Artists-in-Residence
Below, you'll find our current artist-in-residence. You can find our alumni artists-in-residence here.
Coriander Focus
Artist-in-Residence Summer 2025
Coriander Focus is a full time creator, working most in the mediums of multimedia photography and written word. Coriander spent her youth deep in the mountains of rural Appalachia where her love of wild places was cultivated, out of that passion came original art and poetry inspired by the natural world and its influence on our internal experience. Coriander explores work that tells a story about how we relate to ourselves and our bodies using photography, poetry and multimedia art that frolics through the forest.
She has worked as an artist and has had her work displayed nationally across galleries, shows and publications since 2010. Notable highlights of Coriander Focus’ recent career have been Her Voice, Her Vision - Chesapeake Arts Center (2024) Windows to the Inside, Woman Made Gallery (2023) and Sarasvati Creative Space Residency (2022).
Jessi Lewis
Artist-in-Residence Summer 2025
Jessi Lewis grew up on a blueberry farm in rural Virginia. Her fiction was in The Mysterious Bookshop's, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year, 2023, and she received an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories, 2020. She was once an Oxford American Debut Fiction Prize winner and her work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Hopkins Review, Zone 3, Sonora Review, The Pinch and Yemassee, among others. Jessi's novel manuscript was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She teaches in the Shenandoah Valley and lives for really good tomatoes.
Alyssa Ruby
Artist-in-Residence Summer 2025
Alyssa Ruby is a Virginia-based artist whose work blends painting, sculpture, and textiles to explore storytelling, nature, and community. She earned her BFA in Fine Art from Flagler College, where she exhibited solo shows at Kenan Gallery and the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. Inspired by a course in natural dyes, she went on to complete her MFA in Fibers at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she developed immersive installations and a thesis exhibition, The Valley of In-Between.
Her professional experience includes designing home products during a print and pattern internship with Kohl’s, and creating an interactive public art installation for the Dewees Island Conservancy in South Carolina. The project combined large-scale murals, sculpture, and educational design to highlight the local ecosystem.
Alyssa currently works as a freelance mural artist with NOW Art and Walmart, creating custom digital murals that celebrate community identity across the U.S. She also serves as Exhibition Manager at ShenArts, where she curates exhibitions and supports artist programming in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Her work—whether in galleries, on city walls, or within natural landscapes—reflects a passion to tell stories that inspire wonder, connection, and a sense of place.
Holland Fox
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Holland Fox is an American artist from Costa Mesa, currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. Fox’s practice explores the intersections of gender identity and sexual politics through painting and self-portraiture. Their work has been exhibited at the New Weight Gallery and the Little Gallery at UCLA. They were awarded the UCLA Department of Art Scholarship, the Carolyn D. Smith Scholarship, the UCLA Library Art Prize, and won second place in the UCLA Hillel Art Competition. Fox is currently earning their Bachelor's of Arts in Studio art and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Rah Gerg
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Rah Gerg is a mixed-media painter who creates immersive collage works with an emphasis in papermaking to portray natural and supernatural queer kinships. Their practice spans sculpture, textile, print, installation, and papermaking often involving tactile and interactive components. Working with category-defiant materials, Rah’s practice welcomes collaboration and insists on interaction through tactility, and a beckoning relationship to the body.
Rah works as an artist-educator, curator, and muralist based in Philadelphia, and received their BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. They attended the Dumfries House Artist Residency in Scotland in 2023, Byrdcliffe’s Communal Artist Residency in 2025, and soon the Peter Bullough Foundation Artist Residency. They have shown pieces and worked on murals in Madison (WI), Providence (RI), and Philadelphia (PA). They hope to engage with artist collectives in radical collaborative artmaking, installations, and curatorial projects. Rah works with the Philadelphia Free Library in youth programming, and at the West Philly Tool Library. These community driven roles inspired their new project– a lending library of sentimental objects. These borrowed treasures will drive a new body of work surrounding hidden feelings, mapped symbology, secret language, and modularity. This project will be explored during Rah’s time at PBF’s residency this August and September.
Bex McCharen
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Bex McCharen (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, fashion designer and founder of the inclusive fashion label Chromat. Their work creatively reimagines sustainable futures, climate optimism and queer joy. They studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and are based in Miami, Florida.
McCharen was awarded the Smithsonian National Design Award in 2021, was recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 “People Who Are Reinventing the World” and was honored in the OUT 100 as one of the LGBTQ’s communities’ brightest voices. Their work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and Elle. Collaborations include Beyoncé, Intel, Disney, Reebok, MAC and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Design Lab.
They gave a TED Talk on inclusive design, and have spoken at SXSW, Harvard, Parsons, MIT, CFDA, Pratt, Fashion Institute of Technology and Tulane. They have been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, the Anderson Center, the Studios of Key West, Santa Fe Art Institute and the Blue Mountain Center, NY. McCharen curated ‘Queer Joy’ at the MoMA PS1 and their work was recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A resident of Miami since 2018, McCharen has facilitated design and art workshops at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Lotus House women’s shelter, the University of Miami, the Miami Workers Center, Miami-Dade College Architecture and Fashion department, Istituto Marangoni Miami, the Alliance for LGBTQ Youth and is currently an artist in residence at Miami Cancer Institute.
Naomi Day
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Naomi Day is a teaching artist and interdisciplinary storyteller working with Black speculative fiction and film photography. Her writing examines the politics of the Black body, the construct of social monstrosity, and generational trauma as inheritance, though mostly she just aims to tell really good stories. Her work in the classroom is rooted in the belief that art making is world making, and sometimes we just need someone to give us permission to create.
Naomi’s short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine and Black Warrior Review, among others, and her critical writing has appeared in Lit Hub. She’s received gifts of time and scholarship from the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Carl Brandon Society, and more, and she owes a particular debt of gratitude to The Seventh Wave for their avid support of her work in all forms. She’s a member of the Clarion West class of 2022, holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and works as an editor and engineer in her various other lives.
Lin Qiqing 林 绮晴
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Lin Qiqing (pronounced Chi-Ching, b. 1991, Guangdong, China) is a textile artist based in New York City. As a former award-winning journalist from China, she tells stories about human relationships, gender, immigration, and language through her distinctive figurative weaving, using hand-spun paper yarn and paper collage. She graduated with an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design in 2023 and a
BA in journalism in 2014.
Qiqing has participated in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program(2025) and residencies at Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild(2024), Residency Unlimited(2024), and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2023). Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Wassaic Project, New York Live Arts, Art Gotham Gallery, All Street Gallery, Surface Design Association, and New York Textile Month.
Julia Roland
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Julia Roland (b. 2002 Savannah, GA) is currently a rising visual artist and an alumni of the Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA in painting and a minor in art history. She has been creating work since 5th grade as she attended specialty visual and performing arts middle and highschools. The paintings in her portfolio symbolize the many different layers of African American culture and human identity through the juxtaposition of frontal facing confrontational figures, saturated colors, bold shapes, and loose patterns. These paintings are reflections of her identities intersecting as a black, queer woman. Intersectionality, the driving theme of the work, is the interconnected nature and overlapping of social categorizations as they apply to an individual.
Rob Macaisa Colgate
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Rob Macaisa Colgate (he/she/they) is a disabled bakla poet and playwright. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts and 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, he is the author of the poetry collection Hardly Creatures (Tin House, 2025) and the verse drama My Love is Water (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). His work appears in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, and Poets.org, among others, and has received support from MacDowell, Fulbright, Lambda Literary, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review. He serves as a reader for POETRY Magazine and managing poetry editor at Foglifter. The inaugural poet-in-residence at Tangled Art + Disability, he received an MFA in poetry and critical disability studies from the New Writers Project at UT Austin.
Isabel Lu
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Isabel Lu (b. 1997, North Carolina) is a painter, researcher, and community organizer whose work explores fluid ideas of medicine, remedy, and care. Their large-scale, vibrant portraits incorporate ancestral and contemporary concepts across both Western and Chinese medicine, herbalism, architecture, and mythology. They intertwine the physical body with medicinal plants, practices, and beings. To see parts of ourselves within these medicines offers space to find refuge and remedy in our relationship with our surroundings. Isabel’s paintings have been shown at Ella West Gallery, the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, and GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art. Isabel completed residences at Durham Art Guild and Artspace in Raleigh. They’ve spoken at Eastern Carolina University, Duke University, and North Carolina Museum of Art.
Isai Soto
Artist-in-Residence Fall 2025
Isai Soto is a Mexican-born American artist from Fallbrook, California, just north of San Diego. After receiving a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, he pursued a career in the arts which is informed by his interest in autoethnography. His work as a graphic designer and printmaker influences his approach to artmaking, emphasizing reproducible methods. His navigation of identity reflects a negotiation of truth. He explores these ideas via drag performance and costume. He has exhibited at Manhattan Graphics Center, the Brooklyn Public Library, Macaulay Honors College, and Berry Campbell Gallery, and has performed at several nightclubs in New York City. He works from his home in Brooklyn, New York.