Andrea Pérez Bessin

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Andrea Pérez Bessin is a printmaker and installation artist whose work focuses on syncretic amalgams of plants and humans that celebrate gender variance present in the natural world. They received their MFA in Studio art from the University of Connecticut, a BFA in Studio Art from Rhode Island College and a BA in Biology from Brown University. Their practice has been sustained through residencies and grants including Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Peter Bullough Foundation, The Rhode Island Foundation, Millay Arts, Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust, Marks Family Endowment in the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Andrea lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island.

Brandon Scott

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Brandon Scott is a multimedia artist and art historian studying how medicinal and non-medicinal plants have been interpreted and used throughout time.

Mandy Bonnell

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Mandy Bonnell is a printmaker and contemporary artist investigating the connections that lie between drawing and stitch, combining a variety of traditional craft techniques with contemporary drawing and printmaking processes.

She explores mark making on an intimate scale using careful precision to create skeletal structures inspired by the natural world and textile samples. As well as responding to the natural world, her imagery draws on eighteenth and nineteenth century textile samples of embroidery and lace and she incorporates typographic punctuation marks transferred into different pattern formations to form a narrative. The time it takes to produce these sequences unites the pursuit of hand-stitched needlepoint while utilizing a repeated mark within a non-repeated pattern.

Her work is a response to self-taught eighteenth and nineteenth century women artists and naturalists, to acknowledge forgotten artists, whose images are lasting examples of plants and insects now extinct and provide insight into the attitudes and practices of women at the time. She aims to establish an on-going visual and tactile dialogue with the past and interpret this through contemporary drawing and printmaking methods.

Calaudine Metrick

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Born in Philadelphia, PA Claudine Metrick is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor at PrattMWP, an affiliate of the Pratt Institute.

In 2023, she will be an artist in residence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation and The Walkaway House, Center of Gravity Residency. Her work has been exhibited at the Vessels’ Gallery formerly in Boston’s South End, as well as Carroll and Sons, the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Danforth Museum of Art, the New Bedford Art Museum, the Cotuit Center for the Arts, AS220, the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY, Arizona State University, Morehead State University, Adams State University and in the New York City area at The Painting Center, Site: Brooklyn, and Curious Matter.

Recent shows include the “26th Annual Drawing Show” at The Boston Center for the Arts in Boston, MA, “Uncompressed” at Coastal Carolina University, and a solo exhibition of works “Biophilia” at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Deepthi Bathala

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Deepthi Bathala is a writer focusing on architectural history and theory. She was recently recognized by The Graham Foundation with a 2023 Carter Manny Writing Citation. Taubman College Ph.D. student earned this recognition for her dissertation titled “Famine Crops, Plantations, and Environmental Imaginaries: Botanical Gardens in Colonial and Contemporary India.” 

Her aspiration is to contribute to a broader understanding of the active role that plants play in shaping our environment and informing our efforts to address climate change.

Veronica Martin

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Veronica Martin is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in Hesperios Journal, Vestoj, Kinfolk, Fonograf Magazine and elsewhere. Her 2016 column for Tin House, Your Slipcase is Showing, explored the intersection of literature and personal aesthetic.  She has received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers and from the Community of Writers, and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Texas.

Yujin Kang

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Yujin Kang 강유진 is a painter currently based out of Virginia and has exhibited her work across the U.S and internationally. Her work features impressionistic mountainous landscapes juxtaposed against modern architecture and construction. To see more of her work visit her website here: https://www.kangyujin.com/

Jane Marchant

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Jane Marchant is an interdisciplinary storyteller working with writing, photography, plants, and collage. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, Apogee, Kweli Journal, Catapult, Columbia Journal, Evergreen Review, and elsewhere, as well as anthologized in The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century (2Leaf Press). Her photography and book art have been exhibited with the Center for Book Arts, Kala Art Institute, and ACCI Gallery. She’s at work on a memoir in the form of an Encyclopedia of Botany of the San Francisco Bay Area, which investigates motherhood, racial passing, and interconnected root systems.

Jane is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and Lucas Artists Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center. She has received support from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation, Tin House’s First Book Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and Art Omi, among others. 

Helen Palmer

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III

Helen Palmer is a writer, thinker and teacher. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014), Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and her first novel is Pleasure Beach (Prototype, 2023).

The concepts she has written about in recent years all share the common need for new narratives and new perceptions. They all require the simultaneous deployment of scientific and technical experimentation with playful use of the imagination in order to think beyond what already exists and fabulate alternative models into being.

Palmer has been teaching across the disciplines of literature, literary and critical theory, diffractive creativities and creative writing since 2010. She runs public creative writing workshops.

Darcy Casey

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III

Darcy Casey is a writer, editor, and teacher holding an MFA from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. She’s a member of MWPA, AWP, and The Authors Guild. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Yemassee, CutBank, Brilliant Flash Fiction, River River, and elsewhere.

The opening page for her novel, Pity-Heart, was Longlisted for the Retreat West Best Opening Page Competition in 2020 and her flash CNF piece, “My Sister and Other Big Things,” was a runner-up for the CutBank Big Sky, Small Prose contest in 2019. 

Nancy Hershberger

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III

Nancy Hershberger is an art quilter/fiber artist. She makes art quilts using fabric and thread and inspiration from the natural world.

Antonella Chiodo

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session III

Antonella Chiodo is brilliant researcher, and specialist in 16th century Italian drawings. She has completed research at the Frick Center for the History of Collecting, and continues to work part-time at the Morgan Library.

Laura Villareal

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Laura Villareal is a poet and book critic. Her debut poetry collection, Girl’s Guide to Leaving, (University of Wisconsin Press 2022) was awarded Texas Institute of Letters' John A. Robert Johnson Award for a First Book of Poetry and the Writers' League of Texas Book Award for Poetry. ​She earned an MFA at Rutgers University—Newark and has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, National Book Critics Circle’s Emerging Critics Program, VONA, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at University of Texas-Austin. 
 
She is currently an associate with Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, where she co-edits and writes for Letras Latinas Blog 2, in addition to working on other related projects. 

Rachel Hirsch

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Rachel Hirsch studies the cultural history of early modern South Asia. Her research is geared towards understanding the construction of cities and gardens, theorizing urbanism and territoriality, and experimenting with new research methods. Rachel has spent the past several summers in Pune, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Burhanpur, where she has conducted fieldwork and studied Hindi and Persian. More recently, she has written on the construction of Burhanpur in the early seventeenth century and on the historiography of Islamic cities in South Asia.

Marco Wilkinson

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Marco Wilkinson received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds. He has received fellowships from the Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology, Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Hemera Foundation, and Craigardan. He is the nonfiction editor at The Los Angeles Review. His teaching and writing interests include creative nonfiction, ecopoetics, lyric prose, Latinx literature, and queer literature.

Doug Baulos

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

From their urban studio in downtown Birmingham, artist Doug Baulos creates rich and earthy installations from found objects as well as homemade textiles and pigments. The UAB Assistant Professor of Drawing has built an impressive career as a fine artist, with an upcoming show at the Kyoto Art Center in Kyoto, Japan and a current exhibit at the newly opened Shelby County Arts Center titled Root, Branch, and Star. Doug’s hand-bound books, mixed-media installations, and woven work is grounded in themes of nature, mortality, and loss but feels hauntingly fragile — beautiful with a delicate darkness. Doug shares with us their own sources of inspiration and how they hope to inspire young artists in the south.

Jessica Dalrymple

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Jessica Dalrymple studied Fine Art at Hamilton College and trained as a painter at The Art Student's League of New York and studied with prominent landscape painters; Gregg Kreutz, Scott Christenson, and John Osbourne. She has exhibited with many national and regional juried shows and has received numerous awards including the Fenimore Award which granted her a solo exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY. She earned a certificate in horticulture from Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, is a licensed city tree pruner through Trees New York, and actively volunteers with local environmental groups.

She collaborates with organizations to create art events that raise awareness about the local landscape and environmental issues such as; co-creating ArtLab Gowanus, a pop-up structure hosting landscape related art workshops taught by local artists, made possible by the Gowanus Public Art Grant, applied for in collaboration with The Gowanus Canal Conservancy (2015). In 2014 she created a “Plein Air On The Canal” event hosting orgs such as local chapters of The Urban Sketchers and Oil Painters of America on the banks of the canal to capture the evolving landscape. Other events include a Spring Botanical Draw for the Gowanus Dredgers focusing on local vegetation, multiple Botanical Drawing events for The Old Stone House Brooklyn featuring their gardens, and a Botanical “Drink N Draw” event to raise funds for The Human Impact Institute. Most recently she leads monthly “Mindful Nature Journaling Hikes” through New York City Parks.

Suzy Kopf

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Suzy Kopf is a multidisciplinary artist who scrutinizes the paper ephemera of midcentury consumer culture to probe the enduring mythos of the American Dream. Through water media paintings, collages and site-specific installations she excavates archival materials and inherited nostalgia for planned utopias erected and cast aside. Vibrant and pastel colors unify her work across media and evoke the built landscape of the eroding Silicon Valley where she grew up. Conscious of how much byproduct can result from art-production, Suzy strives to have a “no waste” practice, recycling materials back into her work and making her own paint.

Suzy has been the recipient of numerous residency fellowships including most recently Kala, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Playa and VCCA. Projects related to her research-based practice have been funded by the Hagley Museum, Baltimore National Heritage Area, the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and the Design History Society.

Eleanor Olson

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Eleanor Quist Costello Olson was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, surrounded by nature, dogs, and women. Eleanor's work has become focused on interactions with the built and natural environments we live within and complicating the narratives usually thought of as black and white. They are influenced by gender and race theories, social and political histories, nature, and our current ecological state. Activist and politically engaged painting and other visual art forms have largely become the focus of their work, with an emphasis on conservation, destruction, and intersections within environmental, gender, and race issues. 

Eleanor Quist Costello Olson recently received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Class of 2020 with concentrations in Race, Gender, and Sexuality and Nature, Culture, and Sustainability. 

Francisco Vazquez Murillo

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Francisco Vazquez Murillo is a visual artist living in Rosario, Argentina. He has exhibited his work internationally throughout Argentina, Mexico, Netherlands and now at Oak Spring Garden Foundation, in Upperville Virginia with his site-specific installation Deadline. To see more of his work visit his online portfolio here: https://fvazquezmurillo.com.ar/Deadline