Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
This month we welcome two cohorts to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Residency residency sessions run:
August 7 - August 19, 2024 - meet the cohort!
August 21 - September 2, 2024 - meet the cohort!
A Boston based artist, Alison Croney Moses creates wooden objects that reach out to your senses—the smell of cedar, the color of honey or the deep blue sea, the round form that signifies safety and warmth, the gentle curve that beckons to be touched.
Born and raised in North Carolina (USA), by Guyanese parents, making clothing, food, furniture, and art is embedded in her memories of childhood. She carries these values and habits into adulthood and parenting—creating experiences, conversations, and educational programs that cultivate the current and next generation of artists and leaders in art and craft. Her work is in the collections at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is a recipient of the 2023 Boston Artadia Award, the2022 USA Fellowship in Craft, and a finalist of the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize. Her work has been featured in American Craft Magazine Boston Art Review. She was recently named one of the 2023 WBUR 10 Makers. In the Fall of 2023, Alison’s first solo was reviewed in the Boston Globe. Alison holds an MA in Sustainable Business & Communities from Goddard College, and a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design.
Headshot by AfroCentered Media
Anthony Smith
Allentown, pa
Anthony Smith received a B.A. in Fine Arts from Amherst College (1999) and an M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Michigan (2001). He’s shown nationally most recently in the “Might Real/Queer Detroit Exhibit”, Detroit (2022) and in “Telling Our Story” at the David Driskell Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Smith has also shown in various Pennsylvania exhibitions including at the Bethlehem House Gallery in 2016, 2019, and 2022, and in “The New Normal” at Moravian University Payne Gallery (2021). He’s been reviewed in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Detroit Free Press, and the Artist’s Magazine to name a few. Smith has taught at the University of Michigan, Parsons, Princeton, MICA, Lehigh, and Muhlenberg Colleges. Domestically he has served as artist-in-residence at the National Academy of Design (2006 – 2008), the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT in 2016 and 2022 the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough NH in 2023, and at the Banana Factory Art Center from 2014 to today. Internationally, Smith traveled in January 2023 to Senegal Africa as part of the CAORC-WARC Faculty Development Seminar and to Sanquhar, Scotland as part of Kolaj Magazine’s Collage: Scotland residency program. He currently teaches art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Allentown Pennsylvania with a studio at the Banana Factory Art Center in nearby Bethlehem.
Jade Yumang
Chicago, IL
Jade Yumang was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and has been living in the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in Chicago, IL. They have exhibited their work in several museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Brooklyn Museum (NY), John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles, CA), Art-in-Buildings (New York, NY) to name a few. Jade has received grants from Illinois Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the BC Arts Council. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), Fire Island Artist Residency (NY), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency (New York, NY), and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE). They earned an MFA with Departmental Honors from Parsons School of Design in 2012 and a BFA with Honors from the University of British Columbia in 2008. Jade is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Janice Lardey
providence, ri
Janice Lardey is an experimental artist from Ghana and a graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), USA, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.
Lardey’s profound interest in surfaces, color, patterns, and textures has been pivotal in shaping her artistic practice and her research into textiles and print cultures. Her works explore various media, including printmaking, painting, drawing, applique, dyeing, sewing, and papermaking. Her work examines themes such as societal gender roles, patriarchy, the everyday, sustainability, domesticity, loss, the transient nature of life, and material effects.
Jessica Roseman
lexington, ma
Jessica Roseman (she/her) creates interdisciplinary performances and community based movement projects to help people sense, feel, and move better. Jess’ choreography reveals unspoken truths about mothering, ancestry, and wellbeing, encouraging empathy with her audience. In her work, she incorporates techniques from her vocations as a Feldenkrais Practitioner, Gyrotonic Instructor, and licensed massage therapist. Her award winning, multi-year restorative practice NOURISH provides deep physical connection to ourselves, each other, and our environment by recognizing and choosing what we need in the moment. She is developing an immersive, interactive NOURISH exhibition that gently bridges the gaps between public performance and personal experience; active dancer and “passive” audience; movement and visual art.
Jessica lives in unceded territory of the Massachusett & Pawtucket people known as Lexington, MA with her twin teens. She has held residencies at Lexington Community Farm, Arrow Street Arts, Subcircle, Bearnstow, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. A New England States Touring Artist, Jessica has worked with Now + There, DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Monkeyhouse, Miami Light Project, Movement Research, The Field, Global Arts Live, and ICA Boston, among others. Jess has a BA with Honors in Dance and African American Studies from Wesleyan University, and is pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Design and Media at Northeastern.
Headshot by Mel Taing
Pantea Karimi
san jose, ca
Pantea Karimi is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in San Jose, California. She worked and studied in Iran and the UK before settling in the US in 2005.
Since 2014, Pantea Karimi’s multidisciplinary work has been focused on the interconnectivity of art and science by exploring select historical objects and scientific manuscripts of medicinal botany and mathematics from Iran, Arab regions, and Europe. Karimi’s interest in botany, research, and mathematics is informed by her family with roots in Shiraz, Iran, known for its herbal medicine tradition since the medieval period and abundant architecture that uses geometry and harmonic forms. These subjects define her ancestral and cultural heritage and unify her work. Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran and later emigrating to the UK and then the US, her life and sensibilities have been intensely influenced by war, religion, and politics. Utilizing multimedia and installation and balancing harmony and tension, Karimi creates syncretic imagery and narratives to claim female agency and highlight her cultural heritage as it intertwines with geopolitical tensions. Her multimedia installations include Virtual and Augmented Reality, three-dimensional objects, video, animation, sound, print, and drawing.
Karimi’s works have been exhibited in solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the UK, and the United States including McMullen Museum of Art in Boston, San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, New Bedford Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Montefiore Einstein in NY, and Rotch Library at MIT. KQED Arts & Culture published an article on Karimi’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom work followed by a live interview on KQED Forum, aired on April 26, 2023.
Karimi is a 2024 City of San Jose Creative Ambassador, a 2023 Kala Art Institute Honoree, and a 2019 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate. She is the recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant (2022), City of San Jose Arts and Cultural Exchange Grant (2019) and Artist Residencies at MASS MoCA (2022 and 2024), Santa Fe Art Institute (2024), Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Program (2024-2026), University of California San Francisco Library (2021-2022) and Kala Art Institute Fellowship (2017).
Shayna Stripe
Brooklyn, NY
Shayna Strype is a New York-based multimedia artist working in animation, puppetry, and performance. Her films and live performances utilize dark humor, playfulness, and mixed media techniques to explore humanity through nonhuman perspectives, including objects, animals, and elements of nature. Across mediums, she creates handmade worlds that delve into the subterranean subconscious. Her films have screened at festivals internationally including Ann Arbor and Palm Springs ShortFest and won prizes at Brooklyn Film Festival, Thomas Edison Film Festival, Athens International Film Video Festival, among others. Her show, MINE, received a Jim Henson Workshop Grant and has been performed at Dixon Place Theater and the NY State Puppet Festival. Shayna’s upcoming 16mm animated film ‘Transitional Object’, commissioned by Mono No Aware, will premiere this December in Brooklyn, NY. Shayna received her MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College.
Afsaneh Aynesazi (b.1983) is an Iranian artist based in the US. Her journey in art began in her childhood with her grandfather Ostad Esmail Arjang--the renowned father of Iranian sculpting and etching.
Afsaneh works at the intersection of photography and mixed media. Through collage work, she problematizes objectifications inherent within photographic representation to depict the nuanced realities of Iranian women.
Her work frames ever-present coercive gazes upon women's bodies, showing the power of that gaze to dismember and reduce women's bodies to objects of desire.
A.J. McClenon
Chicago, IL
A.J. McClenon is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Washington, DC, and currently resides in Chicago. A.J. is a fellowship recipient at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Masters in Fine Arts (2014); and a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in creative writing from the University of Maryland College Park and also studied at The New School. A.J. has performed and shown work in spaces like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Filmmakers, LA Film Forum, Echo Park Film Center, Danspace Project, Woman Made Gallery, Longwood Art Gallery, Roman Susan Gallery, Links Hall, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, and Hyde Park Art Center. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching, youth rights, and community collaborations and is currently the co-founder of Film School. This touring film series features Black films that have remained in obscurity.
While excavating tangible ways to approach sonic textures A.J.'s work arrives as poems, Bildungsroman refrains, visual scores, and mixed media translations through performance, installation, repurposed materials, drawings, and moving images. These works represent “place," nature, and the body. Processes of regeneration: sound from image and then the image to material/objects; found and collected objects to assemblage become articulations for Black migrations, geomorphology, escapism, and ecosystems found in nature and technology.
Headshot by Eryka Dellenbach
Amalia Galdona Broche
providence, ri
Amalia Galdona Broche is a Cuban-American artist and educator exploring displacement, diaspora and the geographies of identity. Through textiles, sculpture and installation she investigates how migration and transculturation processes shape identity construction. Her practice is rooted in material thought and reimagines relationships between entities in the built and natural environments.
Anoushé Shojae-Chaghorvand
Philadelphia, PA
Anoushé Shojae-Chaghorvand is a Philadelphia based transdisciplinary artist who works primarily in kinetic sculpture. She creates “spatial cinema”—time-based, looping, high- tension scenes—in the form of performative installations that capture the complexity, violence, and absurdity of our American Dream. Shojae-Chaghorvand’s work encompasses a variety of time-based media, initially beginning her artistic practice in performance art and then expanding into kinetic sculpture. In her work, Shojae- Chaghorvand is drawn to the ephemeral and plays with the notion of liveness, using kinetics because of their propulsion to their own destruction. She is currently interested in recreating the escapist tactics of amusement in Western culture. Anoushé received her BFA from Maine College of Art in 2019, her MFA from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022, a 2023 fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, and most recently an artist in residence at RAIR (Recycled Artist In Residence) in Philadelphia.
Headshot by Billy Dufula
Bryan Fernandez
New york, nY
‘It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen.” - Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water
I am a Dominican-American artist from Washington Heights, New York—whose artistic practice centers around the Visibility of marginalized communities of my Cultural Background. As an Afro-Dominican, I observed my demographic's lack of authentic representation in white media. In reaction, I create large-scale figurative mixed media pieces to tell stories of who my people are—countering Colonial and anti-black narratives portrayed within the mainstream.
Headshot by Kiara Torres
Donna Costello
brooklyn, ny
Donna Costello is a dance artist working in the field of dance, theater, performance and education. She centers the body as a deep vessel of expression committed to building relationship, investigating context and fostering community.
Donna collaborates with a wide range of artists creating in apartments, public parks, historic landmark buildings, pools, fields, stages and schools in the U.S. and abroad. Performance highlights include works by choreographers jill sigman/thinkdance, Carrie Ahern, Nicole Mannarino, Vicky Shick, Cora Dance (founding member), Jimena Paz, Naomi Goldberg-Haas, immersive theater director Kelly Bartnik, filmmaker Darryl Hell, visual artist Nick Cave, and theater artist Jennifer Sargent.
At the core of her collaborative creative work is the examination on identity, femininity, and disrupting social constructs & conventions to reveal something new and true. Her choreography has been presented and supported by Dixon Place, chashama, Triskelion Arts, BAX, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Flea Theater, Roulette, James Madison University, Estrogenius Festival, Women-in-Motion, MOtiVE Brooklyn, NACL, Definitive Figures Festival in New Orleans (Co-Producer) and Performatica in Mexico.
She champions the authentic voice of young people through her work as teaching artist, curriculum specialist and lead facilitator with Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Juilliard’s K-12 Global Program and the Park Avenue Armory.
Movement moves us all.
Headshot by Confidanz
Janhavi Khemka
Chicago, IL
Born in Varanasi, India, Chicago-based Janhavi Khemka approaches acoustics through woodcut printmaking and experimental installations composed of animation, sound, performance, and vibratory material.
Growing up, Khemka’s late mother encouraged her to speak in Hindi, resulting in an emphasis on lipreading in a hearing-speaking world. Shortly after she lost her mother to cancer, Khemka searched for ways to imprint her experience of the ‘real’ world. Activating her sensory capacities through touch, taste, smell, and the visual, Khemka attended Santiniketan (2015-2017) interjecting a lineage of largely male master printmakers with conceptual wit and an astute awareness of the limits of printmaking. Khemka moved to Chicago to complete her master’s at the School of the Art Institute, finding herself gravitating toward animation, sound design, and performance, activating works on paper through sound and bodily intervention. Developing immersive works that splice together the two and three dimensional, she invites her viewers to locate their inner assumptions and aural subjectivities within the strange and otherness.
Slipping between imposed identities like, ‘disabled’, ‘marginalized’, and ‘immigrant’ - Khemka transcends ineffectual terms, attuning herself instead to the possibility of listening to materials she works within. For her, it becomes fictional necessity to ensures her politics are not foreclosed nor erased, theoretically and conceptually.
Janhavi’s recent exhibitions at Comfort Station and SITE Student Galleries, Chicago, IL, have received critical attention. She has also recently been awarded fellowships at KALA Art Institute Residency, Berkeley (CA), and the 3Arts/Body of Work Residency, between UIC and the MCA Chicago. She has worked closely with Japanese print maker Paul Furneaux in Edinburgh, UK, and has recently earned the Lalit Kala Akademie Award for her installation ‘Sapna’, in 2022.
Liza Faktor
Portland, OR
Liza Faktor is a visual artist and independent curator. Her practice is informed by how the memories and traumas of humans and the land are intertwined; how we and landscapes process violence; and how we might heal. She’s interested in how our various geographies are connected through colonial past, extraction economy, and in the future of the natural world. Her image-making is connected with her engagement with other artists and communities, and is heavily influenced by collaboration with activists and scientists.
Her work was exhibited in Spain, Norway, China, Russia, UK and the US, and is in private collections in the UK, Switzerland, Lebanon, Russia, and the US. She is the recent recipient of Oregon Regional Arts & Culture Council grant (2023) and Oregon Arts Commission Career Opportunity grant (2022).
Apart from her own artistic practice Liza has worked as a curator and creative producer with visual artists and filmmakers on award-winning installations, films and multi-platform projects. She curated over twenty exhibitions and festival programs on the intersection of visual arts, film, performance and emerging media, lectured and taught workshops in the US, the UK, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain, UAE, Australia and Russia.
She immigrated from Russia in 2010 and is based in Portland, OR.
Maurya Kerr
oakland, ca
Maurya Kerr is a bay area-based writer and artist. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes and appears in multiple journals, including Magma Poetry, Poet Lore, and an anthology, “The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry.” Much of her artistic work, across disciplines, is focused on black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya was a 2021/22 UC Berkeley ARC Poetry & the Senses Fellow, won the 2022 Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, and most recently won Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize and second place in Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize. Her first chapbook, MUTTOLOGY, was published by Small Harbor Publishing in late 2023, and her second, tommy noun, in March 2024 by C&R Press.
Headshot by Alan Kimara Dixon
Simon Han
medford, ma
Simon Han is the author of the novel Nights When Nothing Happened (Riverhead Books, 2020), which was named an Indie Next Pick and best book of the year by Time, the Washington Post, Harper's Bazaar, and Texas Monthly. His stories have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, Guernica, Fence, and Electric Literature, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Aperture, Lit Hub, and the Paris Review Daily. He has received support from MacDowell, Willapa Bay AiR, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Born in Tianjin, China and raised in various cities in Texas, he lives in Medford, MA and teaches at Tufts University. He is at work on a second novel.
Headshot by Chanhee Heo