Patty B. Driscoll

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Patty B. Driscoll is an American artist who utilizes traditional genres and processes such as the still life, water gilding, metalwork, and textiles – layering her work with subtle narratives and subject matter that investigate the context of the feminine/feminist identity. Her work is a dialogue with historical pathways, iconography, and the symbolism of women, and challenges implicit societal representations and inculcated cultural values.

Driscoll received her MFA from the California College of Arts after completing her undergraduate work in Studio Art and Art History at Skidmore College. In addition to her formal degree training, Driscoll has studied at the Florence Academy of Art, the Studio Arts Center International in Florence, and the Art Instituto in San Miguel Allende, Mexico. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Abroms-Engels Institute for the Visual Arts, the Alexandria Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Masur Museum, the Wiregrass Museum of Art, and the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery of Skidmore College. For the past 25 years, Driscoll has lived and worked in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.

https://www.pattybdriscoll.com

Nia Lee

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Nia Lee is a Los Angeles–based artist and writer whose practice materializes Black Food Futurism through sculpture, installation, ritual, and communal performance. Their work explores Black memory, domestic labor, taste, and spirit as portals for ancestral connection and speculative possibility. Nia’s work moves fluidly between material experimentation and multisensory worldbuilding and creates artworks and experiences that merge archival histories with embodied, future-facing imagination.

Their approach has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The Cut, Thrillist, Vogue, and more. Nia appeared on Netflix’s James Beard–nominated docuseries High on the Hog and the James Beard Award–winning podcast Black Kitchen Series. They are the visionary behind Stormé Supper Club, a social sculpture and ritual dinner series centering queer Black women, femmes, and gender-expansive individuals.

Nia’s work attends to care, liberation, and the architectures that shape Black life. They collaborate with cultural institutions, organizers, scholars, and communities to create installations, performances, and shared rituals that serve as sites of reprieve, memory, imagination, and collective dreaming.

https://www.nialee.me

Sierra S. Roark

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Sierra Roark is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UNC, where she studies human-plant entanglements. Roark is a historical archaeologist and archaeobotanist with a background in Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern archaeology. Her dissertation "Green Gold: Plant Use, Identity, and Power in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1600-1800" examines archaeobotanical and historical evidence of plant use among the diverse populations living in the Tidewater region of Virginia and Maryland in the 17th- and 18th-centuries. Using a framework of well-being to consider manifestations of identity and power, Roark's research explores the exchange of plants and knowledge, foodways, medicinal strategies, garden history, and the emergence of colonial botany.

Brad Bolman

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Image Credit: Maria O'Leary / Institute for Advanced Study"

Brad Bolman is an Assistant Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Tulane University. His research explores how humans come to understand themselves and other organisms through the intersecting lenses of environment, science, medicine, technology, and capitalism.

His first book, Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles, traces the emergence of the laboratory dog as an experimental subject across fields including eugenics, radiobiology, pharmacology, tobacco research, and neuroscience. The book examines how dogs became transnational laboratory commodities and how scientists, through their work with beagles, shaped evolving ideas about humanity and scientific practice.

His forthcoming book, Rotten Beauty, explores the history of mycology through a character-driven account of botanists, amateur collectors, doctors, and industrial scientists who spent centuries attempting to understand fungi. The book will be published by Knopf.

https://brad.bolman.com

Thomas Carlin

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Dr Thomas Carlin is an invasion ecologist with broad interests across Zoology, Quantitative Ecology, and Biosecurity. Tom received his PhD in Ecology from the Bio-Protection Research Centre, Christchurch, where he studied how species' niche shifts occur across the world. At Scion, Tom is working on a range of projects including helping to prevent invasions of wilding conifer species, models of pathogen spread, and improving urban ecological systems.

Mariko O. Thomas

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Mariko Oyama Thomas is an independent scholar, instructor and writer who moves between Arroyo Seco, NM, and Whidbey Island, WA, with her two wildling daughters. She has an MS in communication research from Portland State University and a Ph.D. in environmental communication from University of New Mexico, and researches plant–human relationships, environmental justice and storytelling. She is also associate editor for the academic journal Plant Perspectives, a consultant for outdoor recreation DEI efforts, faculty at Skagit Valley College and a freelance writer. She is fairly decent at reciting fairy tales.