Artists-in-Residence
Below, you'll find our current artist-in-residence. You can find our alumni artists-in-residence here.
Camilla Sims
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, 26-year-old Camilla Sims embodies the characteristics of the African freshwater cichlid that inspired her artist alias, Convict Julie. A self-taught composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performing artist, she is carving a unique path in classical music removed from academia. Earning a B.A. in Entertainment & Media Studies and a certificate in Music Business in 2020, Sims expresses her worldly experiences and perspectives of global Blackness by pairing her original music with original film productions. Focusing specifically on classical music, she is combining classical music composition and independent research, creating Afrocentric Neoclassical music with the intent of deconstructing Eurocentrism from Classical music, uncovering ethnically diverse Diasporic classical perspectives, and composing original works removed from the framework of colonialism. Her work is similar to that of composer-artists Yussef Dayes and Devonte Hynes, and the point of contrast is her anti-academic foundations and approach to creating Afrocentric Classical music.
Andrew Norris
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Andrew Norris is an artist and educator living and working in Richmond, VA. Andrew received a BFA from East Tennessee State University and holds an MFA from the University of Florida where he also earned a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexualities and Women’s Studies. Norris has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of Wisconsin- Green Bay, and is currently an Assistant Professor and Studio Art Coordinator at Virginia State University.
Norris’ work has been featured in numerous national group exhibitions including at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Mary Washington, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. In 2023, Norris had two solo shows: “All I Ever Wanted Was to Kiss the Sun” at Bermudez Projects in Los Angeles, CA and “A Brighter Shade of Melancholy” at Iridian Gallery in Richmond, VA. Norris has been awarded fellowships to attend artist residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the University of Wisconsin (Green Bay, WI). His work has been featured in New American Paintings (Issue 153) and has work in the collection of the Tom of Finland Foundation. Norris' time at the Peter Bullough Foundation is funded in part by a 2024 VCUarts Adjunct Research Grant.
Tony Hao
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Tony Hao is a CT-based Mandarin-to-English literary translator and writer. Authors he has translated include Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger, Taiwanese essayist Hsieh Chih-Wei, Chinese short story writer Ban Yu, and Chinese essayist Xiao Hai. His translations and writings have appeared and are forthcoming in Granta, The Common, Books from Taiwan, Florescence (The Taipei Chinese PEN), MAYDAY Magazine, and elsewhere. His works have been recognized by the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, Art Omi’s Translation Lab, BCLT’s Advanced Translation Workshop, the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and elsewhere. He holds a B.A. from Yale College, where he majored in English and studied fiction writing, journalism, and literary translation.
Photo credit to Tong Wei-Ger
Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Sandra Jackson-Opoku is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. Her novels include The River Where Blood Is Born (1997), which won an American Library Association Black Caucus Literary Award, and Hot Johnny (and the Women Who Loved Him) (2001). With Quraysh Ali Lansana, she edited Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks (2017). Jackson-Opoku’s own writing on the cultures of the African diaspora has been published widely.
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Jackson-Opoku is the recipient of honors and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Antiquarian Society. She won the CCLM/General Electric Fiction Award for Younger Writers. On faculty at Chicago State University, Jackson-Opaku has taught for institutions and organizations such as Columbia College Chicago, the University of Miami, Nova Southeastern University, the Writer’s Studio at the University of Chicago, the North Country Institute for Writers of Color, and the Hurston/Wright Writers Workshop. She lives in Chicago.
Nicolette Reinsmith
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Nicolette Reinsmith is an oil painter based in Eureka, California. A 2024 graduate of California College of the Arts in San Francisco, she earned her B.F.A. in painting and drawing. Her work is informed by her upbringing in rural northern California, where her personal experiences as a woman within the masculine dominated rural landscape shape the themes and narratives of her paintings. Reinsmith examines the complex intersections of American rural life, class distinctions, and gender roles, exploring how these forces influence both personal identity and the broader American cultural dynamic. Her work has been featured in exhibitions across San Francisco, San Rafael, and Eureka, California, and is a 2024 recipient of the Robert Ralls Memorial Scholarship. As Reinsmith continues to evolve her practice, she is expanding her exploration of rural America, traveling to different regions to document their unique culture and communities.
Isa Dorvillier
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Isa Dorvillier is an artist and educator, born and raised in New York City, living and working in Queens, NY. Her art and teaching practices are rooted in fostering opportunities for open-ended exploration, connection with community, and deep engagement with the living environment. This work takes the form of attentive observation, urban exploration, material experiments, cloth making, photography, and both experiential and formal research.
Dorvillier draws from the cultural and ecological histories of Brooklyn and Queens - in particular urbanized bodies of water. For her, the beauty and pleasure of living in an urban ecosystem are derived not only from the human world but from how the living environment sustains itself in heavily industrialized areas. Referencing street grids, leaf shadows on sidewalks, estuary ecosystems, and woven lace, Dorvillier works to catalog and contextualize the vast memory and meaning that the urban landscape holds.
Dorvillier graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021 with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Fiber. She presented her first solo exhibition, Riparian Rites in 2024 at Psychic Readings Gallery in Lower Manhattan. Dorvillier completed the Apprentice Training Program at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in summer of 2024. Dorvillier has led walking tours in collaboration with Jane’s Walk Festival/The Municipal Art Society, and The Queens Memory Project/Open House NY, and The Queens Public Library. Dorvillier works at the Queens Public Library she plans and facilitates experiential art programming for young people.
CC Molaison
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
CC Molaison is a fiction author from New Orleans. Her writing explores the lives of characters living in the Gulf South. A sense of place threads through her work, and often that place embodies the fringes of the greater region to such an extreme degree that it seems to exist outside of it: the American South within the United States, New Orleans within the American South, her birthplace on the Westbank side of the river within New Orleans.
Bayous and swamps, the emblematic landscapes of Southeast Louisiana, can hardly be said to have solid ground. In fact, exactly the opposite: the location of land and water both. Her characters see the duality that they stand on in all aspects of their lives. The local geography’s murkiness and radiance, hospitality and inhumanity—combined with the city’s sociability and poverty—all animate her work.
Her stories, published by Witness Magazine, Another Chicago, and Stranger’s Guide, have been nominated for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Award. She has received support from A Studio in the Woods and the Newcomb Institute at Tulane University. Currently, she is at work on a novel written in footnotes.
Samantha Van Heest
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Samantha Van Heest (b. 1998) is an artist and art educator currently residing in the greater Washington DC area. She has exhibited her work across the United States and Europe. Her debut solo exhibition, DEEP/CLEAN, opened February 2023 at HOMME Gallery in Washington, DC. Samantha has been included in various group show at spaces such as UMBRELLA Art Fair (Washington DC); Hamiltonian Artists (Washington DC); Magma Maria (Offenbach am Main, Germany); McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA); The University of Maryland (College Park, MD); among others. She was featured in New American Paintings South #148 and has worked for the contemporary painter Amy Sherald. She is a member of the 2024 Sparkplug Collective at DC Arts Center (Washington DC), and a Post-Graduate Resident at the Torpedo Factory (Alexandria, VA). She teaches art in the Greater Washington DC area with a focus in drawing, painting, and portfolio development. Van Heest earned a BA in Studio Art from the University of Mary Washington in 2020.
Kat Chudy
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Kat Chudy is a multimedia artist living and working in Tallahassee, Florida. They have an extensive educational background in both art and science and seek to find the edge where the two disciplines meet and inform one another through the subject of their work – invisible disability. Kat recently graduated from Florida State University with an MFA in studio art and is currently teaching printmaking at both FSU and Thomasville Center for the Arts in Thomasville, Georgia. Chudy participates yearly in SECAC - the Southeastern College Art Conference, chairing panels and presenting research on access and disability aesthetics. Chudy advocates for disability rights, healthcare rights, and educational reform. Their work is shown both in disabled shows and venues, as well as mainstream exhibitions, something they believe is critical to help bring disability culture to mainstream understanding as part of the larger picture of the human experience.
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Kat’s work uses printmaking as the bedrock of a robust artistic practice, using the iterative nature of the medium to work out formal problems before bringing ideas into fiber or sculptural form. The flattening of information and images creates a removal and space for transformation and play. Signifiers of illness become beautiful installations or prints either through conceptual or physical transformation. Their sculptural and fiber work uses found, used, or discarded items as a base - something that mirrors the need to make do with what is available and strives towards efficiency, an ethos of recycling, and a reduction of waste. Repetition and accumulation in their work come from finding parallels between how medical histories are collected by institutions and individuals and their own collecting.
Oliver Lyric
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Oliver Lyric is a San Antonio, Texas based interdisciplinary artist holding a BFA from the University of Texas San Antonio. His work, while utilizing many mediums, focuses on trans and queer identity and experience while being in a conservative part of the country. He uses his work to express the internal and external facets of transness with unflinching vulnerability often pulling from his own experiences and using his body as a vehicle for his thoughts and feelings about being trans in America. He uses and mixes many mediums including fiber, ceramics, photo, books, print, video, and paint. His work often utilizes mending techniques to talk about creating identity and the internal processes of healing oneself.
He has had work in multiple shows around San Antonio at Brick at Bluestar as well as the University of Incarnate Word in their Circularity Sustainable Fiber Art show in 2024. He currently teaches classes on mending and sustainable sewing at the Creative Reuse Center of San Antonio.
Audacia Ray
Artist-in-Residence Spring 2025
Audacia Ray (they/them) is a bisexual and nonbinary writer and advocate whose creative work is intertwined with their political activism and experiences as a queer sex worker, survivor of violence, and keen observer of climate impacts on human and non-human beings. A longtime memoir and nonfiction writer, Audacia shifted their writing practice to fiction in 2021. They are a Tin House Workshop alumn with short stories published in The Hopper, Necessary Fiction, Litro Magazine, Superstition Review, and Stone Canoe, and they are at work on a novel and a collection of short stories. Their story “Don’t Look at the Owls” was nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award and their fiction explores queer surviving and thriving, friendship and connections among living and dead bio and chosen family, and trans and nonbinary entanglements with nature.
A dedicated polymath, Audacia played a key role in drafting the most-expansive statewide sex work decriminalization bill in the U.S., won a Feminist Porn Award for their directorial debut The Bi Apple, and hosted the monthly sex worker storytelling series Red Umbrella Diaries in NYC for five years. They were an editor of $pread magazine and the resulting best-of anthology published by Feminist Press in 2015. Their first book, Naked on the Internet, was published by Seal Press in 2007 and their essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in We Too: Essays on Sex Work and Survival.
Audacia currently serves as Interim Executive Director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project (AVP), where for the last seven years they have worked to expand queer survivor’s access to resources beyond the criminal legal system. While at AVP, they have presented their research on anti-LGBTQ hate violence to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, run a citywide campaign to increase access to bathrooms for TGNC people, and developed community safety training for small LGBTQ groups who wish to build community rather than engage with police.
Dacia has a MA in American Studies from Columbia University and a BA in Cultural Studies from the New School. They are an aspiring naturalist who identifies strongly with riparian zones in the places they love best: Brooklyn and the Catskill Mountains.