2026 Residency Program Theme: Adaptation
All living things respond to a changing environment through adaptation, but what is the mysterious alchemy behind it? What catalysts lie within our world that spark individuals and whole species to adjust their characteristics? Adaptation is a demonstration of flexibility, openness and a desire not just to survive, but to thrive. Whether it takes milliseconds or millennia, a lifetime or generations, the process of adaptation holds infinite hope for the future. Join us in 2026, exploring the theme of Adaptation and all of its potential.
The 2026 residency participants are:
Visual Artists
Christine Adame (She/Her) – Lake Dallas, TX
Christine Adame is an intermedia artist from Laredo, Texas. Her artwork is about heritage, informed by her mestiza identity. Her work resembles artifacts built from layered processes—including drawing, fibers, digital fabrication, book arts, and printmaking.
Jessica Aquino (She/They) – Brooklyn, NY
Jessica Elena Aquino is a multidisciplinary artist exploring migration, relationship to land, memory, and ancestral knowledge through weaving, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. A first-generation Mexican American, they transform found materials into abstract narratives of memory, identity, and belonging. Aquino is based in Brooklyn, NY
Han Cao (She/Her) – Dallas, TX
Han Cao is a self-taught fiber artist based in Dallas, TX. Using hand embroidery on vintage photographs and postcards, she reimagines lost narratives through thread. Influenced by her Vietnamese upbringing, her art explores memory, identity, and belonging.
Chidinma Dureke (She/Her) – Laurel, MD
Chidinma Dureke creates multi-layered, mixed media oil paintings and sculptural installations. She was born in Washington, DC to parents of Igbo descent and earned her MFA from The LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. Her work has been exhibited at The Peale Museum, Howard Community College, Yale University, and others. In 2025 her work was commissioned by Issa Rae and Denise Davis for the Sony Pictures film One of Them Days.
Nina Elder (She/Her) – Gardner, CO
Nina Elder is a visual artist, writer, and educator. Inspired by geologic disturbance and resilience, Nina interprets planetary dynamics in constellation with social issues and personal narratives. She travels extensively and lives off the grid in Colorado.
Artemis Herber (She/Her) – Owings Mills, MD
American-German artist, Artemis Herber has exhibited in the US, Germany, Greece, Italy, England, Portugal, and Spain. Enriched with incorporated geological materials that are rooted in ancient natural myths, her hybrid configurations transform deep time narratives into the volatile conditions of our shared world through human impact.
Lynette K. Henderson (She/Her) – Chatsworth, CA
Lynette K. Henderson is a multi-media artist exploring nature and the environment through painting, drawing, photography, and mixed-media sculpture. Rooted in a passion for the natural world, her experiences in the upper Midwest fostered a lasting fascination with wildlife. Now in Los Angeles, she works with multiple related themes on aesthetic and conceptual levels.
Christie Lower (She/Her) – Halfway, OR
Christie Lower is a self-taught fiber artist and educator based in Eastern Oregon where landscape and wildlife guide her creative practice. Using needle-felted wool, she creates sculptural wildlife pieces that explore memory, place, and our emotional connection to the natural world. Her work balances realism with quiet storytelling, inviting viewers to slow down and look more closely. Christie is also the founder of Rustic Fiber Academy, where she teaches needle felting to students worldwide.
Mita Mahato (She/Her) – Seattle, WA
Mita Mahato is an artist and poet whose work joins fragments of used and discarded materials in poetic experiments that dramatize ecosystemic survival against capitalism. Her books are Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing 2024) and In Between (Pleiades 2017) and her poetry comics can be found in PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, and other publications.
Simone Martin-Newberry (She/Her) – Los Angeles, CA
Simone Martin-Newberry is an illustrator and essayist who centers black and bodies of color within color-rich environments and histories. Her work has been commissioned and featured by The New York Times, Emergence Magazine, Chronicle Books, Waxwing Journal, and many others. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently works and lives on the road.
Liz Obert (She/Her) – Santa Fe, NM
Liz Obert is a lens-based artist with a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Washington State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recently, she won the 1839 Award for Photographer of the Year in Still Life and received an honorable mention for Foto Slovo.
Julia Oldham (She/Her) – Eugene, OR
In her multi-channel video installations, Julia Oldham visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a fragile world. She creates immersive portraits of complex ecological systems through long-term, research-based examinations of natural landscapes and the human interventions that have shaped them.
Jessica Reisch (She/Her) – Brooklyn, NY
Jessica Reisch is a new media artist, designer, and educator from New York. Emphasizing rhizomatic networked connections, her soundscapes and immersive installations draw on the use of highly sensitive microphones and microscopes in conjunction with transducer speakers and projections to engage with the surrounding environment.
Emily Robison (She/Her) – Swannanoa, NC
Emily Robison is an award-winning spinner, knitter, and weaver living in Asheville, North Carolina. Her research and writing has been published in “Ply” and “Spin Off” magazines. Emily’s craft is shaped by place and cultural memory, grounded in the belief that we cannot move forward without fully understanding where we have been.
li rothrock (She/Her) – Phoenix, AZ
li rothrock investigates inheritance across diaspora and the generative capacities of invasive species using photo, video, and sculpture. Solo shows include long violence dreamt me west, Northlight Gallery, Phoenix, AZ (2025) and the shape of an absence, Eric Fischl Gallery, Phoenix, AZ (2024). She received her MFA at Arizona State University.
Vic Spindler-Fox (They/Them) – Pittsburgh, PA
Vic Spindler-Fox is a technologist & textile artist from East Tennessee, now making a home in the Rust Belt. They focus professionally on environmental field work, open-source software, and documentation. In their artistic life, they make reclaimed and mended textiles rooted in place, exploring mourning and memory, queerness, ghosts and failure.
Raty Syka (They/She) – Santa Cruz, CA
Raty Syka (UCSC Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA ‘24) is an interdisciplinary researcher, visual artist, and educator interested in the interface between human and more-than-human worlds. Using comics, illustration, and print media, Raty’s work engages broad public audiences around issues of climate change, agriculture, and sustainability.
Forest Woodward (He/Him) –Missoula, MT
My practice is rooted in the immersion and movement of body and mind through landscape. Using the book form, analog photographic practices, written word, and land-based installations, I work to explore questions around ideas of permanence, control, and human relationship to the ecosystems we inhabit.
Jingyi Yang (She/Her) – Jersey City, NJ
Jingyi Yang is a textile artist and fashion designer from Inner Mongolia, now based in New York. Her practice explores how threads can hold emotion, distance, and time, carrying traces of memory through material. She reimagines textiles as quiet spaces where material listens and remembers.
Writers
Dina Abdulhadi (She/They) – Brooklyn, NY
Dina Abdulhadi is a Palestinian writer and ex-scientist from the US South. A 2024-2025 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at The Poetry Project and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published by Room, Reckoning, Breakwater Review, The Worcester Review, Brooklyn Poets, Mizna, and Haymarket Books.
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (He/Him) — Staten Island, NY
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion is a visionary writer, healing practitioner, and facilitator. He writes to connect with the unseen and unspoken so we can feel and heal. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers, River is at work on his debut full-length poetry collection. The title poem won an AWP Kurt Brown Prize.
Vanessa Freije (She/Her) – Burien, WA
Vanessa Freije is a writer and an award-winning historian working across multiple genres. She is an associate professor of International Studies and History at the University of Washington and lives between Mexico City and Seattle. She’s currently working on her first novel.
K Ho (They/Them) – Minneapolis, MN
K Ho is a writer and photographer from Vancouver BC, unceded Coast Salish Territory. Their work has appeared in The Margins: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Canadian National Arts Centre, and elsewhere. A graduate of the U of Minnesota’s MFA, K has received support from MacDowell, Tin House, and others. They live in Minneapolis.
Donna Kaz (She/Her) – Blue Point, NY
Donna Kaz is a multi-genre writer, also known as the Guerrilla Girl, “Aphra Behn.” She is the author of “UN/MASKED, Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour;” & “PUSH/PUSHBACK, 9 Steps to Make a Difference with Activism and Art.” Kaz has received the Venus Theatre’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Yoko Ono Courage Award for the Arts.
Maxim Loskutoff (He/Him) – Missoula, MT
Maxim Loskutoff is the award-winning author of Old King, Ruthie Fear and Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and GQ. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.
Beth Piatote (She/Her) – Berkeley, CA
Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce writer, playwright, and scholar. She is author of The Beadworkers: Stories (2019); distant water: poems (2026); and the play, Antíkoni, as well as a scholarly monograph and many other works. She is enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes and she loves her Native language and homelands, her kids, her dog, and horses.
Jana Richman (She/Her) – Escalante, UT
Jana Richman is the author of a collection of personal essays, a memoir, and two novels, but she would really like to be a poet. Born and raised in Utah’s west desert, Jana currently lives in the irascible small town of Escalante, Utah, surrounded by the magnificent Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
