Artists-in-Residence
Below, you'll find our current artist-in-residence. You can find our alumni artists-in-residence here.
Amanda L. Andrei
Artist-in-Residence February 2024
Amanda L. Andrei is a playwright, literary translator, and theater critic residing in Los Angeles by way of Virginia/Washington DC. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history and societies from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she co-translates from Romanian to English with her father, Codin Andrei. Her plays have been produced by Relative Theatrics and developed with Boston Court, NY Classical Theater, La MaMa, IAMA, Chalk Rep, Circle X, Echo Theatre, The Vagrancy, The Road Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Artists at Play, and others. Her play MAMA, I WISH I WERE SILVER won the 2022 Jane Chambers Award for Feminist Playwriting, and other work has received finalist status with the Princess Grace Award, Eugene O’Neill Conference, Playwrights Realm, Blue Ink Award, and Ashland Festival. She reviews theater for Stage Raw and the South Eastern European Film Festival, and her reviews of theater, poetry, and translated literature have appeared in American Theatre Magazine, Rappler, Hopscotch Translation, Barrelhouse Magazine, and more. She is one of three members of the Theatre Communications Group 2023 cohort of Rising Leaders of Color. MA: Georgetown, MFA: USC.
Lara Antal
Artist-in-Residence February 2024
Lara (she/they) is an award-winning cartoonist and illustrator who loves black humor, black coffee, and colorful characters. Their debut graphic novel, Ronan and the Endless Sea of Stars, was the recipient of the 2023 Graphic Medicine Award and a finalist for both the Ringo Comic Awards and Pop Culture Classroom's Book of the Year. They regularly contribute comics to The Washington Post in their news, opinion, and travel sections and were included in the Best Illustrations of 2022. Their clients include Google and Dotdash-Meredith, and they've been featured in The Wall Street Journal, WNYC-NPR, Kirkus, and more. If you dine in NYC you might see one of their infamous Choking Victim posters. They are also a creative producer on the Witch Wave Podcast, hosted by Pam Grossman. Hailing from Wisconsin, they currently live in Brooklyn with their almost-toothless chihuahua, Chuck.
Nathalie Basoski
Artist-in-Residence February 2024
Nathalie is a Dutch Macedonian photographer and mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her artistic practice enscopes analog photo, digital video, painting, collage and textiles. Throughout her childhood in both the Netherlands and Macedonia, she navigated the contrasting landscapes of these two countries, fostering a lingering sense of unfamiliarity in each. Nathalie’s craft is unburdened by traditional techniques. Her work serves as a poignant reflection of her past and present experiences. Her process is driven by intuition, arranging textures, colors, shapes, and objects to create a narrative that unfolds retrospectively. Nathalie earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in 2018. Her works have been shown in The Contemporary Art Museum in Skopje, North Macedonia, The Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA. As well as in numerous galleries in New York City such as Gallery MC, Amos Eno Gallery, BWAC and Eyes on Art. Her photography has also been published in photo books such as Summer of Something Special by Something Special Studios, 12 Macedonian Photographers by Templum and Broad Magazines Reppinks Selects.
Rasha Abdulhadi
Artist-in-Residence March 2024
Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.
Miles Lamberson
Artist-in-Residence March 2024
Miles Lamberson (he/him/his) is a Southeastern conceptual artist working primarily in print, collage, and sculpture. His work considers the malleability of memories and how histories and traumas can shapeshift daily experiences. Vital to his practice is the idea that print is memory, and the activation of the memory is the art itself. The interaction with the process is what makes the work come alive
Zines are a current focus in Miles’ work, inspiring him to research and curate “Belonging and Non-Belonging: The History and Future of Zines in WNC" at the Buncombe County Special Collections in 2023. The exhibition explores and expands upon the impacts (past, present, and future) of self-publishing and zinemaking in Western North Carolina and Asheville. Since then, Miles has become the Executive Director of the Asheville Zine Festival, a non-profit exhibition and festival celebrating zines in the Southeast, and is releasing monthly zines to subscribers through good ol’ snail mail.
Miles has shown work at the Elizabeth Holden Gallery in Swannanoa, NC three years in a row, has curated and shown in the ROGUE SHOW at Arrowmont School of Craft in 2022, and most recently has shown in RAGE at the Bakery ATL.
Ocean Salazar
Artist-in-Residence March 2024
Born in Colombia, Ocean grew up in Miami Beach with a love for the macabre, literature, and the sea. They studied at Sofia Art Academy for six years and graduated from Miami-Dade College with an Associate in Arts degree in the summer of 2019. They also studied at Visual Arts Passage between the years 2021-2023 under the mentorships of Dale Stephanos, John English, and Sterling Hundley. As of now, they currently reside in Miami. They work at the Perez Art Museum as a Teaching-Artist.
Ocean Salazar’s work encapsulates a self-titled and self-defined genre called Dark Tropical – where the glitz, the vibrancy, and the allure of a tropical paradise coexists with the things that go bump in the night.
Even when those things are ourselves.
Christopher Paul Jordan
Artist-in-Residence April 2024
Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter from Tacoma, Washington, USA. Lacing salvaged materials such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan simulates conditions of removal, relocation to surface questions about human relationships. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his investigations are often staged or permanently embedded in public space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim - Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).
Rashad Ali Muhammad
Artist-in-Residence April 2024
Rashad Ali Muhammad is a multidisciplinary collage artist known for creating vivid and captivating works reflecting the vast complexities of our human existence. Muhammad's ongoing journey to expand his emotional intelligence ignited his desire to explore the intricacies of the human experience — the expansive intersections that shape our lives and how we can relate to each other beyond the surface. His experiences as a queer, gender-nonconforming person of the African diaspora reflect his fondness for utilizing art as a catalyst to liberate minds from the binary confines of society. Through his art, he cultivates open space for healing and rejuvenation from our chaotic world.
Muhammad's emphasis on connecting to his inner child and love for experimentation fuels his whimsical and enchanting artistic sensibilities. For him, collage combines intention, invention, and investigation, dissecting established references and reassembling them to create new compelling visions. With a formal graphic design and photography education, Muhammad blends his acquired skills to create art that fascinates and expands the mind.
Muhammad is a resident artist at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA. His art has been exhibited extensively throughout the Washington Metropolitan region (DC, Maryland, Virginia), with other national and international exposure. He is a 2023 Art and Peacebuilding Fellow with the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at GMU. His artwork has appeared broadly in print and digital media, including the Washington Post, Kolaj Magazine, Create! Magazine, and British GQ.
Tyler Allen Penny
Artist-in-Residence April 2024
Tyler Allen Penny (aka TAP) is a queer southern poet, performer, educator, and collagist. Their work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Beyond Queer Words Anthology, Northwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, West Trade Review, swamp pink, Best New Poets 2018, Columbia Journal, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. A finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 14th Annual Poetry Contest and the 2021 Princemere Poetry Prize, they are the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize in Creative Writing, a Distinguished Travel Award to attend the Tin House Winter Poetry Workshop with Ada Limón. Their work has been supported by residencies/fellowships from Monson Arts, Taleamor Park, and the Vermont Studio Center.
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TAP is an associate poetry editor for West Trade Review, editor for Iron Oak Editions, co-host of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series, and host of QUEER SOUTH Reading Series in NYC. They hold a BA from the University of Mississippi and an MFA from Stony Brook University, where they taught undergraduate poetry workshops and created the IMAGINE/CREATE Reading series. Since 2014, they’ve taught creative writing workshops at libraries and community centers across Long Island and for the Jeanette Sarkisian Wagner Teen Writing Program. They currently teach at Stevens Institute of Technology and Suffolk County Community College, and live in Brooklyn, NY with their cat, LB2. They are currently at work on a book of poems and collages that explores the spiritual, joyous, and violent acts a queer body endures during the discovery and self-creation of sacred spaces/sanctuaries to inhabit, as well as a book of essays.
Carla Du Pree
Artist-in-Residence May 2024
Carla Du Pree is an author of fiction, a state and national arts advocate, an arts ambassador, a literary consultant, and the executive director of the literary nonprofit, CityLit Project, which holds an annual award-winning CityLit Festival. As part of her work with CityLit, she curates the CityLit Stage and CityLit Studio: Writers of Craft, Creativity, & Community, and co-founded Scribente Maternum, (a fancy way of saying Writing Mamas) which holds an annual retreat called Write Like A Mother. Her fiction appears in several literary journals, including Callaloo, The Pierian Literary Journal, The Ilanot Review, and the Potomac Review, among others. She is the recipient of fiction fellowships and residencies from the Peter Bullough Foundation, Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts (founded by children’s author Jacqueline Woodson), Rhode Island Writers Colony for Writers of Color (directed by Jason Reynolds), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts - VCCA (2x), and Poetry Foundation through Furious Flower Poetry Center. She has also been awarded fellowships/residencies at the wonderful Under the Volcano (2022), Writers of Dairy Hollow (2022), and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing (2019), but at the time could not afford to attend, further driving her intention of accessibility in her professional life. She is a Rubys and Maryland State Arts Council literary arts grantee and was awarded the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies inaugural Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Individual Award and the Maryland State Department of Education's Arts Leader for April 2020. She serves on executive committees of several local, state, and national boards, and holds roles with Pen Parentis (NY) and the VCCA Fellows Council, all relating to the arts and to magnify diversity and inclusion work. She holds a Master's from Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars and is a longstanding member of the Wintergreen Women's Writers Collective founded by Dr. Joanne Gabbin. She lives in Columbia, Maryland with her husband who's been her partner for 45 years. She has three adult children, one grandchild, and three dogs.
Virginia Hines
Artist-in-Residence May 2024
Virginia Hines is a photographer and photography writer based in San Francisco, California. She started using a camera during high school, working part-time for the local newspaper where her parents were editors. In college at Rice University she studied photography with Geoff Winningham; later she resumed her photographic education, studying with notable artists including Harvey Stein, Bruce Gilden, and Alex Webb. She is a frequent contributor to Street Photography Magazine, which featured her during its Year of Women Photographers, as well as in two podcast interviews. Her photographs have appeared in many other print and digital publications, including Portrait of Humanity 2021, The Lancet Global Health (March 2020 cover), L'Oeil de la Photographie, All About Photo, The Independent Photographer, and F-Stop Magazine. Her work has been exhibited in group shows across the U.S. and in Europe and South America. She also wrote essays for Harvey Stein's book of street photography, Coney Island People: 50 Years (Schiffer, 2022) and Rita Nannini’s First Stop Last Stop (Workshop Arts, 2023).
