Artists-in-Residence
Below, you'll find our current artist-in-residence. You can find our alumni artists-in-residence here.
Jane Tseng
Summer 2026
Jane Tseng is a Hakka Taiwanese American ceramicist using wheel-thrown and handbuilt clay objects as surfaces and forms to explore the narratives of the imagery around her. Inhabiting and making art in her childhood home in the Shenandoah Valley is a full-circle and yet also a beginning. She draws from the flora and fauna that interchange through the seasons and the contrast between the familiarity and foreignness of the spaces she lives in.
Sarah Tollok
Summer 2026
Sarah Tollok lives in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband and two sons. Her writing can be found in anthologies with Improbable Press, Alan Squire Publishing, Clan Destine Press, Memento Vivere Press, and Chaos and Ink Books. Bookstories, the author’s love letter to the world of books, was released in 2024 with Balance of Seven Press.
Clara Schulte
Summer 2026
Clara Schulte is a weaver residing in Old Town, Winchester, VA. She learned to weave in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, her home, and continues to act as a steward for a craft that was nearly lost to technology and time. Her focus is the marriage of traditional Appalachian overshot and natural fibers to create timeless and functional homegoods meant to be used, cherished and passed down. When she is not weaving she is walking with her pup, Ginger, reading or camping.
Lily Crocamo
Fall 2026
Lily Crocamo (b. 2001) is an artist and graphic designer from Baltimore, Maryland, working in the DMV area. She graduated in 2025 with a BFA in Studio Art from Florida State University, with focuses in Textiles, Printmaking, and Electronic Art, earning Honors in the Major for Undergraduate Research.
She utilizes textiles and other mixed media to investigate the significance of religion and spirituality to the human experience, and how various theological phenomena impact secular aspects of society. Her work often explores the lived experiences of queer and neurodivergent people, and how their identities impact their relationships with themselves, other people, and the physical world around them. She is fascinated with how the tedious, repetitive nature of fibers as a medium embodies these concepts physically.
Ema O'Connor
Fall 2026
Ema O’Connor is a writer, journalist, editor, union organizer, and born, raised, and prodigal New Yorker. She is the author of a forthcoming creative nonfiction book about her decade reporting on the destruction of reproductive rights in the US. For the book she traveled the country embedding with the people providing reproductive and health care outside of — and despite – systems and laws; to be published by Zando/Crooked Media.
Ema has published 696 articles and essays in The Guardian, BuzzFeed News, and elsewhere on LGBTQ+ issues, immigration, and reproductive justice, as well as personal essays and cultural analysis. Ema's reporting has triggered multiple federal investigations and legislation, and forced CEOs to resign. She is a 2025 Knight Election Hub Fellow, 2024 Monson Arts Award Recipient, 2022 and 2020 Society of Professional Journalists Award finalist, amongst other honors.
Photo credit: Chris Risch
Rowan Raskin
Fall 2026
Rowan Raskin is a queer, non-binary artist from Arizona and a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (2021). Located in Boston, MA, but inspired by their childhood spent exploring the deserts of the unceded Maricopa lands; Raskin mythologizes the Southwestern queer experience. By combining the aesthetics of the southwest gothic, narratives of found family, perceptions of the body as landscape, and roadkill as an analogy for transgender life, Raskin hopes to create tenderness and love where some might only see horror. Currently, Raskin is working on a series of line dancing paintings inspired by @GaysForPatsy as well as the larger queer dancing communities across North America.
Jaime Bird
Fall 2026
Jaime Bird is a multidisciplinary artist, creature collector, and aqua fanatic at heart. Using sculpture and stop motion animation, she crafts alluring underwater creatures that manifest her innermost anxieties. Through amalgamations of wit, whimsy, flights of fancy, and folklore, she weaves narrative tales that suggest a deeper personal mythology rooted in the strangeness of the human condition.
She was born and raised in New England and currently lives in New Orleans, where she runs the disco ball business Midnight Zone Mirror Ball. Jaime is a longtime member of Aquarium Gallery & Studios.
Wisteria Deng
Fall 2026
Wisteria Deng is a poet, theater-maker, and clinical psychologist whose work explores home as an evolving attempt rather than a fixed place. Across creative practice and clinical care, she is interested in how we create meaning and belonging when the body, language, or geography we call home becomes unstable.
Wisteria received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Yale University, where she provides trauma-informed psychotherapy across diverse medical and marginalized communities, including sexual and gender minorities and patients nearing the end of life.
She is the founding artistic director of Vermilion Theater, a nonprofit that creates bilingual performance and community-based mental health programming in parallel, uplifting diasporic voices, expanding access to culturally responsive care, and fostering spaces for collective resilience, meaning-making, and social connection.
Sok Song
Fall 2026
Sok Song is an interdisciplinary artist working across printmaking, textiles, sculpture, folding, and installation. He holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include presentations at Tina Kim Gallery and James Fuentes Gallery, as well as projects in Portugal and Seoul, with additional exhibitions at venues including Delaware Contemporary, the Korean Paper and Culture Museum, and Tanya Weddemeyer Gallery. He has received fellowships from the Henry Moore Foundation through YCBA, Yale CCAM, and RITM, and grants including LMCC and the Awesome Foundation. His residencies include the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Vermont Studio Center, and Haystack Mountain School of Craft. Song is an educator who has taught at MoMA, the American Museum of Natural History, 92NY, Hunter College, and Yale, and is currently working on a project for the Venice Biennale this summer.
Photo by Chen Xiangyun
.CHISARAOKWU., MD
Fall 2026
.CHISARAOKWU., MD (she/her) is an Igbo transdisciplinary poet artist and 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her practice weaves together archive, collage, film, and her experiences as a physician to explore memory and identity in the African diaspora. Her poetry and visual art is featured in Michigan Quarterly Review’s special issue “African Cartographies,” edited by Chris Abani, ANMLY, Beloit Poetry Journal, Transition, Obsidian, and many others. Her writing has been nominated for literature prizes including the Pushcart Prize, Best of Net (Poetry), and Best New American Poets. Her chapbook “This Wake Holding, Mmiri” received the 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize’s Honorable Mention from the Africa Poetry Book Fund. She has received fellowships from the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, Anaphora Arts, The Black Genius Foundation, Cycladic Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, Torch Literary Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Ucross. From 2010-2017, she served as a US Commissioner to UNESCO. She earned her MD from Duke University, Masters in Public Health from UNC, and BA from Stanford University.
Rian (Raven) Crane
Fall 2026
Rian (Raven) Crane (he/they) is a post-disciplinary artist, independent curator interested in Black diasporic rebellion as an anti-thesis to borders, gender, and prisons. Their work explores the paradox of hypervisibility for Black +/ Trans folks as well as the ongoing genocidal settler project of Anti-Blackness, displacement, colonial-made borders and severed ties from the land. Their work posits Black fugitivity as a refusal to the colonial imagination; they imagine Blackness in relation to land, water, and nonhuman kindred. He collaborates and organizes with other artists and communities to counter isolation, individualism, and the hyper-productivity of end-capitalism. They have been an artist-in-residency at ACRE (Steuben, WI), Big Medium (Austin, TX), Fresh Arts’ Space Taking Artist Residency (Houston, TX), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and a Mississippi Basin Curatorial curatorial fellow with Independent Curators International (ICI). He has shown visual and sound work at University of New Orleans Gallery, 500 Capps Street in San Francisco, and written for Burnaway. Rian is the founder and collective member of a QTBIPOC artist run space called Friends Gallery in so-called Houston, TX on unceded Karankawa and Akokisa lands.
Anindit Dutta
Fall 2026
Anindit Dutta is a fiction writer from Guwahati who is currently at work on a novel that explores the consequences of extraction in populations across rural Assam through a cohesive interface of folklore, the slow violence of colonial rule, and contemporary experiences perpetrated by rapid, unplanned industrialization. He is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Georgia, where he is an Appleby Scholar researching on communities around riverine ecologies in the Global South. He graduated with an MFA at the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin where he received a Crawley-Garwood Research Grant and the Fania Kruger Fellowship in Writing. Before moving to the US, he built educational tools to support children learning English in India. His writing has been supported by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at UGA. He had also been a Fiction Editor at the Bat City Review.