Nazafarin Lotfi, 2023

Eliza Moore Fellow 2023

Nazafarin Lotfi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi is a multi-disciplinary artist who studies how the self and notions of identity formation are understood in relationship to architecture, landscape, space, and place. She explores humanness in relation to nonhuman bodies and places that are defined by practices of map-making and gardening. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the University Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal, IL; Regards, Chicago, IL; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; MOCA Tucson, AZ; Elmhurst Museum of Art, Elmhurst, IL, among many more. She is the recipient of 2023 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence.

Lotfi’s practice has received support from Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Grant, Night Bloom: Grants for Artists, and CAAP Grant from the City of Chicago. Lotfi was a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University in 2021-22.

Ariana Benson, 2022

Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence, 2022

Ariana Benson is a poet with an interest in this connection through the lens of black history. She is the recipient of the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her manuscript Black Pastoral. Scroll down to read our Q&A with Ariana, and visit her website to learn more about her projects and publications: https://arianabenson.wordpress.com/about/ 

Fidencio Fifield-Perez, 2021

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2021

Artist and educator Fidencio Fifield-Perez was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, and raised in the U.S. after his family migrated. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. Learn more about him at http://fidenciofperez.com, and read an interview with him on our blog.

Emma Steinkraus, 2020

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2020

Emma Steinkraus is an artist, curator, assistant professor, and the visual arts editor of the contemporary poetry and art magazine Company Journal, currently based in Farmville, VA. Her work combines paintings, photo transfers, and installations to explore gender and ecology. Her project for the Eliza Moore fellowship, Impossible Garden, documents the contributions of women to natural history and scientific illustration by assembling thousands of images of the animals, insects, and plants created by 130 of history’s female scientific artists working between the 15th and 19th centuries into a mural wallpaper.

To learn more about Emma, visit www.emmasteinkraus.com/. 

To see more of her work and read about her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, visit our Shelter in Art Exhibit and our blog. 

Maddison Colvin, 2020

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2020

Maddison Colvin is an interdisciplinary visual artist residing in Utah who currently works in Brigham Young University’s Department of Art.  Her work focuses on themes of ecology, built environment, and communal knowledge, and spans media from painting to video game design. Her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, titled Eden(s), explores humankind’s visual, aesthetic, and cultural responses to gardens by weaving together essays, photos, drawings, paintings, and facsimiles of other botanical work into a book. Learn more about Maddison at http://maddisoncolvin.com/. 

To see more of Maddison’s work and read about her project for the Eliza Moore Fellowship, visit our blog.  

Ellie Irons, 2019

   Eliza Moore Fellow, 2019  

Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Arts Practice, focusing on Public Fieldwork, urban ecology, and socially engaged art, at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

 Ellie’s work sits at the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology. As an Eliza Moore Fellow, she extended work on her Feral and Invasive Pigments project, which involved making watercolor paint from the leaves, petals, and berries of spontaneous plants growing in urban areas or places otherwise impacted by human activity. To learn more about Ellie, click here.

Jennifer Scheuer, 2019

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2019

Jennifer Scheuer is an artist and collaborative printer whose work focuses on lithography and the history of print. She currently holds a position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University. Her artistic research is based on plants, medicine, the body and healing throughout history. 

“I have been working with archives and historical books in my artistic research and greatly value the time to spend with historical and contemporary primary documents,” Jennifer said. “Dedicated time at [Oak Spring] was an opportunity to create new series of work...and for internal growth in understanding of the relationship between humans and plants.” 

Jennifer spent much of her two week residency in the Oak Spring Garden Library, researching both herbals and the Doctrine of Signatures (a concept from the early 16th century which states that plants resembling certain body parts can be used to treat ailments in those body parts). Jennifer’s residency provided her with the time to develop new imagery and an artist book exploring scholarship, gardening, art, and the earth.

To learn more about Jennifer, click here. 

Lucia Monge, 2018

Eliza Moore Fellow, 2018

Lucia Monge is a Peruvian artist who is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work focuses on how humans position themselves in the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants.  She has organized Plantón Móvil for the past ten years, a yearly “walking forest” performance that leads to the creation of public green areas.   

 During her residency at Oak Spring, Lucia explored the library collection and re-performed Charles Darwin's experiments on the movement of climbing plants. Lucia said she gained a great appreciation for the world of botanical illustration as a meeting place for artistic and scientific inquiry, and is grateful for everything Tony Willis and the staff at the library taught her.

Lucia returned to Oak Spring in  2019 in order to share what she learned from the Oak Spring Garden Library with our September 2019 Curated Artist in Residence. She continues to study climbing plants, and has created sculptures, textiles and a series of drawings based on her observations. 

To learn more about Lucia, click here.  To read our blogpost about one of Lucia’s recent projects, which involved sending 125 true potato seeds into space as part of an international art payload, click here.