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

Abby Swidler

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Violinist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer Abby Swidler spins sound into immersive dreamscapes that invite listeners to explore and reflect upon the natural world. Abby’s music thoughtfully weaves together organic and electronic textures to create sonic landscapes which are both of the earth and other-worldly. Abby’s music fluidly lives between categories, with threads of contemporary classical, minimalism, folk, ambient, electronic, and experimental music.

Since 2017, Abby has been connecting with the natural world and exploring environmental themes in their music. Their piece Arbor for baroque violin and electronics (2023), explores the theme of deforestation in the United States, and the dualities of past & present, grief & hope, and nature & technology.  Horizon & Retrospect (2021) examines snapshots of evolving landscapes in Portland, ME. Botanical Portraits (JACK Quartet Studio, 2020) is a series of miniatures for string quartet focused on plant life.  Abby hopes to inspire listeners to feel affirmed in their own unique identities, and to encourage care for one another and the planet.

Their solo project tonguetide will be releasing from the outside EP Oct 4, 2024. Their first release under this project, from the outside is a prismatic collection of captivating soundscapes and intimate songs. Instrumentals, vocals, electronics, and sounds from daily-life and nature are interwoven into wondrous sonic collages.

A violinist, violist, vocalist, and passionate collaborator, Abby is a founding member of Diaphanous Ensemble, a genre-bending composer, improvisor, performer collective started with Che Buford & Aimée Niemann.  Diaphanous co-composed, produced, and recorded a work for visual artist Deborah Jack’s seven-panel video installation which will be on exhibit in fall/winter of 2024 in the New Orleans Triennial.  Diaphanous premiered four new string-quartets by its members in Aug, 2023, and performed with Ioanna Gika as part of Jacolby Satterwhite’s A Metta Prayer, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Sep, 2023.

Abby is a touring member of the band Iron & Wine, playing violin, viola, and singing.  Abby’s work is also featured across a variety of collaborations, including ruby, a dream-pop duo with songwriter kim mayo that Bandcamp Daily described as “a striking, evocative work full of hushed beauty,” and Tsubaki, a collaboration with Courtney Swain & Kyle Harris, which released the short film Ripe featuring the group’s layered and haunting compositions. They have also composed film scores for “THE THAW” directed by Sean Temple and Sarah Wisner, “HOLDING BACK THE TIDE” directed by Emily Packer, and “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” directed by Jeff Verlanic.  As a composer, Abby has written works for Palaver Strings, BBC Shortcuts, Dance Visions INC, O Miami Poetry Festival, and the Peabody Essex Museum.

Abby has performed and recorded with artists including Hamed Sinno, Japanese Breakfast, Angel Olsen, Kishi Bashi, L’Rain, Lady Lamb, Billy Martin, Carla Kihlstedt, Shattered Glass, Mirah, Darlene Love, Jherek Bischoff, Ava Luna, I’m With Her, Band of Horses, Bent Knee, Palaver Strings, and The Jessica Pavone String Ensemble. They have performed on The Tonight Show, at SXSW, Newport Folk Festival, Winter JazzFest, Panama Jazz Festival, Halifax Jazz Fest, National Sawdust, Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, Joe’s Pub, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Lincoln Center.  They are featured on over 40 studio albums.

Abby has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Subcircle Residency, the Turkey Land Cove Foundation for the Arts, The Panama Jazz Festival, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. Abby was a JACK Quartet Studio Artist, an Experimental Institute fellow at Antenna Cloud Farm, a New Amsterdam Records Genre-Fluid Composers Lab fellow, and a Gabriela Lena Frank Academy of Music fellow.   They received a B.M. in Violin Performance from Eastman School of Music and an M.M. in Contemporary Improvisation from The New England Conservatory. Originally from Missoula, MT, they currently live in Brooklyn, NY.

https://abbyswidler.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