Scarlett Peterson

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Scarlett Peterson is a poet, essayist, and lesbian. Her first collection, The Pink I Must Have Worn was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. She is currently working on her second manuscript of poems, Notes from the Field, and a lyric memoir, Groundwork.  She is a PhD candidate at Georgia State University working on additional graduate certificates in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Gerontology. She is the 2022 winner of The Robert V. Morea III Poetry Prize, a recipient of a Martha’s Vineyard Creative Writing Fellowship, and attended an Oak Spring Garden Interdisciplinary Artist Residency in the Summer of 2023. Her work can be found in Moon City Review, The Lavender Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Peculiar, Pidgeonholes, Gargoyle Magazine, Ponder Review, Madcap Review, Counterclock Journal, The Shore, Poetry Online, Skink Beat Review,  Eunoia Review, and more. You can find her on X [Twitter] and Instagram @scarlettpoet.

Gavin Ryan

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Gavin Ryan is a musician and native of Payson, Utah, he has performed and taught throughout the United States, as well as in Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Haiti, and China. After completing a US Fulbright Fellowship in Bali, Indonesia, he founded and directed Gamelan Madu Kencana, a community Balinese gamelan based in Provo, Utah. Recent accomplishments include the inaugural award of the Utah Performing Arts Fellowship in 2020, the 2023 Brehm Prize in Instrumental Composition, an Oak Springs Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Residency, and the Rackham Presidential Graduate Fellowship. He currently directs Gamelan Kyai Telaga Madu and Gamelan Madu Biru at University of Michigan.

Parul Naresh

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Parul Naresh is a textile designer, visual artist and educator who practices sustainable art. She aspires to put environmental awareness at the forefront of her work with a strong belief in utilization of natural renewable resources. As a dyer and printmaker, she explores silkscreen printing using plant-based dyes & earth pigments. She has been indulged in supporting the sustainable textile & art practices and related artisan communities. With noticeable change and after years of team efforts, today with artisans as her partners, she continue to be part of it as an entrepreneur turning her passion and dedication for handwoven and natural material, into a textile craft business–weavesandwildflowers.com

Kylan Rice

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Kylan Rice has writing published in RHINO, West Branch, Seattle Review, Booth and elsewhere. He has an MFA in poetry from Colorado State University and is currently a PhD candidate in literature at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Lauren R. Cannady

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session I

Lauren R. Cannady is a scholar working at the intersections of art and architectural history, intellectual history, and the environmental humanities. Her research and teaching explore artistic production as the material evidence of intellectual trends in early modern Europe and colonial North America. She is co-editor of Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, which appeared in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series in 2021, and her current research project is a book manuscript on early modern taxonomies of knowledge and the ordering of the natural world through patterned gardens and vernacular botanicals. Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte. She holds a PhD in Art History from New York University.

Madge Evers

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Madge Evers uses foraged plants and fungi to explore cross-species collaboration. Her work has been exhibited at the Danforth Art Museum, the Brattleboro Museum, throughout the east coast, and acquired by private and institutional collectors. Madge was a Critical Mass finalist in 2019 and a 2021 Mass Cultural Council photography finalist. Images from The New Herbarium series were published in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Artist residencies in Ireland, at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Kinney Renaissance Center at UMass, on Cape Cod, and in Maine have allowed Madge to interact with landscapes and their histories. After teaching for 25 years in Rhode Island and Massachusetts public schools, she now works as a full-time artist in western Massachusetts.

Susanna Kwan

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Susanna Kwan writes, edits, and draws in San Francisco. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Writers' Grotto, and Vanderbilt University.

Audrey Bell

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Audrey is a fine artist and medical illustrator who combines her artistic and scientific talents with her love for the natural world in a project titled Transformative Encounters. The project is a series of illustrations and maps that depicts interactions of plants and animals in three different ecosystems in Ohio, and explores some of the impact of those interactions on our world. Taking inspiration from diverse materials in the Lloyd’s collection, Audrey’s artwork highlights some of the overlooked connections in our human and natural histories. With a fresh look, she hopes to find clues to a healthier future where our relationship with the non-human world is more respectful and symbiotic.

Paula Whyman

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session II

Paula Whyman new book, Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, is forthcoming from Timber Press/Hachette Book Group in January 2025. It’s a blend of memoir, natural history, and conservation science, a chronicle of her attempts to restore retired farmland to natural habitat. Her first book, the linked short story collection You May See a Stranger, won praise from The New Yorker and a starred review in Publishers Weekly, and won the Towson Prize for Literature. Her stories have appeared in journals including McSweeney’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and The Southampton Review. Her fiction was selected for the anthology Writes of Passage: Coming-of-Age Stories and Memoirs from The Hudson Review. Her nonfiction has been featured on NPR, in the Washington Post, and in The Rumpus. She is co-founder and editor in chief of the literary journal Scoundrel Time.

Tami Banh

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Tami Banh is a Senior Designer at SCAPE and an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Urban Design program at Columbia University. With a background in landscape and architecture, she is interested in pushing disciplinary boundaries and investigating the relationship between politics, ecology, landscape, urbanism, and architecture. Her works and research focus on displacement, climate resilience, critical cartography, and human-nonhuman cohabitation. Tami holds a dual Master’s in Architecture and Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Penny White Travelling Fellowship as well as Student Honor Awards from ASLA and BSLA. She also holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the University of Southern California.

Douglas Dale

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Douglas Dale was born in Springfield, MA in 1993. They received their BA from Grinnell College in 2015 with honors and time at Sorbonne Université in Paris, France. They have spent years working at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA, textile studio Carolyn Ray Inc. in Yonkers, NY and product incubator FCTRY in Brooklyn.

Their work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, working with Fiber Art Now, The American Craft Council, Craft Alliance, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts California, The Galesburg Civic Art Center, The North Dakota Museum of Art, The Center for the Visual Arts of Wausau Wisconsin, and the World Trade Center in Manhattan.
Dale is trans non-binary and currently lives and works in St. Louis, MO.

Brenda Biondo

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Brenda Biondo is an American artist who uses traditional camera techniques and a formalist aesthetic to explore the perception of atmospheric light and color and their role in the construct of landscape. Her work emphasizes the use of unconventional contexts to create new ways of looking at common subjects, while challenging viewers' perception of color and three-dimensional space. Her interest in atmospheric phenomena and other components of the natural world is informed by her degree in journalism and her previous career as a writer specializing in environmental issues.

Brenda's work has been exhibited throughout the country and published in numerous print and online publications, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Her photographs are held in numerous private and public collections, including those of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Center for Creative Photography and the San Diego Museum of Art. A solo exhibit of her work opened at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2017. 

Her first book of photographs, Once Upon a Playground, was published by the University Press of New England in 2014 and is now the subject of a five-year traveling exhibit organized by ExhibitsUSA.

A native New Yorker, she’s been a resident of Colorado since 1999 and currently divides her time between Manitou Springs, CO and Marfa, TX.

Shastri Akella

Interdisciplinary Residency, Two-Week, Session I

Shastri Akella's is a writer and teacher. His debut novel "The Sea Elephants" has been published by Flatiron Books (USA, Canada) and Penguin (India). He was a writing resident at the Fine Arts Works Center (2021) and the Oak Springs Garden Foundation (2023). He's winner of 2022 FracturedLit Flash Fiction Contest and the 2023 Best Microfiction Contest. His writing has appeared in Guernica, Fairy Tale Review, CRAFT, The Masters Review, Electric Literature, World Literature Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and PhD. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Michigan State University.

Anna Wyngaarden, 2023

Plant Science Research Fellow 2023

Anna Wyngaarden is a population ecologist and botanist interested in the population dynamics driving the persistence of rare and endemic plant species. She is currently focusing on three globally imperiled species endemic to granite outcrops in the southeastern US, utilizing observational studies and modeling approaches to tease apart the broad and local drivers of the species’ observed patterns of abundance and occupancy.

Nazafarin Lotfi, 2023

Eliza Moore Fellow 2023

Nazafarin Lotfi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Lotfi is a multi-disciplinary artist who studies how the self and notions of identity formation are understood in relationship to architecture, landscape, space, and place. She explores humanness in relation to nonhuman bodies and places that are defined by practices of map-making and gardening. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as the University Galleries at Illinois State University, Normal, IL; Regards, Chicago, IL; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; MOCA Tucson, AZ; Elmhurst Museum of Art, Elmhurst, IL, among many more. She is the recipient of 2023 Eliza Moore Fellowship for Artistic Excellence.

Lotfi’s practice has received support from Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Art Grant, Night Bloom: Grants for Artists, and CAAP Grant from the City of Chicago. Lotfi was a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University in 2021-22.

John Pastoriza Pinol, 2023

Botanical Artist in Residence 2023

Based in Melbourne, Australia, John considers himself a contemporary visual artist whose practice sits within the genre of botanical art yet rebels against its continued traditional representations and tropes. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, in solo and group exhibitions for the last 22 years in private and public galleries exploring these tensions along with the complex and dynamic interrelationships of man and nature/science and art. This has evolved into a commitment to painting as both a method and as a form of deeper inspection which continues to draw upon the power of close observation. Using rich luminous hues in gorgeously exotic and rare botanical specimens epitomise his work, however these are more than representational flower paintings. Closer inspection unearths a certain ambiguity of form and intent towards a dark and complex narrative which is born of the association between eye and hand, and sense and thought.

Beverly Allen, 2023

Botanical Artist in Residence 2023

Corymbia ficifolia, watercolor on paper, 49 x 40 cm, 2018 - Beverly Allen

Beverly worked as a graphic designer and illustrator, before moving to botanical art practice. She has shown annually at the Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney ‘Botanica’ Exhibition since 1999, and exhibits internationally.

Her work is held in private collections including the Shirley Sherwood Collection, the Peter Crossing Collection and the Isaac Sutton Collection as well as at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation USA, the Royal Botanic Gardens Herbarium Library at Kew Gardens, the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library, the Highgrove Florilegium for the Prince of Wales’ Charitable Trust, The Transylvania Florilegium for the Prince of Wales’s Foundation Romania and The Florilegium, Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney.

Carol Woodin, 2023

Botanical Artist in Residence 2023

Carol took a circuitous route to botanical art. A one-time draftsman, surveyor’s cartographer, and tractor-trailer driver all were steps along the trail that contribute to her work in the field and studio.

A freelancer for over 30 years, Carol's main obsession has always been orchids, but rare wildflowers, heirloom fruits and other interesting plants are fair game. Living in the Hudson Valley provides perfect opportunities for exploring plant diversity. Her artwork has been exhibited and collected around the world. Among recent venues are Jonathan Cooper Gallery, London; Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; Shirley Sherwood Gallery, Kew, UK: UBS Galleries and Newhouse Galleries in New York; Museum de Zwarte Tulp, Lisse, the Netherlands; and the Marciana Library, Venice, Italy. Her work is in the collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hunt Institute, and numerous private and corporate collections throughout the Americas and Europe. She recently was invited to contribute to the Grootbos Florilegium, a project to document and raise awareness of the Cape Floral Kingdom in South Africa. A book has been published documenting the project.

Carol is Exhibitions Director of the American Society of Botanical Artists,, curating and coordinating exhibitions throughout the US. She teaches workshops around the country and internationally in person and online devoted to techniques of watercolor painting on vellum.

Jean Emmons, 2023

Botanical Artist in Residence 2023

Emmons has won many awards including two Gold Medals and a “Best Painting in Show” from the Royal Horticultural Society, London. Also, the prestigious Diane Bouchier Founders Award for Excellence in Botanical Art given by the American Society of Botanical Artists.

She has exhibited at the Smithsonian; the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library; the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; the New York Botanical Garden; Wave Hill, the United States Botanic Garden and the Horticultural Society of New York.

Recent awards include the Jurors’ Award at the 20th Botanical Art Exhibition at Filoli and “Best in Show” at the American Society of Botanical Artists 21st International Exhibition, Wave Hill.

Her work is included in numerous collections including the Shirley Sherwood Collection, Kew; the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library; the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; and the Alisa and Isaac M. Sutton Collection.

When not painting, Emmons spends her days gardening and walking the trails of Vashon Island, Washington State.  She volunteers at Vashon Island Pet Protectors.

Emily Hauman

Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session IV

Emily Hauman, is a conservation horticulturist based in Pensacola, Fl.