Artists-in-Residence
Below, you'll find our current artist-in-residence. You can find our alumni artists-in-residence here.
Hannah Oberman-Breindel
Artist-in-Residence August - September 2023
Hannah Oberman-Breindel (she/her) is a New York City-based writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Washington Square Review; The Literary Review; Forklift, Ohio; Connotation Press; Thrush; Court Green; and other places. As a poet and prose writer, Hannah is most concerned with inheritance: how we carry and claim our histories, what stories have been told and retold as a matter of public or familial record, and what has remained secret. More broadly, she writes about how to live in the wake of change and loss, and how to reconcile the predictability of loss with the continued need to create meaning through building something more permanent. Her work wrestles with the imperfect tools we have for this type of building: language, art, and love.
Hannah's work has been supported with fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Hambidge Center, the New York Mills Cultural Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Born and raised in New York City, Hannah currently resides again in New York (Lenapehoking) where she teaches High School English. A women's sports enthusiast and former college athlete, Hannah has also covered the WNBA and NWSL for online and print publications.
Sarah Thompson
Artist-in-Residence August - September 2023
Virginia-based sculpture artist, Sarah Thompson (b.1975), is a fine craft, assemblage, and experimental photography artist who uses wood, metal, found objects, and fibers to create narrative sculptures that explore memory and resiliency. She received her BFA in 3D Media and Material Studies from Old Dominion University. Thompson first honed her welding skills as a vehicle body mechanic in the United States Air Force, where she served for eight years. After separating from Active Duty in 2010, she opened a reclaimed wood and salvaged metal art business, and in 2017 she began pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Old Dominion University with a concentration in 3D Media and Material Studies. Thompson has received numerous awards and appeared in juried exhibitions throughout the Mid-Atlantic.
Thompson was awarded "Best in Show" at the Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries’ 2022 Juried Student Exhibition. She was awarded the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts Windgate University Fellowship and the Steve and Carolyn Gottlieb Scholarship for Veterans. Recently, she exhibited in the Feminist Insight: Continuing Her Story, Juried Exhibition at Fayetteville State University; Fayetteville, NC; Fibers of Nature Juried Exhibition at Floyd Center for the Arts, Floyd, VA; and the Indoor DownEast Juried Exhibition at Emerge Gallery in Greeneville, NC.
Pangea Kali Virga
Artist-in-Residence September - October 2023
Pangea Kali Virga was born and raised in New York and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Social responsibility is pivotal to her art, as she attempts to communicate urgent, difficult messages in beautiful and fun ways through narrative layered fiber art works, dramatic experiential art and performance, free and public sustainable art and skills workshops, and other collaborative projects with public and private community and arts institutions. Pangea has dedicated herself to helping transform the art and fashion industry to be a more sustainable and equitable one, creating art and wearables out of upcycled materials using zero waste practices, supporting her belief in the power of clothing as storyteller, cultural marker, and political catalyst. Patchworked and embroidered, distressed and woven, worn or hung, their work recontextualizes waste and beauty in a realm that inspires play, curiosity, and community action. Pangea's work is ornate and resilient, each stitch an intention, every fiber meticulously collaged. Their work ranges from wall hangings, installation, and monumental site-specific garments to densely textured 3 inch fiber collages to sweeping 30 foot long dresses, all lovingly executed with upcycled materials and refuse sourced from the community, that shift the viewer’s understanding of the act of creation and destruction to imagine it as a closed loop cycle. Through their fiber art and community outreach via workshops, lectures, and various happenings ranging from fashion shows to art shows to massive community projects, Pangea tries to reimagine the praxis and aesthetics of entrenched and failing systems; primarily highlighting the flaws of consumerist practices in engaging, vibrant, and collective ways.
Ilyn Wong
Artist-in-Residence September - October 2023
Ilyn Wong is a Taiwanese-American visual artist and writer based in Berlin. Her multi-disciplinary practice uses personal and familial histories to examine larger, discursive topics. Her current body of work looks at the violence of care and the role of grief in our multispecies entanglements. Ilyn is the co-founder and director of SAP Space, a project space that proposes the garden as a conceptual springboard. Her work has been shown at Interior To Bring Festival in Berlin, SMACH Biennial in the Dolomites, The Aronson Galleries and The Kitchen in New York City. She has received fellowships at the Baldwin Center For the Arts, The Edward Albee Foundation, The Banff Centre, amongst others. She is a contributing writer at Berlin Art Link, and her writings have also been published by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art and the University of Amsterdam. She has an MFA from Parsons The New School and an MA from the University of Amsterdam.
Mary Welcome
Artist-in-Residence September - October 2023
Mary Welcome (Palouse, Washington) is a cultural worker collaborating with remote landscapes and rural communities. Her investigations into the American landscape are a chronicle from years on the road. She uses conversational research, publications, performance, picnics, and play to express and understand the places we situate ourselves within. As an artist-activist, her projects are rooted in community engagement and the development of intersectional programming to address hyper-local issues of equity, cultural advocacy, inclusivity, queerness, and imagination.
Jinghong Chen
Artist-in-Residence October - November 2023
Jinghong Chen is a Chinese-born visual artist currently based in Providence, Rhode Island. She left her native southern China and came to the U.S. alone as a student at the age of 15. Jinghong is graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Illustration.
​
Jinghong's work explores the shared experience of the Chinese diaspora and the longing for home while remaining in a state of limbo between the East and the West, reality and illusion. She draws inspiration from her heritage and childhood memories, particularly her personal relationships with both her direct and extended family, and how those relationships change as she grows older and lives further away. Jinghong is heavily influenced by the craft of paper cutting, which she applies in various art forms, including book art, 2D and 3D illustrations, and
Installations.
​
Jinghong is a two-time winner of the Baker + Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. She is also a past fellow of the RISD Museum Contemporary Art Department. Her work has been exhibited at the Donkey Mill Art Center in Hawaii, Providence Public Gallery, RISD Woods-Gerry Gallery, Carr Haus Cafe, and the University of Rhode Island (forthcoming).
Henry Roundtrip Marton Newman
Artist-in-Residence October - November 2023
Henry Roundtrip Marton Newman (b. 1999) is a Sculptor and Installation artist born and based in New York City. He received his BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Using materials such as light and found objects, his work explores the space between memory and the physical. Experiences such as melancholy and haptic memory are utilized as heuristic tools for how we hold our past. In his work, he attempts to create a circumstance which allows one to enter this grey zone of consciousness. He currently maintains a studio in Brooklyn.
Kasia Merrill
Artist-in-Residence November - December 2023
Kasia Merrill is a writer currently based in Appalachian Maryland. She holds a BFA in creative writing from Pratt Institute and an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work has appeared in Fiction International, The Appalachian Review, Quarter After Eight, Breadcrumbs Mag, and The Ekphrasis Review, and has been shortlisted for the GritLIT and Cutbank short story prizes, as well as the Best of the Net.
​
Kasia has received support from the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, Disquiet International, and the Peter Bullough Foundation. She is at work on her first novel, a braided narrative following three generations of women within the same family.
Julia Lucas
Artist-in-Residence November - December 2023
Julia Lucas is a nonfiction writer interested in movement, endurance, the body, and women in sport. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa after retiring from a seven-year career in professional running.
​
She is now at work on a book about the culture of long distance running.
