THE DIRT PALACE
WINTER 24/25 AIR BIOS
November Cohort
Open house & Artist talk Monday Nov 25th
Annapurna Kumar is an American animator and filmmaker based in Southern California. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer at UCLA Design Media Arts and Special Faculty in the CalArts Experimental Animation Department. Her work is largely inspired by machines and technology, but manifests as diaristic, playful fantasies with a very human touch. Themes of fertility, ecological utopia, sensuality, and a preoccupation with plastic recur throughout her work, which is often fast-paced, non-linear, and at times, totally abstract. Her work blends CGI and drawn animation, 16mm filmmaking techniques, and camera-stand stop-motion.
Elizabeth Tomasetti (she/her) is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. She created portraits of writers and revolutionaries for the bestselling Dutch novel Jaguarman by Raoul de Jong, as well as illustrating Il Ritrovamento del Mammoccio by Maria Giovanna Cicciari. Her current creative focus stems from conversations with her child about politicized narratives, social dynamics and horizontal identities. She has received residencies through Penland School of Craft, Women's Studio Workshop, and the Ora Lerman Trust and is a Local USA 829 scenic artist for film and television. Elizabeth grew up in both the United States and Italy, and is co-founder of Strano Film Festival, an annual short film festival dedicated to the land, in Capestrano, Italy. She is a parent and advocate of bodily autonomy.
@e_tomasetti
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Erin Woodbrey is a New England-based artist, writer, gardener, and beekeeper whose interdisciplinary work utilizes installation, sculpture, printmaking, and time-based media. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Gardeners for a Geologic Afterlife, Goethe-Institut, Boston, MA; Here After with Megan Biddle, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; of the Sun, Yes We Cannibal, Baton Rouge, LA; Wilder Alison + Erin Woodbrey, Expo Chicago, Gaa Gallery, Chicago, IL; Beacon, Beacon, 201 Telephone Box Gallery, St. Andrews, Scotland; Quill Isn’t Staying Now, with Dani Leventhal ReStack, Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany. Woodbrey's work has been featured group exhibitions at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; Code Art Fair, Copenhagen, Denmark; Cry Baby, Berlin, Germany; Greylight Projects, Hoensbroek, Netherlands; International Print Center, New York, NY, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; and SÍM Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland; among others. Woodbrey received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, where they also received a 2018 Traveling Fellowship.
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Jean Mandeberg is an artist and metalsmith in Olympia, Washington whose work has included copper in vitreous enamels, printed tin in mixed media constructions, and found steel in rust dyed textiles. Whether using copper, tin, or steel, the ideas she investigates have consistently focused on chance and our shifting understanding of time.
Jean is a working artist and arts advocate. She served as member and chair of The Washington State Arts Commission and the Olympia Arts Commission, and is now on the board of Olympia Artspace Alliance, to develop affordable live/work spaces. She recently joined the board of CERF+, a national organization offering emergency assistance to craft artists.
IG: @jeanmandeberg
​​Lonesome Bill Walker is a multidisciplinary artist working in wood, fiber, film, paint, and found objects. His pieces address the rampant censoring of Queer pleasure and joy through his handmade toys, sculptures, costumes, and portraiture. Walker has no formal training in the arts, instead holding a background in disability advocacy and language policy. Mentored by peers such as master printer Katie Nealon, painter Michael Matheson, and film producer Matty Lynn Barnes, Walker began showing his work at Bay Area punk shows in 2015. His studio art practice soon developed at Oakland, CA’s Compound Gallery where he would later have his first solo exhibition in 2021. Since then, Walker has shown films with collaborator Ty Jacob in Portland, OR and Chicago festivals, as well as exhibited sculptures in Milwaukee, Portland, San Francisco, and Cleveland. Walker now curates for Tooth + Nail Gallery in Milwaukee, WI where he currently calls home.
Muggs Fogarty is a writer, performance artist, and vocalist from Providence, Rhode Island. Muggs is the author of poetry chapbooks Unburn (Ghost Hum Arts 2016) and Sex Camel (Game Over Books 2018), and can be found fronting music acts, Lookers, Bittersweet and their solo loop pedal poetry project. A former director of Providence Poetry Slam, Muggs has taught and mentored several youth & collegiate poetry groups through UCONN, Brown University, RISD, New Urban Arts, ProvSlam Youth and has received awards from Rhode Island State Council for the Arts for projects in support of local youth writers. Muggs' poetry work has been featured with The Poetry Foundation, Button Poetry, Freezeray, Providence Monthly and Radar Productions. Muggs is host of ‘Chaos Hour’ on WVVX 101.1 Providence Community Radio and is a resident of non-profit community arts space, AS220. Muggs also practices myofascial bodywork and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in acupuncture.
noam keim (they/them) is a trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur freak. They are
a Lambda Literary ’22 Fellow, an RWW ’23 Fellow, a Tin House ’23 Fellow, a Sewanee
’23 contributor and a Periplus ’23 Fellow. Their work has appeared in Foglifter, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review and others. Their first essay collection the Land is Holy
came out via Radix in May 2024.
December Duo Residencies
Virginia Thomas is a scholar of how race, gender, and sexuality shape visual culture and aesthetics. Her research, teaching, and public humanities work analyzes aesthetics of white supremacy and counter-aesthetics that uproot and decompose white property-relations. Her current book project, Dark Trees: Visual Grammars of Family and (Anti)Lynching Aesthetics examines the centrality of lynching aesthetics to white family visual rhetorics and considers the ways Black visual activists take up lynching’s visual schema and transform it into sensorial orders that are reproductively just. She is also the founder of the Queer StoRIes Project, an intergenerational oral history project for LGBTQ+ folx in Rhode Island.
Jo Ayuso is an advocate for BIPOC in their community, creative, healer and loves to spend time learning about connection to the land and water.
M.B Boucai, PhD combines theory with practice. As a queer non-binary Arab Jewish leftist, their work often interrogates the double bind at the heart of identity: it is both liberating but limiting, essentializing but essential to making change happen in the world. After studying at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, they competed a PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and have taught nationally, and have worked as a director, performer, writer, producer, and are co-creator of the critical camp collaborative DIVERSITY FELLOWS!, notorious for touring a live art diversity workshop called TRAINING DAY! and for being made literal diversity fellows at RISD in 2016-2017. playwright/wordsmith, having completed 3 full length plays, 3 screenplays, and short fiction in the last five years. https://www.mbboucai.com/
Vanessa Gilbert - As the Creative Project Doula, Vanessa offers her long time theatre making experience to artists looking to hone their performance projects. Vanessa cut her teeth at Perishable Theatre in Downtown Providence, where she founded the Blood from a Turnip puppet salon (resurrected in Richmond, VA!) and built the RAPT (Resident Artists of Perishable Theatre) Program, supporting interdisciplinary performing artists with space, peer mentorship, and financial support. The Wedding Cake House Residency is a wonderful invitation to work on her own work rather than interpreting the work of other artists. www.vanessagilbert.com
Cindy Crabb is the longtime publisher of the world renown zine Doris which played a central role in the 1990s girl zine movement associated with third wave feminism. Editor of LEARNING GOOD CONSENT: ON HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP AND SURVIVOR SUPPORT, (AK Press, 2018), her diaries and papers are archived at Radcliff/Harvard Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America. Her essays have appeared in compilation books published by The Feminist Press, NYU Press, Routledge Press, Seal Press and St. Martins Press. She has articles and interviews in Maximum Rock and Roll, Punk Planet, Utne Reader and Teen Vogue. Cindy is also a trauma therapist. You can find her substack where she writes about therapy related topics https://sensoryandsensibility.substack.com/ and her website https://cindycrabb.com you can follow her at https://www.instagram.com/cindy_crabb/
Devan Murphy is the author of I'm Not I'm Not I'm Not a Baby (Ethel 2024), a chapbook of prose poems, abstract comics, and short essays about God and loneliness. Her visual art has been featured in galleries throughout the Pittsburgh region. Her writing and illustrations appear in The Iowa Review, A Velvet Giant, The Guardian, The Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Anomaly, and many others. Her work has received support from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, the Poetry Society of New York, and the 309 Punk Project in Pensacola. You can find her online at instagram.com/gytrashh or devmurphy.club.
January Cohort
Open house & Artist talk Monday January 20th
Dale Going is a poet and book artist. Her poetry includes the collections "The Beautiful Language of Our Disaster" (Codhill Press, forthcoming as their 2024 Guest Editor selection), "The View They Arrange" (Kelsey St. Press) and "As/of the Whole" (SFSU Award, selected by Brenda Hillman) as well as numerous chapbooks, broadsides and artists' books. Her work has received support from Fund for Poetry, California Arts Council, and Residency Fellowships at Yaddo, The Watermill Center and Djerassi. Her Em Press letterpress editions of poetry by women are archived internationally in prominent library special collections. She co-founded the quarterly ROOMS, which for a decade published formally innovative work of women writers and artists. A newchapbook is forthcoming in winter 2025 from Brian Teare's Albion Books. She lives in Manhattan and the Adirondack Park of upstate New York after a previous lifetime in the San Francisco Bay Area.
linktr.ee/dalegoing, dalegoing.com, instagram.com/dalegoingpoet, facebook.com/dalegoing
Jung Hae Chae is the author of the forthcoming memoir-in-essays, POJANGMACHA PEOPLE, winner of the 2022 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Previously, she won the Crazyhorse Prize in Nonfiction, the Emerging Writers Contest in Nonfiction from Ploughshares. Her writing can be found in AGNI, Guernica, New England Review, Ploughshares, swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), 2019 Pushcart Prize collection, and the Best American Essays 2022. Follow her @chaejunghae on IG and Twitter.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of the novel The Evening Hero, a Good Morning America Book Club Buzz pick and the young adult novel, Hurt You. Her journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and many others. She is a founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches fiction at Columbia, where she is the Writer in Residence and core faculty at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. @MarieMyungOkLee (Insta/Twitter) www.Facebook.com/MarieLeeWriter tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_writing_makes_book?lang=en
Ø.K. FOX is a barista, nightlife producer, curator, printmaker, artworker, and overthinker based in Queens, NY. He co-founded Zinefeast at SUNY Purchase and Paperjazz at Silent Barn. he also co-hosts a weekly podcast called ART AND LABOR, which discusses current and historical political struggles. His personal practice includes a drag persona called Sexual Gumby. His art experiments with the distortion of identity through fandom and mass media.
Promiti Islam (she/they) is a writer and educator whose work centers stories of resilience, survival, nature, and expansion. Their practice is inspired by over a decade of experience as a youth educator and community worker. Promiti seeks to make art with a tender touch, where softness is a puncturing tool to narratives of diasporic alienation and suffering, claiming instead, a space to belong. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, they learned early on of the power of language to mobilize communities and reimagine the world. They have received support from Catapult, Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Asian American Feminist Collective, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. Promiti has a B.A. from Wesleyan University and an M.A. from Columbia University – Teachers College. They love the ocean, pop culture trivia, and black eyeliner.
website: promitiislam.com
instagram: @promitii
Twitter/X: @promitiofthesea
Thalia Zedek: I am a Boston based musician, songwriter and recording artist. I came up in the punk/noise scenes of DC, Boston and NYC but I enjoy and appreciate all types of music and personal expression. I have released music on the Matador, Domino, Thrill Jockey, Fire Records and Silver Rocket record labels, and currently perform both solo and with E, Thalia Zedek Band and Come, as well as in my collaboration with graphic novelist/artist Leela Corman..
Xray Aims (they/them) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, a queer and disabled person, who works with collaborators in long durational pieces. These intersect art and kink in an effort to connect humans to one another, and beyond. Their work engages with beauty, pain, the built environment and the bodies. Movement, communication, the audience and consent are essential.
Their work has been in solo and group shows in the U.S., Canada and Europe. In recent years they have been awarded the Collective Futures Fund, A4A / Mass MoCA’s Massachusetts Statewide Capacity Building Grant, and the Mass Cultural Council Grant, along with Boston Center for the Arts: Studio Residency Program 2023-2026. Xray Aims (in the past: Aliza Shapiro / Truth Serum Productions), born/lives in Boston, earned two Bachelor Degrees, in Fine Arts and Architecture, from Rhode Island School of Design. xrayaims.com @xray_aims_artist truthserum.org
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February Cohort
Open house & Artist talk Thursday February 6th
Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic/journalist residing in Los Angeles by way of Virginia/Washington DC. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she co-translates from Romanian to English with her father. Her plays have been produced by Relative Theatrics and developed with Boston Court, NY Classical Theater, La MaMa, Echo Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Artists at Play, and more. Her play MAMA, I WISH I WERE SILVER won the 2022 Jane Chambers Award for Feminist Playwriting. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote Journal and Another Chicago Magazine. Her theatre critique and articles have been published in American Theatre Magazine, Rappler, Howl Round, and Stage Raw. She is a Theatre Communications Group Rising Leaders of Color (2023) and part of The Public Theatre’s 2024-2025 BIPOC Critics Lab. MFA: University of Southern California. www.amandalandrei.com
Amanda Torres (AT) is a writer, educator, arts administrator, and cultural organizer from Chicago whose writing focuses on queer family, latine futurity, and social imaginaries. Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope, The Acentos Review, Breakbeat Poets, and At Our Best: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships. They co-founded a youth literary arts organization in Boston, directed The National Incubator for Community Engaged Poets, and have taught and developed curricula for young people and educators working to develop creative, justice-oriented learning spaces for over nineteen years. Currently, they teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, live in Rhode Island and are an MFA candidate at Randolph College (amandatorreswrites.com)
Greta Scheing makes ceramics, drawings and animations in Providence,RI. She thinks a lot about home, nature, and humor and sharing things offline.
Lily Xie (she/they) is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially-engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-actualization for frontline communities. In collaboration with grassroots organizers and frontline communities, she uses her background as an artist and urban planner to facilitate creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The magic they create together often takes shape in animation, print media, and video. Learn more at: www.lily-xie.com
Larry Krone has lately been steering his curiosities toward questions of individuality in the context of belonging, queer kinship, chosen family, and the progression of life. Since the early 1990’s, Larry has been exhibiting objects, drawings, installations, and video in galleries and museums in the contemporary art world (solo shows at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Brooklyn’s Pierogi among others). His practice has expanded to include performance (Joe’s Pub, PS122, The Whitney Museum, The RISD Museum, etc.), self-publishing (LOOK BOOK 2015), fashion and costume design (as House of Larréon, he creates stage looks for performers Bridget Everett and Kathleen Hanna plus for theater and dance), graphic design (book covers, album art, merch, and promotional fliers and zines), and writing. The formal art world has come to be only a part of who Larry is as an artist, but his roots in conceptualism remain at the core of his practice.
Matthew Lawrence is an archivist, writer, and editor born and still living in Providence, Rhode Island. He and his partner Jason Tranchida edit the queer art journal Headmaster, which recently released its tenth issue, and together created Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza, a musical documentary about the 1919 Newport Sex Scandal. He did not star in Mrs. Doubtfire or Boy Meets World and is not currently dating Chilli from TLC.
Lawrence wrote 262 weekly issues of Law and Order Party, an email-based guide to Rhode Island arts events that ran from 2015 - 2020. His writing has also appeared in a number of regional art publications as well as The New Inquiry, Archivaria, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and The Guardian. He was a 2021 finalist for the Rabkin Prize for Visual Art Journalism. He is on Instagram at @spanakopitaenthusiast and on Twitter and Bluesky at @beefcakefactory. Learn more at matthewrobertlawrence.com.
Veasna Has is a nonfiction writer whose personal essays explore themes of family and cultural identity, rooted in her Cambodian American upbringing. She is a 2024 Periplus Fellow and an alum of the Tin House Summer Workshop. Her work has been supported by Kundiman and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and has been published or is forthcoming in diaCRITICS and Slant’d, among others. She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays. Born and raised in Long Beach, California, she now calls Queens, New York home.
February Family / Teen Cohort
Open house & Artist talk Friday February 21st
Antonia Bertucci (she/her) is a guardian, thinker, painter, and writing witch living in the Pacific Northwest near the Salish Sea. Her work is shaped by, rooted in, and obsessed with the body as a holy site, water and land as teacher, and the vital weaving of just, responsive and responsible relationships, especially in hostile contexts. What sound does our love make when it enters the body of another? How do we repair failures of imagination, attention, and care? How does one wrest joy from the centrifuge of cultural alienation and pain? These questions (and their many fractals) guide her work, as well as the wisdom and generosity of the visionary Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, adrienne maree brown, V (formally Eve Ensler), Dean Spade, her kid, and the luminous chaos of women, magic, queerness, and the immanent non-human world.
Her work has been featured in the Dark Mountain Project, BUST magazine, 45th Parallel, various poetry contests and zines, and many local community art projects. Her loyal but not very social social media handle is @paxalta
Ching-In Chen- Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of 'The Heart's Traffic: a novel in poems' and 'recombinant' (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks 'to make black paper sing' and 'Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters' (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of 'The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities.' They are a Massage Parlor Outreach Project core member, Kelsey Street Press collective member and Airlie Press editor. They received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, EmergeNYC and Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They collaborate with Cassie Mira on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation and environmental justice. www.chinginchen.com, FB & Insta: @chinginchen
Cassie Mira is an artist based in Seattle, WA. Her interdisciplinary practice is based in new media, poetry, and performance, plays with human interaction and denatures gendered experience. She was an artist-in-residence at The Seattle Residency Project in 2020 and completed a graduate degree in Museology at UW Seattle in 2023.
Cassie’s work analyzes transitional spaces by exploring human interaction through transitional experiences and investigating upheaval. Informed by research in LGBTQIA+ history and the development of modern computing, she investigates adaptive responses of individuals and communities. Her work incorporates field recordings, assemblage, performance and ritual.
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters & low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. Eli is a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.
March Cohort - Caregiver Residency
Open house & Artist talk Monday March 10th
Eve Kerrigan is a writer of short fiction and memoir whose work spans many genres, from realistic literary fiction, to Magical Realism, to Dramatic Literature. Her writing has appeared in L’allure Des Mots Magazine, High Noon Magazine, on Public Radio, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Creep Throat: Sex Fables for the Horny, Gloomy, and Unhinged. Eve's dramatic monologues have been performed at The International Women Writers Guild and she writes monthly episodes for the popular podcast "Strange & Unexplained with Daisy Eagan." For more about Eve and her writing endeavors, visit her website https://www.evekerrigan.com/ or follow her at https://www.facebook.com/evemkerrigan/
Lizzie Anderson is a thresholder, carer and justice lover who creates conversation, connection and art while tending to her perennial garden. She is an enthusiastic and grateful sister, friend, neighbor and pedestrian. She works as a therapist, conflict worker and facilitator.
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​​​​​Marcel Marcel is a neuroqueer artist based in Boston, born in Latvia. Their work is multi-part and multi-time. They remix SCOBYs, sculpture, performance, cake-scapes, surveillance footage and digital ephemera. Hovering between the absurd and the abject, in an interrogation of fascism and capitalism, Marcel's work offers a speculative play-filled refuge into radical joy and liberatory futures.
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Marcel is currently a studio artist resident at the Boston Center for the Arts. They are a member of the artist collectives Digital Soup and Mobius. In 2018, Marcel received their MFA from the VCFA, creating a gesamtkunstwerk thesis called Hot Dogs 24/7. In 2023, OyG Gallery in NYC named Marcel as an artist to watch for. In Summer 2024, they had their very first art piece in a show in NYC. Upcoming shows include a 2 person show in January 2025 with Georgina Lewis, called “of both and worlds, in double time.”
Website: www.like-design.xyz // Instagram: www.instagram.com/spandexical01​​
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Marianne Bullock (she/her) is an historian, organizer and mix-media artist based in Western Massachusetts. She is the mother of an 18 yr old and 10 yr old, a City Councilor and wild gardener. She founded the Prison Birth Project, an organization that grew from a small group of volunteers to a nationally recognized Reproductive Justice organization that passed one of the most comprehensive anti-shackling laws in the nation. She graduated from Smith College as an Ada Comstock Scholar in 2014, and was a fellow in the Kahn Institute fellowship on M/others. In 2023 she was a resident at the Salt Institute, Oral History Summer School. For the past year she has been working on an oral history project in her small town that documents the lives of parents who are actively substance-using or in recovery, as well as sewing together bits of recycled and saved fabric when she finds a moment.
insta: @small.ritual or @nonninaingreenfield
Samantha Sea Sea is a New York based performance artist who works with video, sound, movement, poetry and the human voice. Their work explores multiple themes such as inter generational hopes/traumas/joy, Afro Futurism, magical realism, mental health, Black spiritual traditions, and connection to water. She started working in performance in 2015 after participating in a series of ensemble performances directed by Monica Mirabile. Samantha has performed at Wild Project, Secret Project Robot, MoMA PS1, Essex Flowers, La Plaza Cultural Community Garden and Roulette Intermedium among many other spaces. She recently started a pop up performance venue/curatorial project called irrelevent art space that showcases performance art, poetry, and music, and strives to create an environment where people can bring their young children to shows. This project was inspired by Samantha’s experience of becoming a parent and realizing how few forward thinking family friendly venues existed in NYC.
Uriah Bussey is a non-binary archival Hoodoo interdisciplinary trauma informed artist, writer, and educator from Cobbs Creek, Philly. Bussey has a deep care for self narrative work, grief, housing and disability justice. Their collaborative film with Abdul-aAliy A. Muhammad, titled, “#MEDSTRIKE, Confronting the Nonprofit Industrial Complex” (commissioned by Visual AIDS), recently screened at “ENDURING CARE” (Montreal, CA) with a world premiere in over 100 countries released on December 1st, 2021. Bussey received their BFA from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania with concentrations in Printmaking and Applied Digital Arts. Recently Bussey experienced their first international residency, Officina Stamperia del Notaio in Tusa, Sicily. Bussey’s practice spans photo, prose, printmaking, painting, and video. Offers a dialogue with their personal & inherited archive, disability, sexuality, death, living spaces, magic and memory. Black spaces are portals. Reflecting on technology and print as a function in keeping, sharing and remembering. Bussey has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally along with two solo shows in their emerging artist career.
v. nico d’entremont (they/them) is a trans-disciplinary artist and speculative world-builder whose sculpture, ritual/performance, hybrid documentary, inter-species collaborations and community engagement examines poetic entanglements across the veil of life and death. Infusing personal documentary with magical realism, their work troubles preconceived notions of gender, queerness, disability and various states of “otherness”, seeking healing from personal and community trauma.
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The aim of d’entremont’s practice is one of continuous, speculative world-building. While the sculptures and spaces they create examine conditions under which we live, their social interventions engage audience members in participation, dialogue and support in seeking collective liberation from these conditions. Through decentering dominant narratives and claiming queer ancestry with human and non-human kin, d’entremont’s spiritual practice emerges.
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D'entremont is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow and 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow. Their practice has been supported through residencies at Yaddo, BANFF, The Joan Mitchell Center, ACRE, SPACES Cleveland, The Berwick Research Institute and 2024 Collective Futures Fund collaborative project grant.
March Duo Residencies
dama (aka Amanda Maciel Antunes) is a Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles. Her auto-didactic and transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create paintings, photography, writing, sculpture, sound, film and assemblage. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references written by women as points of departure. For reasons of political, historical and cultural urgency, her artistic journey aims to learn from the side of language that requires getting in touch with the unfamiliarity of times past to bring up the inner depths of the present. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her first book titled Second Birth was published in the Spring of 2023 by HEXENTEXTE. She’s also a librarian at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles where she also curates and hosts a monthly Surrealist Study Group focusing on women authors and artists, creating community engagement, social practice and arts programming.
Adele Bertei was a founding member of No New York’s Contortions, and a personal assistant to Brian Eno. Bertei was lead singer for the Bloods, considered the first out, queer, all women-rock band. She has appeared in several indie films, most notably as a lead character in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames. Bertei has toured with, written songs for, and recorded as a backing vocalist for artists as diverse as Tears for Fears, Thomas Dolby, Sheena Easton, The Pointer Sisters, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, Scritti Politti, and Whitney Houston. Her duet with Thomas Dolby on “Hyperactive!” was a top twenty hit in the UK, as was her single with Jellybean Benitez, “Just a Mirage.” She is the author of Peter and the Wolves (2020), Why Labelle Matters (2021), Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood (2023), and Universal Mother (2025).
instagram @adelebertei facebook adelebertei1 www.adelebertei.com
Mary Tremonte - I am an artist, activist, educator, and DJ based in Pittsburgh, with a piece of my heart in Toronto. A founding member of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, I work with "printmaking in the expanded field," including printstallation, interactive silkscreen printing in public space, and wearable artist multiples, such as bandanas and embroidered badges. As DJ Mary Mack, I strive to make safe(r) spaces on dance floors for embodying a body politic with pleasure.
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I am co-organizer, with artist Vee Adams, of Queer Ecology Hanky Project, an ongoing exhibition of over 130 artist-made bandanas.In 2022 I completed Dirt Is Beautiful, a public art project in collaboration with Grow Pittsburgh, through Pittsburgh Office of Public Art’s Environment, Health, and Public Art Initiative. Through my work, I aim to create temporary utopias and sustainable commons through pedagogy, collaboration, visual pleasure and serious fun.
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Melissa Weiss is a full time artist working primarily in clay. She lives and works in Asheville, NC. She is originally from NYC. She graduated from SVA with a BFA in photography in 2000. Melissa took a clay class for the first time in 2004. She set up a studio shortly after that and continues experimenting and exploring this inexhaustible material. She has taught and exhibited ceramics across the United States. Melissa makes illustrative, functional ceramics from wild clay dug from her land in the Arkansas Ozarks, the traditional territories of the Caddo,Osage and Quapaw tribes. Her work strives to illuminate the sweetness and fortitude of humanity. She is inspired by all people fighting for liberation and a just world.
April Duo Residencies
Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers. She teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. (https://www.gracetalusan.com/, @gracetalusanwriter instagram), https://www.linkedin.com/in/grace-talusan-writer/)
Charlie Samuya Veric: A self-taught poet, independent curator, and intellectual historian, Charlie Samuya Veric is the Leo A Cullum SJ Professorial Chair in the Humanities and the founding director of the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is the author of five poetry collections, including, Histories (2015), Boyhood: A Long Lyric (2017), The Love of a Certain Age (2019), and No Country (2021). His most recent book of poems is Songs from Manunggul (2024). He has curated the landmark exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery in 2015, titled, Figuring Filipino Utopia. He is a contributing writer to Magnum America: The United States, published by Thames & Hudson. He is completing a book manuscript, Forging the Postcolony: Cultural Cold War and Filipino Decolonization, which builds on his earlier book, Children of the Postcolony: Filipino Intellectuals and Decolonization (2020). A former fellow of the Johannesburg and Stellenbosch Institutes for Advanced Study, he holds a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University.
Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist who recently relocated to Cambridge, MA after living and working in Milwaukee, WI for over 25 years. She holds a BA in English Literature from St. Francis College in Hyderabad, India; a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Working with materials like thread, ink, video, photography, sound and ceramics, Raja calls upon a rich conceptual vocabulary to create work that has an expansive feel yet functions on an intimate scale. Whether embroidering with her mother, re-working clothing from family, or making casts of artifacts from travels and relocations, Raja, transforms objects and images so materials can convey profound experiences. Her work encompasses a variety of approaches that consistently connect the intimate and personal with a consciously global existence. In her practice, Raja conducts experiments that delve into difficult emotional realms—investigating personal, social, and political conflicts, melding complex content with intriguing surfaces and materials.
Ina Kaur (b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work responds to the imbalances and injustices within social, cultural, and ecological environments. Her practice explores intersectional frameworks within contemporary landscapes, focusing on issues related to colonialism and its lasting impacts. Her multidisciplinary art practice has been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, she is also deeply committed to community engagement, developing initiatives, and participating in responsive artistic practices.
Kaur currently serves as the Curator of Creative Practice and Community Engagement Coordinator at the Newcomb Art Museum while continuing to teach studio art courses at Tulane University. A native of New Delhi, India, she currently lives and works in New Orleans, LA
IG: @Studio_InkSpace
Zooey Kim Conner is a mixed Korean multidisciplinary artist and organizer from Providence, RI. Their creative practice is multidisciplinary and project-based, drawing on skills in illustration, fiber arts, risograph printmaking, tattooing, writing, and research. They are interested in making work that is weird, silly, self-reflective, and uncomfortably earnest, to tell stories about liminal identities, ambiguity, and belonging.
They work at The Steel Yard, organize and print at the Binch Press/Queer.Archive.Work print studio, and co-organized the Queer + Trans Zinefest. They otherwise occupy themself by sending emails, teaching themself fiber crafts, drawing pictures of rats, and, most recently, developing chronic illnesses. They would not recommend that last one.
![image_6483441 - Ren L[i]u_edited.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/28e538_47961613abf2411a8c36b636ca233021~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_249,h_249,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/image_6483441%20-%20Ren%20L%5Bi%5Du_edited.jpg)
Ren L[i]u (they/he/ä»–) is their 姥姥‘s grandchild first. Second, they are bracketed [for now]. While still figuring out how to explain themself, Ren is grateful for all the spaces where they do not need to—those rooted in disability justice, their QTPOC poetry communities, and of course, their grandma’s kitchen.
In Ren's TJ work facilitating community accountability processes and crisis response, he has grown to turn to poetry and spoken word as creative practices of survival and pleasure. Ren’s poems explore healing through wound, trans death/remembering, crip intimacy, ocean embodiments, and are all homage to their ancestral lineages—blood and chosen. In other words, Ren is always trying to make altars out of everything, including, if not especially, the rocks in their pockets. They are a 2023 Zoeglossia Disability Poetics fellow and part of the 2023 Providence Poetry Slam team.
Ren’s performances and poetry can be found in fifth wheel press, the Passion of X trans of color film anthology, commissioned/adapted into opera, and regularly at the Providence Poetry Slam where they are a proud staff member. Ren works toward anti-carceral survivor justice for a sexual assault and domestic violence coalition and also co-organizes the Spoonie Uni Project, a Black and Indigenous centered disability justice and mutual aid fund. They can be reached at renliubracketed@gmail.com and @renallegedly
July Family / Youth Cohort
Picnic on the lawn Saturday, July 26th
Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of Stroller (Bloomsbury) which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022, noting that “the central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity.”
Some of Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Rumpus, LitHub, Guernica, The Millions, n+1, The American Scholar, The Washington Post and elsewhere.
Amanda lives in Connecticut with her husband and two kids where she teaches at Fairfield University, The University of Chicago’s Graham School, and the Westport Writers’ Workshop
Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press (EP), with Hana van der Kolk, are the FlagsSs Day Collective, hosting processions in the streets of Troy, NY & beyond, bringing together community, intertwining celebration and challenge, protest with party, and dissent with a dedication to joy. Beallor is a multi-disciplinary artist, working with history, archives, and documentary through video, collaborative performance, and photography. Beallor is Documentarian in Community Co-Creation, facilitating the Co-Creation Initiative of MDOCS (documentary studies program) at Skidmore College. Press is a media-maker and educator with an interest in socially engaged practices and experimental documentary. In the 90s/early 2000s, EP came up making activist media for Indymedia and then produced for the TV/radio program Democracy Now! EP’s arts projects include socially-engaged single channel video, video projection, event documentation, and banner/cape fabrications. Press is a media maker and a Senior Lecturer in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Aymar Ccopacatty has been working on uniting his art practice with and lifelong studies of his indigenous Aymara heritage, currently taking shape in important new ways.
The project has to do with decolonization of logic, language and the heart. A family curse imposed by a catholic priest and legends combining oral tradition with investigation of Spanish chronicles from the 1500’s.
Ccopacatty’s art practice has always involved the textile and building techniques learned from his family in a traditional context, now the body of work becomes a part of telling his family story.
The profound desire and work toward mental and actual liberation of personal family histories as pre-colombian idol worshippers and resulting genetic survivors of holocaust in the Spanish silver mines of Potosi and otherwise.
Jenine Bressner How are we actively building the world in which we would like to live? What does a better world look and feel like, particularly for trans a non- binary people? How will we use what we have to create a world that no one would wish to leave? I live to connect people, as we are our greatest possible resources. We have nothing more important than each other.
"Kapwa" (fellowship or togetherness) is a Filipino ethos that views "others" as united with "self". I'm very interested in community, and in creating culture that hopefully makes good impressions in the wet clay of young minds.
I want to see things I've never seen before, and I strive to make work that satisfies this wish. I have been sculpting glass with torches since 1998, and laser cutting textiles since 2009.