at kristentauer.com.

Tereza Nesnidalova

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Visual Arts

Tereza Nesnidalova is a Czech visual artist currently living in Iceland, with experience in many fields including illustration, painting, photography, tattooing, fashion design, and set decoration. She has always been inspired by Asian art and culture and likes to combine art and craft together, incorporating the Japanese philosophy Wabi-Sabi that embraces the beauty of imperfection. Tereza uses natural dyes in her work as well as pigments collected from nature around her. She loves to capture women’s faces and bodies, but her inspiration also comes from nature with all its forms and shapes.

Claire Cox

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Originally from San Diego, Claire Cox has lived in New York City for two decades and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Hunter College. Her first novel, Silver Beach, won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2021. Last year, it won the Bronze Medal for Popular Fiction at the Ippy Awards, and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction from the Publishing Triangle. Her stories were published in Kestrel and The Missouri Review, her essays at Literary Hub and Necessary Fiction. She is a longtime public high school teacher and lives with her family in upper Manhattan.

Marisha Falkovich

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Studio Arts

Marisha Falkovich was born in Moscow, Russia and is an artist now based in New York City. She works primarily in clay, drawing and animation. Along with her art practice she runs a small ceramics and lamps shop.

Victoria Buitron

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, SmokeLong en Español, The Offing, and other literary magazines. A VONA fellow, her work has been selected for 2022’s Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner.

Rachael Reichenbach

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Intellectual Arts + Teaching Fellow

Rachael Reichenbach (she/they) is a 2023 Teaching Fellow. Rachael is a racial justice and systems change facilitator, coach, and trainer. She supports white-bodied folks to disrupt internalized white superiority inside themselves & their relationships and to embody anti-racist culture that is sane, loving, collaborative, and equitable. She supports multi-racial social justice organizations and networks to develop and refine processes for effective, human-centered collaboration and meaningful engagement across lines of difference. Additionally, she offers workshops that are designed to develop and deepen liberatory consciousness and a systems approach to social, racial, and environmental justice. She lives at Wild Hydrangea, an intentional community in Northern Alabama, on the land of the Upper Creek and Cherokee.

Khanh Pham

2023 Artist-in-Residence

Ceramic Arts

Khanh Pham found pottery as an art that suits her interest in learning and helps her build patience. She wants to use this art form as a middle point between other art interests including designing, drawing, and sculpting. Khanh was born in Vietnam and immigrated to the US at age 14. With this history she had to overcome many challenges to be where she is today. Khanh wants to continue to bring her life experiences into her work and conversations. Pottery soothes her and she wants to share that comfort with others.

Elise JeanMaire

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Elise Jeanmaire is a queer/trans writer from Providence, Rhode Island. She was a finalist in the 2020 Ploughshares Emerging Artist Contest and the 2021 Queer-Art Mentorship Program. In 2022, she was selected as a fiction contributor at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. At the start of 2023, an early draft of her novel, Waiting for Providence, was awarded a fellowship for the GrubStreet Novel Generator program. Elise is passionate about yoga, NPR, and chocolate chip cookies. She lives in a house once owned by an infamous mobster with her lovely wife, Kristen, and their playful pup, Gustavo.

Mac MacDevitt

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Place-Based

Lawrence MacDevitt did not begin to emerge as an artist until he was in his 60s. He spent much of his working life as a teacher, a therapist and a facilitator who worked to build community coalitions. Lawrence designed and built a Sky Yurt, the first of a planned series of SkyHigh Shelters to be used by a band of nomadic artists and crafters. The frame was exhibited at the 2013 Champlain Makers Faire. In Chicago, he developed the MyLai Memorial Exhibit, a 2000 square foot traveling exhibit with a set of sculptural interactive art components. Lawrence took the exhibit on tour to Veterans for Peace chapters in 15 different cities in 2018 and 2019. Now back in Essex, NY, Lawrence is working on a series of outdoor sculptures using parts and pieces from the original SkyYurt project. He values setting up conditions where viewers/visitors can become participants/collaborators, and also experience attentive respect from the artist for their contributions. Lawrence currently produces and co-hosts SpeakEazy, a monthly storytelling open mic at Whitcomb’s in Whallonsburg, NY.

Tereza Nesnidalova

2023 Artist-in-Residence and Work Exchange Recipient

Visual Arts

I am a Czech visual artist, currently living in Iceland, with experience in many fields from illustration, painting, photography, tattooing to fashion design and set decoration. I have always been inspired by Asian art and culture and I really like to combine art and craft together, also enjoy Japanese philosophy Wabi-Sabi that embrace the beauty of imperfection. I use natural dyes in my work as well as pigments collected from nature around me. I love to capture women’s faces and bodies. Another big and endless inspiration comes from nature with all it’s forms and shapes.

Evan Shopper

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts and Teaching Fellow

Evan Shopper, LICSW, is a 2023 Teaching Fellow. Evan holds a Masters in Social Work from the Smith College School of Social Work. He currently is a psychotherapist in private practice in Amherst, MA. Though he sees all ages, he specializes in working with kids and adolescents. For years he has taught both parenting classes to parents of preschoolers and toddlers as well as state-mandated co-parenting classes for divorcing parents. He is currently writing a parenting book that incorporates the tools and understanding therapists use when working with young children.

Prior to being a therapist, Evan received a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. For many years, he was visiting faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, teaching fiction and nonfiction. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, The Colorado Review, The Indiana Review, and others.

Deirdre Gainor

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Bookgardaner

Deirdre has enjoyed many careers – teacher, theater and film producer, mother, executive, and school administrator. It wasn’t until she got her MFA in Creative Writing in 2011 that she began to pursue writing in earnest for the first time since she was a teenager.

As a producer, Ms Gainor won a dramalogue award for her production of Bertolt Brecht’s Arturo Ui. She then left theater to develop and implement an arts program in the California prison system. Once that was up and running she turned her talents to film production and garnered an Academy Award nomination for a feature film called ANNA. She went on to produce for American Playhouse. Her return to education gave her the opportunity to produce schools instead of movies and is proud to have helped start the Archer School for Girls and Girls Athletic Leadership School in Los Angeles.

Michael Prior

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Master Artist Fellow

His second book of poems Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House, 2020) won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the British Columbia & Yukon Book Prizes Poetry Prize. Prior is the recent recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Jerome Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and elsewhere. He divides his time between Vancouver, Canada and Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is an Assistant Professor of English and an ACM Mellon Faculty Fellow at Macalester College.

Michele Parker Randall

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Michele Parker Randall reads and writes poetry and authored The Museum of Everyday Life (Kelsay Books) and A Future Unmappable, chapbook (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry can also be found in Nimrod International Journal, Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere.

Michele teaches poetry, personal essay, fairy tales, and Literature of Mental Health/Neurodivergent Literature at Stetson University, and she feels strongly that neurodivergent narratives can make the difference in reducing the stigma placed on those living with mental illness.

Carolyn Bardos

2023 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Carolyn Bardos is a writer (mostly poetry) and a visual artist (mostly painting) based in Troy, New York. She grew up farther downstate in Newburgh. She began making art with serious intent in a high school ceramics class in the 1970s, a period of renewed widespread interest in craftwork. Between 2000 and 2019, she worked in several art-related capacities. She ran a small art center in rural New Hampshire, worked as an actor in regional theatre, wrote and produced plays, and operated an independent publishing company. Her artwork has appeared most recently at Martinez Gallery in Troy, NY. A chapbook of her poetry, Yesterday’s Daybreak, was published in 2011 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company in Charlotte, NC.

Eirinie Carson

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Teaching Fellow

Eirinie Carson is a Black British Londoner and writer living in California. She is a mother of two children, Luka and Selah. She is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine, and her work has also appeared in Mother Muse and You Might Need To Hear This, with an upcoming piece in The Sonora Review’s Fall edition. Eirinie writes about motherhood, grief and relationships and is currently working on her first book about the loss of her best friend, Larissa, and what love looks like after death.

Penny Fujiko Willgerodt

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Intellectual Arts

Penny Fujiko Willgerodt is the executive director of The Prospect Hill Foundation (PHF), the primary philanthropic vehicle of the Beinecke family. Established in 1959 and based in New York City, PHF supports a wide range of organizations working in social justice, environment and arts and culture. Strategic grant-making areas are currently the Nuclear Disarmament Program and the Youth Program.

Penny also serves two nonprofits. She is board chair of Clean and Healthy New York, an environmental health & justice advocacy organization based in Albany, NY. Part of the leadership of the Circle for Justice Innovations Fund, she is a member of member of CJI’s Steering Committee, Leadership Circle and Strategic Opportunities Support (SOS) Rapid Response Fund. Penny previously worked at the Ms. Foundation for Women, Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Rockefeller Family office and was part of the start-up team to create Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, where she served as vice president until September 2008.

Rachel Reeher

2022 Artists-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Rachel Reeher is a writer from the Carolinas. She received her MFA in fiction writing at Arizona State University in Tempe. You can find her at rachelreeher.com.

Jeanette Quick

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Jeanette Quick is an author of fiction, poetry, theater reviews, thoughts on loose scraps of paper near her desk, and is working on her first novel. Her work has been published in The Offing, Ghostwoods Press, Ursus Americanus, DC Metro Theater Arts, and Forum, among other publications. She is a fiction reader for The Maine Review and a nonfiction reader for Autumn House Press. Jeanette has earned residencies from Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Art Farm, Eugene O'Neill Foundation, and Sundress Academy for the Arts and has received support from the Rona Jaffe Foundation for the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop. Jeanette has a Certificate in Creative Writing from the City College of San Francisco, a Bachelor of Arts from UC Berkeley, and a Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center. When she isn't writing, she is a lawyer and public policy professional, and her work advocating for underserved communities has appeared in many publications, including Fast Company, MSN, Morning Consult, Forbes, Business Insider, The Hill, and American Banker.

Kieran Mundy

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Kieran Mundy is a writer from New England. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Joyland, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere, and has been recognized in Wigleaf's Top 50 Very Short Fictions of 2017 and 2019. She is the recipient of Gulf Coast's 2020 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, judged by Jenny Offill. She graduated in 2019 with an MFA in Fiction from the University of Oregon and has received funding for her work from the Vermont Studio Center. She currently lives in Bend, OR where she is at work on a short story collection.

Jack Carneal

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Jack Carneal is a writer who lives in Baltimore City with his wife Chris. He teaches writing in the English Department at Towson University and is the author of Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives, a memoir about his time as a musician who played drums with various bands in the nineties and oughts. He and Chris are the proud parents of two mostly grown but not quite adult sons.

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Himanee Gupta is a writer, farmer, and an associate professor of Historical Studies at SUNY Empire State College. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests include South Asian American religions, Hip Hop studies, diasporas, food justice, regenerative agriculture, and decoloniality. Her primary method of inquiry is autoethnography. In her first book, Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America, Himanee shows how Christianity and white supremacy intersect to create a “typical America” that silently suppresses the presence of those who are not white, Christian or of European ancestry. Her current writing explores how farming and spirituality might come together to form relationships with land in an effort to help unravel settler colonialism and slow climate change. Her work on this topic has appeared in The Weave News, Zocalo Public Square, Political Theology Network, and in newspapers and magazines in Saratoga County, NY, where she resides. Himanee is Empire State College’s 2022-23 Susan H. Turben Chair in Mentoring.

Meg Lamme

2022 - 2023 Bookgardan. Literary Arts

Meg Lamme is a Bookgardan Literary Artist-in-Residence for 2022-23, Elizabethtown, NY, an advanced, non-degreed, women writers’ intensive with Kate Moses and a cohort of four other women. She is also a Craigardan Literary Artist-in-Residence, 2022-23.

Meg is currently working on a memoir of a family archipelago, unblended and volcanic, with a focus on one island in particular, the core of the simmering household.

After 15 years in public relations and organizational communication, Meg earned a PhD in mass communication and devoted 19 years to higher ed, during which time she wrote and published historical research and taught writing. She retired as professor emerita from The University of Alabama.

Elinor Swanson

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Summer Resident Intern (Clay + Farm)

Elinor Swanson is a multi-disciplinary artist from Rhode Island. In May 2021, she graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in Studio Art. She creates artwork that hints at larger, fantastical narratives. Her inspiration comes largely from folktales and her surrounding natural environment.

Amanda Lichtenberg

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Amanda Lichtenberg is a New York City based poet. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies including Versal, Slice, LUNGFULL!, Forklift, Caesura, Mima’amakim, Schmear the Queer and elsewhere. In 2016, Amanda was featured in Creative Capital’s On Our Radar “artist to watch” for her genre-defying work. She is the recipient of an Amy Award (Poets & Writers), a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Fellowship (Provincetown, MA), Playa Fellowships, (Summer Lake, OR), and a Willapa Bay AiR fellowship (Oysterville, WA). Amanda has curated readings for Brooklyn Museum, 92nd Street Y (Makor) and The LouderARTS Project. She serves on the board of directors for Alice James Press.

Cameron Cowan

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Cameron Cowan is a writer, thinker, and human being from Seattle. Described as the worlds last generalist, he is the author of three books and has been published numerous times in both print and digital over the past ten years.

Sarah McCartt-Jackson

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Kentucky poet, folklorist, and educator Sarah McCartt-Jackson has been published by Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, and others. She received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, and has served as artist-in-residence for Great Smoky Mountains, Catoctin Mountain, Homestead, and Acadia National Parks, among other residencies. Her poetry books include Stonelight (Airlie Press, winner of the Arlie Prize, Phillip H. McMath Poetry Award, and the Weatherford Award in Poetry), Calf Canyon (Brain Mill Press), Vein of Stone (Porkbelly Press), and Children Born on the Wrong Side of the River (winner of the Mary Ballard Poetry Prize, Casey Shay Press). She teaches poetry, environmental education, and elementary school.

Alexandra Carmichael

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Alexandra Carmichael is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her nonfiction work has been published in Dovetail, and her fiction has appeared in Adelaide Magazine and Random Sample Review. She earned a BA in English from Binghamton University.

K Chiucarello

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

K Chiucarello is a writer, student, and teacher living in the Hudson Valley. Their work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Hobart Pulp, them., Lit Hub, Epiphany, amongst others. They tutor within the carceral system, on behalf of Bard Prison Initiative. In summer 2021, they were named a Tin House scholar. Updates on their work can be found at kchiucarello.com.

Zena Verda Pesta

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Studio Arts

Zena is a maker of pottery, quilts, supper, grower of food, nurturer of partnerships, roller dancer, and participant and steward in all types of learning environments. She is one generation removed from working the land in Appalachia Kentucky. She comes from mountain people. Zena currently resides in Washington County, NY. She is pursuing ancestral love of the dirt through pottery, connecting kids with nature, natural dying, gardening & community building.

Zena’s ceramic work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She has been a resident in Jingdezhen, China and had her work highlighted in The New York Times, W Magazine, & a Japanese publication. Her career in craft, design, & teaching has taken her all over the world. Zena has been working with kids & adults in process based workshops & facilitating learning environments for 15 years. She feel's very strongly about the power of hands-on experiential and immersive learning. She has devoted her practice to the dirt & making with others of all ages. If you'd like to learn more about her teaching philosophy, past workshops, or other work you can visit www.soulmagical.com!

Callie Jacks

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Summer Resident Intern (Clay + Farm)

Callie Jacks is an artist and designer who moves between photography, printmaking, ceramics, writing, and textile manipulation to explore notions of home, intimacy, and memory. Their work is informed by craft techniques and acts as a personal archive that centers presence and routine as the key elements of creation. Callie received a BA in Studio Arts from Bard College in 2021 and splits their time between the Hudson Valley and Portland, ME.

Theresa Senato Edwards

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, once for a Best of the Net, and once for Best Small Fictions Anthology. Her work can be found in Gargoyle, Thrush, Diode, The Nervous Breakdown, Dialogist, SWWIM, Verse Daily, and PANK, among other journals. Edwards has spent time as editor in chief and poetry editor at The American Poetry Journal and as a poetry mentor in the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective, is a senior poetry editor for Harbor Review, and holds an MFA from Goddard College and an MA from Western Connecticut State University. Her website: http://www.theresasenatoedwards.com

Emily Flouton

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Emily Flouton writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Tin House, DIAGRAM, Subtropics, Gay Magazine, Quarterly West, Passages North, Hobart, and other places. She won the 2020 Kurt Brown Fiction Prize from the Association of Writers & Writers Programs (AWP) and holds an MFA from Portland State University, where she won the Tom and Phyllis Burnam Scholarship. Originally from New England, she lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches writing and is at work on a novel and a memoir.

Michelle St. Romain Wilson

2022 - 2023 Bookgardan. Literary Arts

Michelle St. Romain Wilson is a professional writer and organizational consultant with over 30 years of experience in the fields of nonprofit marketing and communications, fundraising, and program management. She has taught English and creative writing to youth and teens at middle and high schools in California, through the Oregon Writing Project and the Academy program at Southern Oregon University, and as a volunteer at elementary schools in Oregon. She founded an organization on the island of Kaua'i serving youth and families with arts-based programming and has led workshops and retreats with adults on the creative process. She holds a B.A. in English from Loyola University, New Orleans and an M.A. in English/ Creative Writing from California State University, Sacramento. She is the co-author of Promised Fruit, a collection of poetry published through Singing Bird Press, the imprint she co-created with her writing partner. A second collection will be released in April 2023. Her poems have been featured on Jefferson Public Radio and Ashland Community Radio. She is now completing Song of Belonging, the first book of a planned trilogy spanning several generations of a family of women in Louisiana - all with hidden gifts, secrets, and stories to unravel. Michelle loves living in the Rogue Valley of Southern Oregon with her wife, their three teens, a large garden, and a variety of pets.

John Kane

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

John Kane is an author, college professor, and visual artist. He has degrees in fine art, education, and leadership studies with a focus on innovation and disruptive technology. His book, The Last Seat in the House: The Story of Hanley Sound, was published by University Press of Mississippi and is becoming widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive publications on the subject of concert sound reinforcement during the early years of the music industry. His previous book, Pilgrims of Woodstock, was published to much acclaim by Indiana University Press. He has also written for several national newspapers and music industry trade magazines, including The Washington Post, and Front of House. Dr. Kane grew up in Somerville, Massachusetts, and now resides near the seacoast of New Hampshire. You can learn more about his work at www.thelastseatinthehouse.com and www.pilgrimsofwoodsock.com

HJ Davies

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Multi-hyphenate creative born, raised, and residing in New York City. They have been published in Promethean, OyeDrum Magazine, and Quail Bell Magazine, and have completed residences at AIR Studio Paducah and the EncaustiCastle. In 2020, they received an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. They currently serve as the literary manager for NYC independent theater company KEF Productions Inc. In addition to their literary career, they create music with alt-folk group The Wife and Kids, as well as under a solo moniker, Haushinka. When not creating, they enjoy traveling, karaoke, and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Vivian Montogomery

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Vivian Montgomery is a Boston-based harpsichordist and accordionist who writes. Her work centers around music, childhood, historical excavation of long-buried women composers, her dead mother, and unlikely Judaism. Her personal essays have been featured in the Boston Globe Magazine, Ocotillo Review, Bluestem, Ligeia, Adanna, Jabberwock, Chautaqua Review, Shark Reef, and in the anthology “Mother Reader” published by Seven Stories Press. She has found greatest assurances as a writer from a prize-winning personal essay titled “Immersion, on her first experience at the mikveh, ” and she is driven forward by her work on a historical novel, “Martha Speaks,” based on obsessive research that rose out of a 2014 UK Fulbright Fellowship. Vivian is on the faculty of the Longy School of Music and has been a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center for 10 years. More significantly these days, she is a brooding walker and mother, feeling her way with the help of words spilled onto the page.

Elizabeth Douglas

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Elizabeth Douglas is a writer and landscape designer. She holds a degree in Landscape Architectural Studies and practiced hands-on landscape design for several years. Currently, she serves as a volunteer gardener and designer for community-based projects in upstate New York.

Elizabeth’s writing has spanned many topics and genres. Her book The Habit was published by Doubleday in 2003 and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Her more recent work has appeared in Image journal online, and her award-winning short play The Birthday Gift has been produced by theaters in the U.S. and Germany.

Amos Landon

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Amos J Landon is an openly transgender writer from southern New Hampshire. He lives with his partner, four teenage sons, two hedgehogs, and a turtle named Pickles. When Amos is not writing, he can be found playing board games and hoarding office supplies (sticky notes are a personal favorite). Amos’s writing is geared toward middle schoolers and focuses on friendship and humor. His debut novel, The Girl, The Pig, And The Accidental Demon will be on shelves in summer 2022.

Sandra O'Donnell

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Sandra O’Donnell is an author, book coach, and reluctant literary agent. She holds a BA and MA in Communication and a PhD in History. She leads writing workshops and retreats in the US, Mexico, and Canada. She’s the author of Your First Fifteen Pages and cohosts a podcast aimed at demystifying the writing and publishing process.

Sandra is currently working on a memoir tentatively titled A Stacked Deck and a nonfiction book about persecution and prosecution in England during the time of Elizabeth and James I.

Orchid Tierney

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Intellectual Arts

Orchid Tierney is an Aotearoa New Zealand poet and scholar, now living in Gambier, Ohio. She is the author of a year of misreading the wildcats (Operating System, 2019) and Earsay (TrollThread 2016), and chapbooks my Beatrice (above/ground press, 2020), ocean plastic (BlazeVOX 2019), blue doors (Belladonna* Press), Gallipoli Diaries (GaussPDF 2017), the world in small parts (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and Brachiation (Gumtree, 2012). She is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. www.orchidtierney.com.

Tara Badstubner

2022-2023 Bookgardan. Literary Arts

I completed a non-degree writing program with Stanford University, CA. Conferences I've attended: Muse and Marketplace, Boston. Kentucky Women's Writers Conference, Lexington.The Work Conference, N.Y.C. Currently, I'm a Writer in Residence at Craigardan (2022-2023) where I'm studying with Kate Moses.

Rob Bailey

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Rob Bailey is a recent MFA graduate from California College of the Arts. His experience in sports journalism, slam poetry, and travel writing all inform his fiction. He is currently at work on his debut novel.

Jennifer Christgau-Aquino

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Jennifer Christgau-Aquino is an award-winning, Bay Area-based writer. She holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University and writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and journalism. Her work has been featured in Ruminate, Third Wednesday, The Dime Show Review, The Magnolia Review and Forbes, among others. She taught journalism at Notre Dame de Namur University and won CAL-JEC’s Journalism Educator of The Year in 2014. She’s currently working on her first novel.

Julie Yoder

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Julie Yoder is an emerging writer and poet - emerging in that she only recently embraced her own creative writing practice after decades of teaching technical writing to others. In between, she taught herself how to play drums, founded an English language coaching business, played actively in local bands, co-founded the nonprofit Girls Rock! DC, and started tap dancing. While searching for a creative outlet that would be less annoying to the neighbors in her apartment building, she stumbled on an experimental poetry workshop. The practices she learned there helped her finally let go of her inner editor and open up to new and exciting ways of approaching the writing process.

Julie is also a life long gardener and recently bought a farmette in Maryland where she plans to start a growing and donation program to help address food scarcity in the local community. Her superpowers are being unafraid to suck at new pursuits and never giving up.

Klara Wang

2022 Artist-in Residence. Place-Based

Zhiqian Wang is a conceptual artist. Her current practice is to expand our understanding of the “material world” in light of physics and philosophy, in conjunction with both traditional and interdisciplinary mediums. The conceptual basis of her work consists of three elements: structure, relationship, and abstraction. She believes the meaning embedded in the close relationships of artists and their work is more important than what is being expressed directly. It has to be understood in a network of relationships bounded by language. Together, they accomplish a value that has not yet been realized: It is a value beyond the framework of language, a value inherent in our cognition but was excluded from our system of knowledge, a value that is highly abstract, a value that has infinite possibilities.

Gordon Haber

2022 Artist in Residence. Literary Arts

Gordon Haber is a writer, editor, and mediocre guitarist. His recent short fiction has been in Cagibi and Newtown Literary. His nonfiction on religion and culture has appeared in The Forward, Religion Dispatches, and Religion & Politics. Gordon also edits the CANVAS Compendium, a newsletter on Jewish arts and culture. His awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Poland and two Queens Arts Fund New Work Grants.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Tucker Leighty-Phillips is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. His work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Offing, The Forge, and elsewhere. He received his MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University and currently works for Roadside Theater, a division of Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. His website is TuckerLP.net.

Daesha Devón Harris

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Visual Arts + John Brown Lives! Fellow

Daesha Devón Harris is a Saratoga Springs, New York artist and photographer who has spent time in Buffalo, NY and San Francisco, CA. Both her multi-cultural family and the unexpected death of her young father have greatly shaped her life. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the College of Saint Rose and an M.F.A. in Visual Art from the University at Buffalo. She is a member of various organizations and plays an active role in her community as a youth mentor, social activist and cultural history preservationist. The gentrification of her hometown and its effect on the local Black community has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork. Most recently Harris has been an En Foco Fellowship winner, MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute Fellow, an Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Studios of Key West, the Yaddo Artist Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship awardee, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grantee and named one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines. She is also an avid fisherwoman and hobbyist gardener.

Tiffany Rea-Fisher

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Performance + John Brown Lives! Fellow

TIFFANY REA-FISHER (Executive Artistic Director, EMERGE125 formerly Elisa Monte Dance) subscribes to the servant leadership model and uses disruption through inclusion as a way to influence her company's culture. In 2018 Tiffany was awarded a citation from the City of New York for her cultural contributions. She has extensive experience in choreographing and curating concert dance. As a choreographer, Tiffany has had the pleasure of creating numerous pieces for the company as well as being commissioned by Dance Theater of Harlem, Dallas Black Dance Theater, NYC Department of Transportation, Utah Repertory Theater, The National Gallery of Art in D.C., and having her work performed for the Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg. Her works have been seen on many stages including the Joyce, the Apollo, Joe's Pub, Aaron Davis Hall, and New York Live Arts in New York City. As well as being E125s Artistic Director Tiffany is also the Co-Founder of Inception to Exhibition, a non-profit that provides a holistic arts experience by supplying low cost, high-quality space to artists from a variety of disciplines and the Director of the Lake Placid School of Dance in Lake Placid, NY. She was the first Dance Curator at the interdisciplinary arts organization The Tank where she now sits on their Board of Trustees. Bringing the best of modern dance directly to the public, she curates the Bryant Park Dance Summer Series providing free art access to thousands while exposing upcoming and established artists to a wider audience. Her professional affiliations include being the Vice President of the Stonewall Community Development Corporation, an Advisory Board member of Dance/NYC, COHI member of IABD, and a proud member of Women of Color of the Arts.

Matthew Daddona

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Matthew’s fiction, poetry, and non-fiction has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, Outside, Fast Company, UPROXX, Amtrak’s The National, Guernica, Tin House, Slice Magazine, The Southampton Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Decider.com, and other outlets. His debut poetry collection, House of Sound, was published by Trail to Table Press in October 2020. As a former member of Flashpoint/NYC, a New York City writing collaborative, he has performed his poetry and prose in over twenty venues across the five boroughs. Matthew is also the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize for poetry; his flash fiction piece “On Shaft Mining” was a runner-up for The Blue Earth Review’s 2017 fiction contest, and he earned 2nd place in River Styx’ 2021 microfiction contest. Alongside two other multi-hyphenates, he co-hosts Kill Genre, a quarterly reading series in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Lily Grace Fast

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Culinary Arts

Lily Fast is an interdisciplinary artist who uses writing, drawing, and cooking as methods to explore affect and multivalent modes of being. Born in Washington DC, Lily has lived in Long Beach, CA, and currently resides in Chicago, IL.

Nina Semczuk

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Nina is a Ukrainian American writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in Sinking City Literary Journal, Coal Hill Review, Sledgehammer Lit, MONEY, Tasting Table, and elsewhere. She is an editor of the Writer's Foundry Review and a co-teacher for Voices From War, a veteran writing workshop. Nina served in the army for five years and is originally from upstate New York.

Austin Frerick

2022 Scholar-in-Residence. Intellectual Arts

Born and raised in Cedar Rapids Austin is a seventh generation Iowan and the first in his family to graduate from college and graduate school. Once he completed his education, Austin took a job at the Congressional Research Service in the Library of Congress, where he provided non-partisan policy analysis to members of Congress and their staff, with a focus on income support programs. He then worked as an Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Tax Analysis.

After his time at the Treasury, he worked as the Director of Special Projects at the Open Markets Institute where he continued to highlight the growing economic concentration in the American economy. Austin is now the Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University, an initiative that brings together faculty, students, and scholars to collaborate on research related to competition policy and antitrust enforcement. He is also a Senior Fellow at Data for Progress and is on the Board of Directors for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project.

Sandy Dyas

2022 Artist-Residence. Visual Arts

Sandra Louise Dyas is a visual artist and published author living in Iowa City. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in 1998 and teaches at Cornell College. Her creative practice is interconnected by a sense of place, both physical and emotional. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a co-founder of Homegrown Stories, an online video-art project.

Leigh Anne Couch

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Leigh Anne Couch has published two books of poetry, Every Lash (University of North Texas, 2020) and Houses Fly Away (Zone 3 Press, 2007), and one chapbook, Green and Helpless (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Now a freelance editor, she was formerly at Duke University Press and the Sewanee Review. Her poems have been published widely in magazines including PANK, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Subtropic, Smartish Pace, Nelle, and Cincinnati Review, with poetry featured in Verse Daily, Dzanc’s Best of the Web, and in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Penguin). Though she is a child of the South, she was a youth of the Adirondacks and the American West. She now lives in Sewanee, Tennessee with writer Kevin Wilson and their sons, Griff and Patch.

Zoe Fowler

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Alongside being a single mother to two teens and a foster mother to several more, I work as an educational researcher in Vermont. I recently completed a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, England, and I’ve had lyric essays and short stories published in a wide range of journals. My current work is focused on Lois Wilson, founder of Al-Anon. I have been fortunate to read my work locally, nationally and internationally, and I am struck by how literature can create a body of shared experience. I’m always thrilled when, after hearing my stories, others are motivated to share their own stories with me. However isolated we sometimes feel, none of us are alone. I write because I want to produce art which will bring people together. And when I’m not writing and working and mothering, I’ll be out hiking in Vermont and spending time with The Truffster, my dog.

Erica Lewis-Blunt

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Audio Visual + Performance + John Brown Lives! Fellow

Composer, DJ, and Sound Designer, Erica Blunt cherishes creating a body of work that is both entertaining and edifying. Starting her musical career as a DJ (Twelve45), Erica brings the sensibility of all musical stylings available to her making for astonishing audio palettes. Her mix series ‘12 by Twelve’ is used to highlight different genres, artists, and pivotal moments in music history while telling a story. A featured DJ at Essence's Street Style Block Party, she could be found performing at NYC staples like Ace Hotel, The Highline Ballroom, Baby’s All Right, and the Brooklyn Museum as well as bringing her unique style to provide the soundtrack for employees of Google, Spotify, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Erica is the Sound Coordinator and Resident Composer for EMERGE125 (formerly Elisa Monte Dance). Since 2017, her collaboration with Artistic Director Tiffany Rea-Fisher has produced several evening length works including After Dark, Emerged Nation, and Rights of Renaissance. Erica performed with the company for their 3-story takeover of the National Gallery of Art in 2018 including a performance by Chris Brubeck, a night that set the record for highest event attendance. Returning with them in 2019, she performed alongside a classical ensemble commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing designing a soundscape that was out of this world while feeling right at home. In February 2021, her composition for Emerged Nation was used as E125 kicked off the NYC Mayor’s Open Culture Program that will open up city streets for outdoor cultural performances and events throughout the five boroughs. Currently, she is composing a full-length ballet for Dance Theatre of Harlem based in the life of American Pianist and Activist Hazel Scott set to premiere on October 22, 2022.

Melanie Smith

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Melanie S. Smith is a 2019 graduate of the GrubStreet Writers Memoir Incubator and a writing instructor at Boston University. She has been published in Ruminate Magazine, Windhover Journal, and Blue Mountain Review, among others, and enjoyed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth Bishop House in Nova Scotia. She is an avid race walker and baker of artisanal breads.

Kathy Bratowski

Artist-in-Residence 2022. Literary Arts + Bookgardaner

Kathy Bratkowski is a writer living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Her short fiction has been published in Drunk Monkeys, Old Northeast Review and elsewhere. She has directed three documentary films and scores of short video features, many of which have been recognized by regional Emmy® awards, MCA Golden Reels and Telly awards. Her documentaries have screened in film festivals (the New York Television Festival, the St. Louis International Film Festival, and the Archaeology Channel film festival) and are streaming on Amazon Prime. She is in production on a film about war refugees from Afghanistan who are settling in the Midwest.

She has an M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and an M.A. in Media Communications from Webster University, where she taught courses in writing, media ethics and production. She has taught broadcast and multimedia production at Lindenwood University and St. Louis Community College.

She is a contributing editor at River Styx magazine where she conducts story critiques for fiction writers. She was a finalist in the Masters' Workshop in the Tucson Festival of Books and has been in residence at Vermont College of Fine Arts, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and Craigardan Arts Center.

She hosts interviews with authors as part of a series sponsored by the St. Louis County Library and St. Louis-area independent bookstores. She is at work on a novel Echo Beach, about an environmental catastrophe that displaces an entire small town, with long-lasting effects on the lives of the people who called it home.

Devon Reid

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Visual Arts + John Brown Lives! Fellow

Devon Reid is a multimedia artist, curator and cultural mediator whose work focuses on the notion that all of life stems from an interconnected wholeness. Her work explores the relationship between the tangible and intangible of connectedness.

Born in Montréal, Québec (1969) Devon lived and worked in Amsterdam, The Netherlands for over 15 years, mentored by artist Hanneke Somer and employed by the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague to develop a program for personal leadership in interactive media and design. She returned to Candiac, Québec in 2011 where she led the development of the cities’ first cultural policy as well as curating projects such as ‘Hist-Art’ (2017) and ‘La Vague’ (2020) bringing artists and fellow citizens together to explore the cities histories and connectedness. Devon’s artwork has been exhibited in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Canada. Her work is held in private collections both in Europe and Canada.

Lucia Maher-Tatar

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Culinary Arts

Lucia Maher-Tatar is an artist and chef. She carries a flux approach to art making and cheffing, working with any materials encountered to create polymorphous, sculptural spaces and gatherings that activate all senses. Having grown up cooking, Luci learned about food in her home kitchen with a sensibility towards bright, clean and herbaceous foods. Drawn to the model of ecosystem, LMT is interested in bridging collaboration in community and eco-mindedness, play and food, from the seed to the meal.

LMT was born in Albuquerque, NM, grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, then spent ten years on the east coast between Baltimore, MD and NYC. She received a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a concentration in Sustainability and Urban Farming from Maryland Institute College of Art. LMT currently lives in Santa Fe, where she is working as a private chef.

Rita Taryan

2022 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Bookgardaner

Rita Taryan is a Hungarian-born Canadian-American writer and teacher based in Brooklyn, New York. Her stories and poems have appeared in Terror House Magazine, ExPat Press, JewishFiction.net, and Room. She is working on a collection of satirical short stories, which tell of exiled tsarinas, demented Bahbooshkas, melting glaciers, strange transformations, cruel marriages, grief, resilience, and countless spies named Igor. Taryan’s short stories examine timely themes: populism, authoritarianism, nihilism. With wild insistent humor, she explores the personal, the paradoxical and the grotesque.

Fatima Alaiwat

2021 Artist-In-Residence. Visual Arts. Farm + Food Resident Intern

Raenel Stelly

2021 Artist-in-Residence. Culinary Arts + Teaching Fellow

Raenel Stelly, known as Chef Rae, is a talented, creative chef who puts the freshest ingredients together in an unbelievable way, while always utilizing from-scratch cooking. She attended culinary school at the Art Institute of Tennessee, and has been cooking since she was 3 years old. She learned how to cook from her great grandmother who fostered an environment of freedom and learning, along with a willingness to try anything.

Originally from California, Chef Rae lived in Arizona as well as Tennessee. She has international taste buds and cooks food from all different cultures. With a background deeply rooted in the South, a love for Italian, Asian, and Mexican food, and strong Creole roots, there is nothing that Chef Rae can't make. She is currently in a post-baccalaureate program pursuing global health. She is also a food sport competitor, commUnity philanthropist, caterer, and a high-class private chef. A lover of spices and refined food, she takes people on a culinary road “less traveled”.

Lindsay Elizabeth Eberhart

2021 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts. Farm + Food Resident Intern

Lindsay Eberhart is a storyteller, farmer, and recent graduate from the College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her academic work is centered around food sovereignty and how we can access a deeper connection to and with our environment through the food we consume. Currently, she has projects featured on PlanetForward and Unearthed with plans to continue exploring the nexus of art and science for many years to come.

Growing up, Lindsay balanced her time between the shores of Long Island and the trails of Wanakena, a very special hamlet in Northern New York. She is looking forward to learning, listening, and tuning into the needs of the Adirondack mountain community during her time at Craigardan.

Chloe Wingerter

2021 Artist-in-Residence. Art and Food Systems. Studio Resident Intern

Chloe Wingerter comes to food systems and agriculture from a public health perspective by working on several projects related to food access, chronic disease, and community-level systems change. While her introduction to food was through a public health lens, she is curious to explore how food systems additionally impact our environment and local communities from a systems change perspective. She is keen on bringing that same curiosity to her studio work by exploring the ways that different elements of clay and glaze can merge, fuse, and transform in functional ceramics pieces.

Chika Onyenezi

2019 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Chika Onyenezi is a writer living in United States. Born in Owerri, Nigeria. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, Apogee, Ninth Letter Magazine, The Opiate, Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. He received Honorable Mention in the 2016 Glimmer Train Fiction Open. He is a 2018 Kimbilio Fellow. In addition to writing short stories, he has a novel in progress.

Theresa Senato Edwards

2019 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts: Poetry.

Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books, one, with painter Lori Schreiner, which won The Tacenda Literary Award for Best Book, and two chapbooks. Excerpts and poems from her newest manuscript, can be found in Stirring, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Thrush Poetry Journal, UCity Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Rogue Agent, Mom Egg Review, Menacing Hedge and elsewhere. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, received creative writing residencies from Drop Forge & Tool and Craigardan, and is Editor in Chief of The American Poetry Journal (APJ).

Ann Armbrecht

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Winter Creative Writing Fellow

Ann Armbrecht is a writer and anthropologist (PhD, Harvard 1995) whose work explores the relationships between humans and the earth, most recently through her work with plants and plant medicine. She is the co-producer of the documentary Numen: the Nature of Plants, and the author of the award winning ethnographic memoir, Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, based on her research in Nepal. She is the director of the Sustainable Herbs Program, a multi-media website documenting stories of the people and places behind the herbal products industry. Ann was a 2017 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar documenting the supply chain of medicinal plants in India and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is currently completing a book, Following Herbs Through the Supply Chain, to be published by Chelsea Green Publishing. She lives with her family in central Vermont.

Erica Berry

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts: Essay

Erica Berry is a writer and teacher born in Portland, Oregon. Her essays and journalism can be found in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, NPR’s The Salt, Literary Hub, Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, Guernica, and others. A 2018 graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, she was the winner of the 2018 Steinberg Essay Prize and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Prize, and the recipient of fellowships from the Judd Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is currently working on a book of essays about fear and anxiety in the Anthropocene.

Luke Ayres

Culinary Manager, 2019. Culinary Arts. Pastry Chef.

Luke Ayres joined Craigardan for 2019 as our first Culinary Arts Program Manager and Head Chef. Luke received a BA in studio arts in Minneapolis. Afterward, he promptly moved to NYC and spent ten years hustling and bustling before moving to the Adirondacks in 2010 with his wife to open Green Point Foods Market & Cafe. Luke went on to become the Pastry Chef at the Lake Placid Lodge. Luke and his family live in beautiful Keene Valley.

Hedy Yang

2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Studio Arts + Teaching Fellow

Hedy Yang is a 22 year old artist with a passion for clay. She started taking ceramics in high school to fulfill a class requirement, and ended up falling in love with it. Hedy recently graduated in the Spring of 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts in Ceramics at Michigan State University, and a minor in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Over the last few years, she has worked hard to create content for social media that showed her process which has been shared by several major social media outlets such as InsiderArt, Buzzfeed, Elle Decor, and many others. Her videos have amassed over 50 million views on Facebook, which she has been able to parlay into a small business, making and selling work through Etsy.

Harry Caldwell

2018/19 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Studio Arts.

Harry Caldwell is a functional potter born and raised on the shores of Lake George in Bolton Landing, NY. After attending Franklin Pierce University concentrating in Ceramics, Harry took an apprenticeship in Coromandel, New Zealand. He apprenticed under Petra Meyboden building a wood-fired kiln as well as producing functional wheel-based vessels. Through his experiences in New Zealand a passion was formed to make work using local clay bodies to have a better connection to the land in which the work is made. Working in his own studio Caldwell Clayworks, in Bolton Landing, Harry uses clay sourced from an island on Lake George: Clay Island. Combining defined forms with a strong emphasis on the connection to the region in his work.

Kathy Irwin

2018/19 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Studio Arts + Harvest Plate Fellow

Kathy Irwin is from Oswego, NY and graduated with a BFA in Painting from The State University of New York at Potsdam. Along with painting she took ceramic courses at the university level as well as classes and workshops at the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN and in Wisconsin. Moving to the mid west opened her eyes to the potters living and working in the area and the sense of community around ceramics. This fascination was followed by exploration and a passion for making pots designed and used for everyday occasions.

Kathy was honored to accept the Connor Meigs Art Award, which provided her the opportunity to have her first solo show at the Florence Mill Art Loft in Omaha, NE. Since then she has had a show at the SALT Quarters Gallery in Syracuse, NY and has been granted residences at the Horned Dorset Colony in Leonardsville, NY and STARWorks Ceramic Residency in Star, NC. Kathy currently lives in a small town in Northern Wisconsin on the South Shore of Lake Superior. She is passionate about making art that can create connections between people, food, and place.

Lauren Cortese

2019 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Lauren Cortese is a fiction writer who began to pursue writing full time in 2018. For Lauren writing was always a hobby, until she found myself in a city she didn’t like working at a job she didn’t like with half of a completed manuscript that she absolutely loved. Lauren writes contemporary fiction with a focus on postmodern concepts, struggles of the individual, and she particularly loves dark humor and complex dialogue.

Melisa Sturman

2018/19 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Resident Studio Intern

Melisa Sturman is a painting and ceramic artist from Minnesota. She studied fine art at George Washington University and has worked as a production potter in St. Paul, MN and as an art teacher in various community settings. A research fellowship for maiolica in Italy helped bridge the gap between her painted canvas and ceramic pieces. Now, her work oscillates between functional pottery, paintings with expressive brushwork, and the space between.

TaraMarie Perri

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Place-Based + Teaching Fellow

TaraMarie Perri is a teacher; her vocation is to support others in discovering the unique wisdom and capacity of their own human body and mind. For more than two decades she has been integrating Eastern and Western practices for students in group and one-to-one settings exploring Yoga (capital Y), Ayurveda, dance, contemplative arts and sciences, alchemy, holistic health and energy therapies. TaraMarie finds inspiration in nature, ongoing study with her personal circle of teachers, and via unique collaborations with multidisciplinary colleagues, performers, artists, and makers in-studio, onstage, and outdoors. She maintains private practices in Brooklyn and Upstate NY.

Founder, Perri Institute for Mind and Body, www.perriinstitute.com

Faculty, New York University Tisch School of the Arts

www.taramarieperri.com

photo credit: Peter Crosby

Stellah De Ville

2018 Artist-In-Residence. Ceramics

Stellah is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer currently in residence at the Cobb Mountain Art and Ecology Project in Northern California.

Stellah’s peripatetic working life has taken her from Melbourne to San Francisco and New York and now, back again to California (with many stops along the way).

She has exhibited her award winning work in her native Australia as well as Europe and the USA.

Her work explores the themes of entropy and transmutation and the inherent beauty to be found in destruction and rebirth. Much of her work is informed by her experiences of being an outsider and immigrant.

While focusing on developing her technique in ceramics, her creative practice also extends to installation, interiors, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and functional ware.

Artist’s website: stellahdeville.com

Margot J. Pollans

2018 Artist-In-Residence. Food Law. Intellectual Arts.

Margot Pollans is an Associate Professor at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, where she teaches food law, administrative law, and environmental law. Her academic work focuses on environmental regulation of food production, and she is coauthor of a forthcoming food law casebook. Other areas of her work include the farm bill and true cost of food accounting. She is also the Faculty Director of the Pace-NRDC Food Law Initiative, whose mission is to promote justice and sustainability in the food system by increasing access to legal services for farmers and food businesses.

Jason Vivona

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Mixed-media. Place-Based + Teaching Fellow

Jason Matthew Vivona was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Creation has always been priority-one for this individual, whether it be art, music, surfing, cooking, skateboarding, or cycling. Excited to pursue professional opportunities, Jason escaped his college career a bit early to travel around the continent as an artist and sponsored skateboarder. Since then, he has exhibited his work around the world, living a nomadic lifestyle and creating throughout, as well as maintaining a level of collaboration with other artists, creatives and companies, to keep pushing the creative process forward. He is currently traversing the United States, making art and collaborating with other like-minded folks. This summer, Jason is heading to Boston to work with Timothy Maslow on his new culinary venture, designing aesthetics for the interior of his new restaurant. Afterward, Jason will be an artist-in-residence at Craigardan. He is ecstatic to work within this inspired community; sharing ideas, creating and exploring this new environment.

Renqian Yang (b.1987, Xiangtan, Hunan Province, China)

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics + Studio Arts

Renqian Yang obtained her B.F.A. in Ceramics from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing in 2009 and her M.F.A. in Ceramics from Syracuse University in 2014. Currently, she lives and works in Oswego, New York as an artist and Assistant Professor at SUNY Oswego. Yang’s work has continued to exhibit in the U.S.A. and China.

Yang is interested in the concept of binaries, and her work addresses the unity and the contradiction of dichotomies. For example, restriction and freedom; pessimism and optimism; complexity and simplicity; representation and abstraction; the man-made world and the natural world are some ideas she has been inquired into. At the same time, her work explores how an individual is related to nature, society, and oneself. While focusing on developing her technique in ceramics, her practices also extend to installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, video and functional ware.

Artist’s website: www.renqianyang.com

Marco Wilkinson

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts + Creative Writing Fellow

Marco Wilkinson writes lyric non-fiction focused on ecological and agricultural/food themes. He is currently at work on a lyric memoir, Madder. He teaches both writing and sustainable agriculture at Lorain County Community College and Oberlin College. He is also the managing editor at Oberlin College Press. His work can be found in Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Seneca Review, Taproot, Terrain, and elsewhere.

Aimee Lin

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Interdisciplinary Arts. Place-Based

Aimee Lin is an interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore and everywhere. A weaver, woodworker, natural dyer, and herbalist, her work is a meditation on material and labor. Informed by deep ecology, deep listening, and a plethora of esoteric resources, her practice involves investigating liminal space through attunement and traveling to harness various collective energies and perspectives.

Aimee’s background as a fiber artist and musician reinforces her belief that everything is interconnected. currently, she is in the midst of cataloguing a cosmic library.

Amanda Palmer

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Printmaking. Teaching Fellow

Amanda Palmer has been an art teacher for youth groups, adults and private citizens for 30 years. She enjoys teaching drawing, crafts, and especially woodblock printing to children and adults. She presents this workshop at Zion National Park each year. It is increasingly important to her to model Leave No Trace principles and to speak about her brand of stewardship of the National Parks through her work. Amanda's current focus is to create a series of relief prints from her drawings and photographs.

Tracy Mayo

2020 – 2021 Bookgardan. Literary Arts

Tracy moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2014 with her husband and Flat-Coated Retriever. After a 30 year career in commercial construction management as a trail blazing woman in a man’s world, she began work on her memoir. Gardening, hiking and birding are among her favorite things.

Kyle Brumsted

2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Resident Studio Intern + Teaching Fellow

Kyle Brumsted is a functional potter originally from Ithaca, NY. His work utilizes clean forms with slight alterations and simple geometric elements to highlight the effects of atmospheric firing with salt and soda. Before coming to Craigardan, Kyle gained experience working as a studio intern at Baltimore Clayworks and as an apprentice for Montreal artist Mahmoud Baghaeian.

“I hope to gain a deep understanding of material properties and interactions through research and experimentation in order to lay bare the processes of making and firing in the finished vessel.”

Greer Rochford

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Culinary Arts + Teaching Fellow

Greer Rochford is an artist, chef and photographer. She graduated from a Masters of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts with her thesis ‘In Search of Jetztziet; between the still and the moving image’. Her photographs, videos and performance work have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Greer currently works as the Sous Chef of award winning Sydney cafe Cornersmith Annandale, sharing their philosophy of local, ethical and seasonal food. She is passionate about reducing waste in the kitchen by using ‘the whole ingredient’, experimenting with waste saving techniques, especially fermenting and turning ‘food into dust’ as well as traditional pastry and baking.

Greer is interested in the intersections of cooking, art and philosophy. Her research spans the visual and culinary arts with a common thread of nostalgia, memory, place, desire and alchemy. She believes ‘there is a connection between photography and cooking - both are processes that are inextricably linked to alchemy (and magic) lending themselves to philosophical enquiry pertaining to the human condition.’

Mary Barringer

2018 The Paul Z. Nowicki Master Artists Fellow. Ceramics

Mary Barringer has been a studio artist since 1973, making both sculpture and handbuilt functional pottery. She received a BA in art from Bennington College, and worked as an assistant to Michael Frimkess. Her work has been exhibited widely, in contexts ranging from museums and commercial galleries to craft fairs and pottery tours.

In addition to her studio practice she has taught at craft schools, community colleges, and universities including Ohio State and Ohio University, and has written and lectured on the history of ceramics. From 2004 to 2014 she was editor of The Studio Potter journal. She lives and works in western Massachusetts.

Naomi Schoenbaum

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Employment, Family, Antidiscrimination and Gender Law. Intellectual Arts + Fellow

Naomi Schoenbaum is an Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School whose research centers on employment law, family law, antidiscrimination law, and gender. Her work has addressed the legal regulation of critical but often overlooked relationships in the market, such as those between coworkers and those between workers and customers, as well as the design of employment discrimination law. Her current research is focused on discrimination and intimacy in the sharing economy, unsexing the law of pregnancy, and the law’s increasing turn to ignorance to achieve antidiscrimination goals. Her work has appeared in numerous law journals, as well as popular publications such as Slate and The Atlantic.

Professor Schoenbaum is a graduate of Harvard Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, and Yale University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of Aurora magazine. Prior to joining the law faculty, Professor Schoenbaum was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, a law clerk to the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow, and a litigation associate at the law firm Sidley Austin.

Lily Fein

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Studio Resident Intern

Lily Fein makes coiled and pinched vessels that emphasize the imprint of the hand. She speaks a visual language, bringing to life the tensions of conversation and interaction. With curves and surface, she explores what it is to touch - where the interior and exterior of a vessel meet and in the finger-marked skin of the pot. Fein has lived in the Mojave Desert, dipped into many creek beds in the United States, and makes music in her band, The Glue. Her home base is Eastern Massachusetts.

Jeff Mertz

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Photography, Film, Culinary Arts. Place-Based

Jeff Mertz is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, photographer, and writer whose work focuses on exploring emotional vernacular in multiple forms. An irrefutable romantic, his artistic practice is dedicated to finding poetry, empathy, and redemption in the mundane.

Eric Hoefer

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics

Eric Hoefer is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Central Oklahoma where he teaches courses in hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramic art. Originally from upstate New York, where he developed his passion for the arts. His formal education in Fine Arts began at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica, New York. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. After graduation, Hoefer pursued post-baccalaureate studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and then spent one year working in Las Vegas, Nevada at Tom Coleman's Studio and Gallery. He received a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Ceramics at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois and completed a one-year artist-in-residency at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis, Missouri. As an artist, his current research has been in creating soda and wood-fired architectonic porcelain vessels. Mr. Hoefer has been teaching in higher education for over 10 years now and continues to exhibit his work throughout the United States.

“The timeless quality that can be found in ceramic vessels and objects drives my work; it is a strong reflection of humanity revealing our history, values and spirit. Clay is a uniquely intimate material that allows one to create through the act of touch. Its infinite possibility of abstraction and expression is inspiring. Historical ceramic iconography, modern painting, architecture, sculpture and contemporary design all merge together and inform my work.”

www.erichoeferceramics.com

Nina Boutsikaris

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Nina Boutsikaris’ narrative nonfiction has appeared in Third Coast, Fourth Genre, Hippocampus, Redivider, The Los Angeles Review, The Offing, Hobart, Brevity, and elsewhere, and her work was named a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Her first book, I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2019. She has taught at the University of Arizona, where she earned her MFA, the Gotham Writers Workshop, and The New School, and was a Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2016. She divides her time between New York City and Hudson, NY.

David Fontana

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University School of Law. Intellectual Arts + Teaching Fellow

David Fontana is an Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University School of Law in Washington. D.C. He went to law school at Yale and graduate school at Oxford, and publishes in leading academic journals in both law and political science, as well as in newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post and The Atlantic Monthly. He regularly consults with Congress, presidential campaigns, and foreign constitution-drafters on issues of constitutional law.

Tatiana Abatemarco

2018 Artist-in-Residence, 2018. Food Justice. Intellectual Arts + Research Fellow

Dr. Tatiana Abatemarco is a Lecturer in the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont with an appointment through the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Prior to holding this position, she was a Scholar in Residence at Green Mountain College, where she taught in the Masters of Sustainable Food Systems and Masters in Resilient and Sustainable Communities Graduate Programs. She also held the rank of Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Paul Smith’s College.

Dr. Abatemarco received a PhD in Natural Resources, with a focus in Environmental Thought and Culture, from the University of Vermont and a Masters degree in Philosophy from the University of Minnesota. Her areas of interest are sustainable food systems, environmental humanities, and ecofeminism.

Cathleen Mulrooney

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Literary Arts

Cat Mulrooney is a writer and teacher. Her poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in a variety of online and print publications, including Mothering Magazine, The We'Moon Anthology: Love, SageWoman Magazine, LiteraryMama, MotherVerse Magazine, The Apple Valley Review, Flashquake, Glossolalia, Modern Creative Life Magazine, and many others. She has been a college writing teacher since 2000 and has also facilitated creative writing workshops in elementary schools, high schools, prisons, and private organizations. In 2008, she won a state grant as an Emerging Artist in Fiction from the Delaware Division of the Arts. In 2013, Cat earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Also in 2013, she was a participating writer and workshop facilitator for the prestigious AROHO Retreat in Abiquiu, New Mexico and was a cast-member of the 2013 Listen to Your Mother show. Most recently, she completed a writing workshop and retreat at the Millay Colony of the Arts in summer of 2017.

Zachary Gerhardt Clemans

2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence. Culinary Arts

Zach Clemans is an Adirondack chef, artist and maker currently working with natural materials from the region. Growing up in Old Forge, his formative years were spent camping and exploring the park where he gained an appreciation and respect for the products available in the region, now vital to his practice. Through his work with these products, he wants to interpret the character of this environment and express a sense of this place, where he is from.

Jennifer Steil

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Fiction, Memoir, Journalism. Creative Writing Fellow

Jennifer Steil is an award-winning author and journalist. Her debut novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, published by Doubleday in July 2015, won the 2013 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award and was shortlisted for both the Bisexual Book Award and the Lascaux Novel Prize. It has received considerable critical acclaim, notably in the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and The New York Times Book Review.

Jennifer’s first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Broadway Books, 2010) is a memoir about her tenure as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a. The book was praised by The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald among other publications.

Jennifer’s freelance work has appeared in the World Policy Journal, Die Welt, Saranac Review, Vogue UK, the Washington Times, The Week, Yahoo Travel, Time, and The Rumpus.

Caitlin Kelly

2018 Resident Internship. Agriculture and Writing

Caitlin Kelly is originally from York, Maine, but has called the Adirondacks home for two years. She received a BA in creative writing and environmental studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. During her time there, she often took trips down to the Adirondacks and knew after graduating she wanted to move here full time. Since graduating, she has held a series of jobs—waitressing, farming, and working for the Adirondack Mountain Club as Hutmaster at Johns Brook Lodge. More recently she worked at the North Country School as an English and Science teacher, and writing freelance for Adirondack Life and Powder Magazines.

Courtlin Byrd

2018 Artist-in-Residence. Writing and film

Courtlin Byrd is a writer and filmmaker from Tennessee by way of California. She attended Vanderbilt University and USC School of Cinematic Arts. Her written work has been featured in the online lit 'zine The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review and the online music 'zine The Bait Shop. She currently resides in Buffalo, NY, where she has turned her creative focus to intermedia prose.

Emma Silverstein

Studio Resident Intern, 2017

Harvest Plate Resident, 2017-2018

Ceramics

Emma Silverstein studied ceramics in Syracuse, China and India. She works with clay and cloth and “making pottery and other useful objects.” After her year-long residency at Craigardan, Emma will pursue a Master’s Degree in Ceramics at Ohio University.

Katharine Wyatt

2017 Farm + Food Resident Intern. Agriculture and Installation Art

Liz Flyntz

2017 Artist-in-Residence. Epicurean Endocrinology. Culinary Arts + Fellow

Liz Flyntz is a Brooklyn-based curator, home chef, and Craigardan's 2017 Culinary Artist-in-Residence and Fellowship recipient. While in residence, Liz is undertaking the food and consumption based portion of her research into how industrialized food and environmental degredation effect gender and the body.

Thomas Graves + Jennifer Kidwell

2017 Nowicki Master Artist Fellows. Performance Art.

Jennifer Kidwell is a performing artist. Recent projects include Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova, FringeArts), and Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed (Dan Hurlin). She is currently working with Geoff Sobelle and Nichole Canuso and is a PITC company member, a Wilma Theater Associated Artists, a co-artistic director of the theater company Lightning Rod Special and a co-founder of JACK. She is a 2016 Pew Fellow.

Thomas Graves is a Co-Producing Artistic Director for Rude Mechs in Austin, Texas. As such he has developed, performed in and produced The Method Gun and I've Never Been So Happy among others. He is currently working on the Rude Mechs' latest production Field Guide commissioned by Yale Rep and the project Not Every Mountain which will appear at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2018. Thomas holds an MFA in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas at Austin.

Eric Kao

2017 Visiting Artist. Ceramics

Eric Kao was the Director at The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, located in Jiangxi Province, China. After receiving his M.F.A. in Ceramics from University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth in 2009, he was granted an opportunity to work in the world famous porcelain producing city of Jingdezhen. Eric returned to United States in 2016 searching for an opportunity to foster creativity in the United States and ended up in Baltimore, Maryland as the Studio and Artist Programs Director until May 2017.

Amy L. Seidl

2017 Artist-in-Residence. Environmental Studies / Climate Change

Amy Seidl is the Associate Director of Environmental Studies and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Vermont. She is an ecologist and author of two books of non-fiction: Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World and Finding Higher Ground: Adaptation in the Age of Warming, both published by Beacon Press. Amy received her B.A. from Hampshire College and her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Vermont. She teaches courses in climate change, sustainability, and environmental literature and is currently at work on a piece of eco-fiction.

Joshua Ramey

2017 Artist-in-Residence. Place-Based. Philosophy. Teaching Fellow: "What do We Owe Each Other?"

Joshua Ramey is a philosopher, writer, and professor at Grinnell College. His work addresses issues in contemporary politics, economics, culture, and spirituality. He is the author of Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency(Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Duke University Press, 2012). While in residence, Joshua is teaching a five-week course, What do We Owe Each Other?, and curating a free guest lecture series which includes the contemporary thinkers Aron Dunlop and Cleo Kearns.

Catherine Seidenberg

2017 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramics. Harvest Plate Fellow.

Catherine Seidenberg is a potter, professional gardener, and Craigardan's first Harvest Plate Resident.

The Space We Make

2017 Artists-in-Residence. Place-Based. Performing Art. Teaching Fellows.

The Space We Make is a multidisciplinary performance company that has been creating site-specific work in the Adirondacks and New York City for the past five years. Co-founded and directed by dancer/choreographer Simon Thomas-Train and writer/musician Caitlin Scholl, both Adirondack natives, The Space We Make is committed to bringing high-level performance and innovative, immersive art forms to North Country audiences.

Tyler Bischoff

2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramic Arts

Tyler Bischoff is a functional and sculptural potter from New Jersey. His love for ceramics was born while attending the Gow School, an all-boys boarding school for dyslexic young men in Buffalo, New York. Tyler studied under Ted Lossowski and received his degree in Visual Arts from Wells College in 2015 and then joined the staff of the Saratoga clay Arts Center as a studio intern and instructor. Here he worked closely with artist Jill Fishon- Kovachick and apprenticed under Regis Brodie. Tyler's work is inspired by the desire to encourage touch and interaction with his vessels. The challenges of Dyslexia made him more of a kinesthetic and visual learner. The texture he uses in his work is visually stimulating with a presence that encourages a physical interaction with the work, breaking the rule of art as object only to be viewed and not to be touched.

Lizzy Wilford

2017 Farm + Food Resident Intern

Lizzie Wilford is from the eastern shore of Maryland, a place far flatter and more humid than the Adirondacks. As Craigardan’s Agricultural Intern she divided her time between working the land and working in the studio. Lizzie is now a farmer nearby at Juniper Hill Farm.

Caitlyn Wright

2017 Artist-in-Residence. Ceramic Arts + Teaching Fellow

Caitlyn Wright is a ceramic artist who's work explores the intersection between food and functional pots. She is interested in pushing the bounds of our relationship with food and how the act of dining can be elevated when paired with thoughtful ceramic tableware.

Artists + Scholars