Summer 2025 at the Peter Bullough Foundation: A Season of Connection, Storytelling, and Immersive Creativity in the Shenandoah Valley

kmooney
May 29
2 min read

Winchester, Virginia – May 29th, 2025

The Peter Bullough Foundation is excited to welcome its Summer 2025 Artists-in-Residence, a dynamic and visionary group of creators whose practices span multimedia photography, fiction, sculpture, and public art. United by a shared commitment to storytelling and place-based inquiry, this season’s residents explore themes of identity, environment, and community through immersive, interdisciplinary work.

Each artist brings a unique perspective shaped by personal experience and regional memory, contributing to a collective exploration of transformation, belonging, and the human relationship to the natural world.

Jessi Lewis is a fiction writer whose stories are shaped by her upbringing on a blueberry farm in rural Virginia. Her work often explores rural identity, displacement, and emotional inheritance through a haunting, atmospheric lens. Lewis’s fiction has been published in The Hopkins Review, The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Zone 3, Yemassee, Sonora Review, and The Pinch, among others. Her story was selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2023, and she received an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories: 2020. A former winner of the Oxford American Debut Fiction Prize, Lewis’s novel manuscript was also a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. She currently teaches in the Shenandoah Valley.

Coriander Focus is a multimedia artist and poet whose work is deeply rooted in the Appalachian landscape of her youth. Her practice blends photography, poetry, and mixed media to explore how we relate to our bodies and surroundings—crafting visual and lyrical narratives that engage with the wild and the intimate. Since 2010, her work has been featured nationally in galleries, publications, and exhibitions, including Her Voice, Her Vision at the Chesapeake Arts Center (2024), Windows to the Inside at Woman Made Gallery (2023), and during her residency at Sarasvati Creative Space (2022). Through her practice, Focus cultivates a sense of presence and wonder, inviting viewers to reconsider their own connection to nature and inner life.

Alyssa Ruby is a Virginia-based interdisciplinary artist whose work weaves together painting, sculpture, textiles, and public art. Through immersive installations and community-focused murals, she explores the in-between spaces of environment and identity. Ruby received her BFA in Fine Art from Flagler College, exhibiting at Kenan Gallery and the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. Her MFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design led to her thesis exhibition The Valley of In-Between, an exploration of place, narrative, and material memory. Her recent work includes a public art installation for the Dewees Island Conservancy in South Carolina, combining sculpture, large-scale murals, and educational elements to highlight the local ecosystem. Ruby currently works as a freelance mural artist with NOW Art and Walmart, designing community-based digital murals across the U.S., and serves as Exhibition Manager at ShenArts in the Shenandoah Valley.

Together, these artists embody the Foundation’s mission to support interdisciplinary practices that challenge, inspire, and invite reflection. Their work this summer will engage not only with their own creative evolution but also with the Foundation’s home in Winchester—through research, experimentation, and public dialogue.