RK Fauth

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

RK Fauth is a poet who writes about ecological grief, awe, and the un/natural world. Her debut poetry collection, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees (2024), explores the relationship between species extinction and language. Playing with Bees won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry from Texas Tech University Press, and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry from The Publishing Triangle.

Fauth’s poems are published by The Academy of American Poets, POETRY Magazine, AGNI, Arc Poetry (Canada), Plumwood Mountain Journal (Australia), Notch Magazine, The Shore, and several queer and environmental poetry anthologies.

Her work has been supported by scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Fulbright Program, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Fauth has held residencies at Art Omi, Djerassi, and The Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a recurring botanical research artist at The Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

From 2020-2023, Fauth founded the award-winning erasure poetry initiative, The UNPRECEDENTED Project. It involved sending hundreds of torn book pages to anonymous strangers through the mail. As a pandemic-era digital humanities project, the UNPRECEDENTED poetry collection has been presented at Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, Florida State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other institutions.

RK Fauth grew up in New York. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

https://www.rk-fauth.com

Omar Mendoza

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Omar Mendoza is an artist from Mexico City whose practice is based on the creation of paintings with natural colors as a form of poetic resistance. Over the last few years, Mendoza has developed a body of work that criticizes the eradication of ancestral knowledge in Mesoamerica due to colonial processes, still present today.

Mendoza conceives his works as living entities, as he creates colors from plants, tree bark and flowers collected in Tlacuilotepec, his father's hometown, along with organic pigments obtained from local markets. These coloristic techniques are inspired by those used in pre-Hispanic codices and murals. The artist prepares the canvases by hand using cotton and extracts inks through a process in which water, heat and time intertwine. Previous drawings are based on dreams and personal experiences that connect with symbolic elements of pre-Hispanic art.

Some of the pigments remain immutable, while others may change over time, reflecting the artist´s intention to evoke the universal nature of change and transformation. These living works dialogue with historical memory and Native American worldviews.

https://www.instagram.com/omr.mz/

Paula Bohince

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Paula Bohince is the author of four poetry collections: A Violence (Princeton, 2025), Swallows and Waves (Sarabande, 2016), The Children(Sarabande, 2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (Sarabande, 2008).

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Liberties, Australian Book Review, Granta, The Telegraph, Raritan, Best American Poetry, and widely elsewhere.

She has been the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar, a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in both Creative Writing and Translation, the Amy Clampitt House resident, the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place, an affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and an artist in residence at the Dora Maar House, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, Green Box, and Oak Spring.

She has received the "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra's Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, the Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and second prize in the UK's National Poetry Competition.

She has taught at New York University, the New School, University College Cork as the John Montague International Poetry Fellow, and elsewhere. She served as the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022(Samovar, 2023).

She lives in Pennsylvania.

https://paulabohince.com

Michelle Robinson

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Michelle Robinson received her Bachelor of Environmental Design in 1991 from Texas A&M University and continued with graduate studies at Texas A&M’s program in Visualization, producing animated short films that were shown at the Walker Art Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, Imagina in Monaco, and The AFI National Video Festival. She completed her MFA in Visual Art at New Hampshire Institute of Art and exhibited her thesis work at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough, NH in 2019. She has had her work published in The Hand, Diffusion of Light, Precog, and Frames. She has exhibited her work in solo shows at LAUNCH LA, the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, CO, The Wright Gallery at Texas A&M University, and the Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery at Coker University in NC. She has been awarded residencies with the Joshua Tree Center for Photographic Arts, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, PLAYA, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She has juried shows for the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and Shoebox Projects, and is currently co-curating an exhibition about the Los Angeles River for summer of 2025 at Shatto Gallery.

She has also been an artist and supervisor with Walt Disney Animation Studios for 31 years, most recently serving as Head of Characters on the Oscar-winning Encanto. She has been a mentor in Disney’s Artist Development Program, taught computer lighting and texturing at the California Institute for the Arts, and is a regular visiting instructor at Texas A&M University. She was nominated for a VES award for Animated Character on Wreck-It-Ralph and was named an Outstanding Alumni for the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, in 2013. She volunteers with several organizations and advisory boards, including Exhibitions Director for International Encaustic Artists, and is a member of the curatorial collective Monte Vista Projects in downtown Los Angeles.

www.michellerobinsonstudio.com

Valentina Soto Illanes

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Valentina Soto Illanes (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile) is a Latin American artist currently living and working in Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work mainly in South America and partaken in interdisciplinary residencies and research projects, interested in how disciplines of knowledge categorize the encounter of flora and fauna.

She holds a BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile, and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Universidad de Chile. In 2020, she received the Master of Fine Arts Fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation.

https://www.valentinasotoillanes.com

Rachael Catharine Anderson

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Rachael Catharine Anderson is a 2022 MFA graduate from the Painting and Printmaking program in the Yale School of Art. She makes thematic oil paintings that relate emotional affect to environmental stimuli. Made intuitively and by direct observation of things in space, the paintings blur distinctions between thinking and feeling. Anderson’s care-full approach revels in enchantment and nuance, uncertainty, wonder, and worldly fascination.

In the fall of 2023, Anderson had her first solo exhibition at signs and symbols, followed by part two of this exhibition in the spring of 2024. Her work has been shown in Italy, Canada, and the United States, including at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York. Her paintings are also included in major private collections in the US and Europe. She currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2024, signs and symbols published Rachael Catharine Anderson: Paintings, the artists's first monograph featuring essays by Barry Schwabsky and Dr. Kathy Battista.

rachaelcatharineanderson.com

Lisa Waud

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II

Lisa Waud creates multi-sensory, site-specific botanical installations that explore the brief space between growth and decay, and the ways nature offers a pause button to both individuals and communities. her work uses plant-based materials to shape built environments where visitors move through shifting states of presence, memory, and sensory experience. she is currently based in the high desert of California after over a decade in Detroit, Michigan.

Grounded in a background in horticulture and professional floral design, and influenced by land art and large-scale environmental works, lisa’s installations intervene within existing architecture, echoing natural structures to create spaces for reflection. 

Collaboration is foundational to her practice. lisa engages the hosting community throughout each project—from planning through exhibition and afterlife—integrating diverse voices, histories, and perspectives into the concepts and materials. . this collaborative approach expands what the installations can hold, transforming them into shared cultural experiences rather than a solitary statement.

Lisa’s process is guided by environmental ethics, prioritizing low-waste production, sourcing from local growers, using found or reusable materials, and composting and recycling at project completion.

Past installations include flower house detroit, petrichor, tread/tender at palais de tokyo in paris, botanical installations at oak spring garden foundation in upperville, virginia, floral set design for danny brown’s “best life” video and jimmy fallon appearance, FLORA festival in cordoba, spain, the fierce urgency of now, hiberna flores, a botanic installation for hudson yards in new york city, a botanic installation for mounts botanic garden in west palm beach, florida, and the tony awards at radio city music hall.

Lisa’s projects have been featured in the new york times, huffington post, martha stewart, hyperallergic, colossal, designboom, the jealous curator, the globe and mail, detroit free press, the detroit news, detroit art review, crain’s detroit, blac magazine, washington post, and travel + leisure.

Lisa has lectured at TEDxDETROIT, oak spring garden foundation, milwaukee art museum, cranbrook art museum, broad museum, henry ford museum, cleveland botanic garden, intermitten tech conference, slow flowers summit, and the evergreen state college.

Lisa has received grants from detroit future city, the carhartt workshop, gretchen + ethan davidson, culture source’s flourish fund, red bull house of art, people first project supported by kresge art foundation), the belle foundation, new economy initiative, the awesome foundation, and the goldman sachs 10,000 small business program.

https://www.lisawaud.com

Casey Lance Brown

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Casey Lance Brown is a landscape futurist who studied at Duke University, Harvard Design School, and is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Through field research, geospatial analysis and alternative capture techniques, he maps the accidental terraforming of the Anthropocene era. Infrared imagery, data visualization and temporal composites highlight the vast imprints of geotrauma on the planet. His works have been awarded by American Academy in Rome (2011), Photoville’s The Fence (2016), and Lenscratch (2024). His series have been exhibited @ the Contemporary Museum of Art in Raleigh, @ Miami Art Week (2022), and in the Fifth National Climate Assessment for the US Global Research Program (2023-24). Brown publishes work on landscape futures in various outlets such as Volume, LA+ SPECULATION, and KERB Journal of Landscape Architecture.

Decay, abandonment, toxic legacies and the fallout of past environmental failures erupt in the foreground in my digital and analog paintings. Built from a base of intensive research, my series juxtapose something highly foreign with the native, something technological with the organic, and/or something extant with the extinct. The contrasts help interrogate how we arrived at our current geotraumatic state.

Brown also has served as an art and design critic at various universities including MIT, Harvard Design School, Clemson University, University of Tennessee, Aarhus University (DN) and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

https://caseylancebrown.com