Kaye Kelly is a Boston-based singer, composer and arranger. With three studio albums under her belt as well as a large catalogue of original music, she is most at home fidgeting with her love of words while playing the piano. Kaye is the founder and composer of SheGrooves, a female-forward band comprised of women from the Berklee College of Music. 

In 2023, Kaye was a Massachusetts Cultural Council awardee for her project “SheGrooves” and was funded to explore songwriting for social change, specifically within the lens of gender equity. Kaye was also recently named a 2023 “Commonwealth Heroine” through the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for her work with arts advocacy and community activism. 

Andrea “Ani” Johnson is an associate professor of Music Business/ Management at Berklee School of Music. She is an international lecturer and consultant in music licensing, marketing, and strategic startups. 

Previously, she worked with Chris Blackwell at Palm Pictures/Rykodisc and licensed over 30 albums for artists including Elton John, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Fleetwood Mac. Her work with Gloria Estefan included restructuring financial systems and managing royalties for a Sony Music venture. 

She serves as faculty support to the student team developing RAIDAR, Berklee’s music licensing platform, and also teaches the RAIDAR blockchain practicum. Built by students, for students, the platform hosts music from Berklee students, alumni and faculty, and allows them to license it for placement in films, ads, video games, and other media. 

Judy Soberanes is an assistant professor at Berklee School of Music. She is an Independent recording/performance artist. Judy shows off her talents through her many skills including music, percussion, makeup artistry, photography, and mixology. 

Ember (They/Them) is a mixed media textile artist, and teaches at NIAD Ember makes, curates, and supports art as a life practice. Ember’s current focus is on human relationships with other animals. The series, “The Hands of Death,” features dead or dying animals and human hands. Contrasting bright colored embroidery on dark fabric illustrates frank depictions of death. An interest in human relationships spills into all of Avalos’ curated spaces. It’s all right there waiting to be grabbed. 

Ember has curated and been featured in various exhibitions such as "Hey, Give me a Call" at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective in Oakland and "Through My Eyes" at the NIAD Art Center in Richmond. 

In addition to creating art, Ember has also facilitated textile workshops, led art committees, and curated art shows. Ember's art is an exploration of the complexities of human-animal relationships and works to create a space for reflection and conversation.

Emma Spertus lives in Berkeley, works in Richmond, and has a studio in Oakland. She is a teaching artist from one of our partnerships, NIAD. Her sculptures and architectural interventions are inspired by her varied encounters in the Bay Area. She is interested in highlighting the humor and visual intrigue of banal subjects, from business parks to technology lingo.

Emma has completed a diverse range of community-minded art projects, including co-founding Real Time & Space, which offers affordable artist studios to 17 artists in Oakland Ca. In 2018, she co-organized Channel Arts with the support of the Oakland Museum of CA. The community-based art workshops focused on enjoying public parks with the belief of art-making acting as an equalizer and a bringer of awareness of the space around us. She is an arts instigator, curator, performance artist, and has attended a number of residency programs both here in the US and abroad. 

Ocean Escalanti is an indigenous visual artist and writer residing in Oakland, CA. Originally from Southern California she relocated to the bay to achieve her BFA Printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. 

Ocean has recently exhibited work and developed a natural dye workshop for the group show ‘Tikkun: for the Cosmos, Community and Ourselves’ at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. 

Ocean has also performed poetry and vended self published works at the Small Press Bazaar at SFMOMA and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. 

Ocean is a facilitator at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA and monitors at Max's Garage Press in Berkeley, CA. NIAD is one of Chalk Hill Artist Residency’s Bay Area Partnerships. 

Alexander Hernandez is a teaching artist from Creativity Explored, who specializes in outdoor interactive exhibits featuring textiles, soft sculpture, and video. 

Growing up, Alexander found his safe space in crafting, where he could freely express his love of American pop culture and his Mexican upbringing. 

In his physical practice, Alexander marries quilting techniques with digitally printed imagery while considering both color and pattern and their relationships with one another. 

His work has been featured in various exhibitions and galleries worldwide, and he has received numerous grants and awards for his art.

Sara Lankutis's artistic practice includes painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage media. Sara has led educational and public programs for all ages at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley Art Museum, and the City of Stockton. She facilitates the printmaking program and offers public events and workshops at Creative Growth Art Center, a historic studio and gallery for artists with disabilities in Oakland, California. 

Each creation of a work is a slow, unfolding process incorporating the traces of time and evidence of a larger collective experience of a place - scratches, footprints, tracks. She’s interested in how these environments can hold layers of mystery and collective familiarity simultaneously.

Amy Keefer is a visual teaching artist from one of our partnerships, Creative Growth. She works in textiles and knitwear. Hailed as "radical in its romance" her work is rooted in wearable art, simultaneously addressing textile practices and relational aesthetics. By making such art and wearing it, the female identifying body is at stake in the narrative. Clothing is an extension of the self.

Parul Naresh is a textile designer, mother, visual artist, art educator, and an advocate of sustainable practices. She derives inspiration from nature and highlights its beauty, honesty, and perseverance. Her drawings often use a wash of watercolor or India ink, and a range of renewable resources. As a fiber artist and a printmaker, she dyes and creates prints on handwoven fabrics using silkscreen, plant-based dyes, soy milk and earth pigments. 

For more than a decade now, her volunteer work supports local Indian artisans to create slow textiles, with an aim of promoting craft and sustainability in the textile industry. The profits from the sales go back into the artisan community thus helping to sustain their livelihood while caring for planet Earth. 

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Her handcrafted Indian textiles can be found at Weaves and Wildflowers. 

Sarah is a collaborative lithographer, writer, and maker in LA, originally from Australia.She is captivated by the alchemic expanse of lithography and loves things that seem impossible. Her printmaking studio is called Speck Editions. 

Her collaborative printmaking means is that she works with artists who normally have an exclusive relationship with their medium of choice (painting, sculpture, music…) to explore the unique visual language of the print process. She sees profound wisdom in rocks, as with all things that have been living a long time. She uses the word living, for it is old Indigenous news that non-human entities such as trees, rocks and bodies of water carry forth an essential ancestral consciousness. 

During her time at Warnecke Ranch, she collected natural materials including pigments. She has a particular interest in and attunement to color.

William Mark Sommer is a visual artist and educator working within the small town of Loomis, California. Through Sommer's work in analog photography, he has received a BFA in Art Photography from Arizona State University and traversed the United States developing a practice that engages in themes of human nature, preservation, empathy and time.

Growing up in a bypassed highway town of Loomis, Sommer’s life was shaped by small-town American culture. This culture along the Lincoln Highway gave him a deep admiration towards the overlooked and in-between places that were forgotten by the many. Through his many travels he has gained a closer understanding with complexities of America and has created perspective on time through his work.

Lorena was born and raised in Sonoma County, and will return here for a month to work with an alternative dark room process called gum bichromate. 

She draws from her family history and tradition of gardening. She explores ancestral knowledge, self sustainability, and the indigenous peoples’ connection to the land. She reflects on and records their traditions through her prints and basket weaving. 

She makes prints of gardens using sunlight. She is testing this process on petates, a flat woven mat made out of natural palm fibers. These petates will become a printing surface for the gum bichromate process which allows her to mix her own pigments into a light sensitive solution. 

Her work has included her family’s experience as immigrants and first generation Americans.

Sarah is a writer and researcher at a social justice nonprofit. Her writing has appeared on KQED Public Media and in Literary Mama, Adoptive Families, 
and the San Jose Mercury News.

She's writing a creative nonfiction manuscript looking at the stories of how three generations of mothers in her family have dealt with “unacceptable” differences in their daughters (epilepsy, queerness, and madness). 

"Necessary Artifacts" uses the lens of motherhood to explore questions of belonging.

Through her artwork, Mary Jane shares her reverence and appreciation for the natural world. She works in portrait, figure, still life and landscape subjects. 

Her drawing and painting style is influenced by painters in the Classical Realist and Realist movements as well as Art Nouveau, Renaissance,and Botanical artists. 

She draws from her talents as a draftsman and dancer as well. 

Working primarily from life, She is faced with the constant, even if subtle, changes of life. The drawing becomes a conglomeration or layering of many hours and days of a facial expression, a
gesture, a likeness - an attempt to make a record of the reality she experiences and observes moment to moment. She is energized by the challenge of capturing something that is not really possible to capture. She distills her observations, experience of a landscape, the weather,
the light on a form, and she does not seek to replicate.

Michelle Mansour is an artist, educator, and curator as well as the current Executive Director of Root Division, a visual arts non-profit in San Francisco.

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"The focus of my work is the interior space of the mind and related ontological meditations. Through the lens of

perception, fluctuating between the miniscule and the grandiose, we find fear and wonder of the unknown, the

invisible, and the uncontrollable. Based initially on an investigation of the interior world of the body where beauty and illness mingle in the same fluids and membranes, my work has become a broader reflection on where the physical and the metaphysical intersect. Originally referencing microscopic imagery, the works push an imaginative space that exists beyond the threshold of the eye or lens. Forging a connection between the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the paintings explore tensions between the scientific and the spiritual, the corporeal and the ethereal."

-Michelle Mansour

Based in Victoria, Australia, Madeleine Joy Daws creates compelling and life-like drawings through a personal process of marketing making using symbols placed onto a grid.

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"Utilizing a system whereby the ruled grid becomes the vessel for a lexicon of hand-drawn symbols, the principal theme in my work is employing iterative mark-making as a temporal site to record measured and psychological time. This emphasis on time and repetition informs my work in a way that allows me to mediate rather than mirror the world; an attempt to coordinate thought and stabilize the disorder of the everyday. Underpinned by the language, tactility, and intimacy of textile-based crafts, works that initially masquerade as digital prints are subverted from by subtle nuances and imperfections in mark-making." 

. -Madeleine Joy Daws

Yulia Pinkusevich is a visual artist working primarily in drawing, painting and installation. She creates projects and large-scale environments that deal with ecological and social systems. Her installations directly engage the body of the viewer and address surrounding architectural spaces. Her work explores the psychology of spaces and human relationships to their environments.

Formally, Yulia’s work is engaged with the direct experience of the viewer through perspectival illusion and spatial perception that play with the cognitive understanding of space. By breaking logical perspectives she creates illusions of impossible spaces, non-places or Utopias that shift the viewpoint to the panoptic.

Her background itself is rooted in change. Born and raised in the USSR, her understanding of rules, social status and human abilities were redefined when moving to the United States. Learning to adapt and observe things carefully and move fluidly throughout her surroundings. She questions and studies our ecology in flux, attempting to tether seen and unseen forces acting upon our current narratives.

Jonathan Crow create images that combine symbols of American mid-century nostalgia with today's mood of anxiety and impending apocalypse. 

I create oil paintings that recall the vibrancy and optimism of America during the Cold War, reframed to reflect the anxiety and uncertainty of this current era. I draw inspiration from vintage snapshots culled from the 1950s through to the 1980s and use them in a way that creates compositional tension between positive and negative space. I’m drawn to images that seem to be small parts of a larger narrative; images that raise more questions than they resolve. My paintings are fragments of mid-20th century suburban life where disaster seems to lurk just beyond the frame.

Charles Moxon is a portrait artist who is based in London and New York. Having graduated from BA (Hons) Painting at Camberwell College of Art in 2013, he has exhibited in Europe and North America.

Moxon's sitters have included Harriet Harman MP and Ex-England and Chelsea Football player Roy Bentley. He was selected for the Young Masters Art Prize in 2012 and the BP Portrait Award in 2016. He has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London and a residency/solo exhibition at the Lux Art Institute in San Diego. He has appeared on the BBC and in publications both in Europe and USA. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Royal Society of British Art Rome Scholarship and the Sunny Art Prize. 

Contemporary dancer, vocalist, and actress Alli Ross is an assistant professor of theater at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. She and her colleague Amanda Friou were selected by the institution for a residency at Chalk Hill as part of a partnership program between CHAR and Berklee College of Music.

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Alli has performed in works such as in Liz Lerman's Healing Wars (Arena Stage, 2013, and tour, 2013-2015), which was a three-year investigation with the company and veterans of our most recent wars. Other transformative work includes Lady Macduff in Sleep No More (original U.S. cast, American Repertory Theater, 2009; Emursive, New York City, 2011). Ross has recently launched Excavate, a collective dedicated to researching, making, and performing site work looking at the interconnection of topography and history of land as it meets somatic landscape. 

A director, educator, and disabled multidisciplinary artist, Amanda is a theatre professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee where she teaches acting, devising, and musical theatre performance in the MFA and BFA programs.

She and colleague Alli Ross were selected by the institution for a residency at Chalk Hill as part of a partnership between CHAR and Berklee College of Music. 

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In addition to directing, she designs and fabricates puppets and consults on projects attempting to straddle different theatrical worlds. On very rare occasions, you may also see her as a performer.

Amanda is a world builder at heart. Her early training in dance and music resulted in a belief that making theatre is more than making plays. Theatre is an umbrella term, that covers a collection of artistic tools that can be used to fashion performance in whatever form a story demands.

Amanda is a member of SDC and AFT, an alumna of Macalester College, The University of Washington School of Drama, The O'Neill Theatre Center National Puppetry Conference, and was a two time fellow of the Drama League Director's Project.

Patricia is a visual artist originally from Spain, currently based in San Francisco, CA. Her work focuses on colorful abstract geometrical structures and bold organic shapes creating spaces that are hypnotic and inviting. She creates these constructions as a way to organize her thoughts and recreate memories and feelings. 

She has received her B.F.A. from the University Complutense, Madrid, Spain in 2009, and her MFA in Serigraphy and Lithography from CIEC Foundation, Galicia, Spain in 2010. She lives and works in San Francisco and collaborates as a Teaching Artist at Creativity Explored.

Through the constant migration between Santa Maria, CA and Leon, Guanajuato, Mexico, as a child, I struggled to maintain emotional stability... Home has always seemed far away from me. In Mexico, my home is the US, and in the US, Mexico is my home. Inculcated by my parents’ cultural values, catholicism, and traditions, have strongly impacted my art practice. In the Spring of 2017, I achieved the degree of MASTER OF FINE ART in Sculpture, at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California.My practice is Interdisciplinary, including painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, mixed media, installation, photography, audio and sound recordings, video, writing and performance. I approach medium and materials according to their formal and conceptual significance. Currently, it is crucial to me that the materials I select be ones that trigger memories of my past. The acts of making, cutting, twisting, tearing, wrapping, heating, burning, and/ or banging provide me with a sense of healing and acceptance: These labor intensive acts that could be associated with violence or even torture have allowed many of those brief past memories, which had faded away, to awaken.

Meadow Presley is a teaching artist with Creative Growth in Oakland, CA. She was selected by the organization to spend a week in residency at Chalk Hill as part of a partnership program.

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Meadow's mixed media sculpture, collage, painting and installation combine themes of memory, collections and popular culture. Each piece hints at a nostalgic story of a magical place existing not quite in reality, a place where inanimate objects come to life. Her work is influenced by collections like that of the magpie, said to have a nest of shiny jewels and gold, images from dreams, and her vast collection of vintage toys and dolls.

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by Euqinom Gallery in San Francisco and Gitterman Gallery in New York. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanists, Kathleen Harrison and Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children.

"Places have a memory, a history, a feeling that we connect with. These memories, like faint echoes, are revealed as light moves across the landscape, transforming the color and texture of a place. It is these moments and experiences that I capture in my atmospheric landscape paintings". 

 -Victoria Veedell 

 "My recent work centers around sculptures and installations made from old piano parts. While making these objects originally, a story emerged of a fictional tribe known as the Pianistas. In the gallery setting, the objects function as artifacts from this lost culture, which used piano parts for all their material needs, creating everything from tools, ceremonial objects and masks, costumes and musical instruments, to large-scale structures and weapons, among other things, in much the same way native tribes from the Great Plains utilized the buffalo. The original purpose, symbolism and spiritual meaning of these objects, how they have been described by art historians and anthropologists both in the past and present, and what happened to these objects over the course of history are all part of the narrative, which continues to evolve."

Lindsey Cuenca Walker is a Filipina American contemporary artist based in Portland, Oregon. She works primarily as a painter but also makes occasional though enthusiastic forays into other media such as printmaking, ceramics, wood, and textiles. Her works explore the ideas of solitude, community, and communion with nature by creating an emotional arrangement of forms that result into still lifes or landscapes. She approaches painting as an attempt at harmony between disparate parts.

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She recevied her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2017. Lindsey has been the recipient of numerous merti-based scholarships and awards, and has exhibited regionally in Oregon, California, and nationally in Philadelphia and New York City. She is originally from Southern California and has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon since 2013.

"I was born to a culture of gold adornments on bronze skin, hand-picked cotton lightly woven and layered into full-body wraps, dresses and shawls. Ornate textiles, mesmerizing embroidery, unforgettable spice blends and a ritual of coffee ceremonies like no other."

Often referencing her her African origins, Féven's work explores eclectic perspectives on language, culture and land. She engages with topics such as divinity, black femininity, political and cultural issues, and is continually striving to find challenges that bring new meaning and understanding to her craft. She lives in Santa Rosa, CA.

Maria Ylvisaker is a visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She works in drawing and printmaking to explore nostalgia and everyday life. Her work has been published by Womanly and Polyester magazines, and has been shown at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, and A.I.R. Gallery. In 2021 she was a resident at Open AIR in Missoula, Montana. She holds a B.A. in studio art and rhetoric & communications studies from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

"With each artwork, I begin by crafting a scene that conveys the internal world I’m experiencing or questioning. These imagined landscapes often include naturalistic elements, such as trees, flora, oceans, and mountains, existing alongside manufactured ones, often taking shapes of buildings or boats.  Using a blade, I cut and extract pieces from paper.

What results is a papercut imbued with the imperfections that arise from a precise tool in imprecise human hands.  I revel in the uniqueness of these variations and hope that they serve to personalize the work so that others may find their own imperfect, evolving, growing stories within it".

-Bianca Levan

Sheng Lor is a Hmong-American artist based in San Francisco, CA, whose process-driven practice combines thread, natural dyes, and visual language to explore new narratives through cloth.

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Her current project Dyeing Flora is an inquiry into the impact of the textile production on communities and the controversies surrounding it. While at Chalk Hill, she will be foraging for natural dyes to create a local fiber-based work which can be used to express the climate resiliency of certain sites based on their dyeing flora.

We highly encourage you to visit her website to view her beautiful weaving and textiles, and learn more about Sheng's inspiration.  

Amanda Season Keeley is a visual artist, curator, and writer. She received her MFA in sculpture from Parson’s School of Art & Design, and her most recent solo exhibitions in Miami include Fredric Snitzer Gallery and Wolfsonian--FIU Museum, with special commission projects featured at UNTITLED Art Fair, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, and The Bass Museum of Art. In 2014, Keeley founded EXILE Books, an independent publishing house and store specializing in artist's books which recently settled in the Little Haiti neighborhood. She is also the Associate Curator for the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry. Keeley is the recipient of several grants and awards such as the South Florida Cultural Consortium Grant, the Knight Foundation Arts Challenge, Florida Department of State of Cultural Affairs Grant, and New York Foundation for the Art’s Blackburn Printmaking fellowship. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections.

Born in Northern California, I spent my childhood making little animals in my mom’s ceramic studio, playing for hours in the woods, and concentrating fully on imaginary characters I invented. Before painting, I was an editorial fashion and portrait photographer in NYC and London for 18 years, a rare woman in a very male-dominated field, working for the best mags. I was trying to capture the female figure and attitude in the form of a narrative. The story was usually fantastical and sometimes absurdist – a theme that I continue to explore in paint. The animals protect others in the artwork, like a charm or pact. They soften the strangeness that is allowed to creep into the juxtapositions. Their participation adds goodness and loveliness. Familiars; part of a person’s soul in animal form, but having their own agenda as well, undefined but potent. The prehistoric animals in some of my paintings seem recognizable yet odd-looking. They are extinct, so their beauty is lost forever.

Alexandra Watson is a co-founder and executive editor of Apogee Journal, a publication providing a platform for historically marginalized artists and writers. She’s the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing. She is a Lecturer in the First-Year Writing program at Barnard College, where she has received a Provost's Innovative Teaching Grant. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, The Common, The Bennington Review, The Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Nat. Brut., Breadcrumbs, Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 poetry scholar at Tin House and Bread Loaf. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for community arts programming. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts.

Born in the Bay Area, Monique Lazard received a BA from the California College of Art, and pursued graduate studies at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. After a successful career in fashion design and art direction, she left New York for Colorado, and began shifting her focus to painting. Monique now lives in Miami.

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"What I try to achieve in my paintings is a sense of “aliveness” with brushwork and color. My aim is to paint the light and pieces of color that describes what I see. My experience with painting is impulsive and fluid rather than an organized plan of action. When I paint I am reacting to the excitement I feel when I see something that registers as beautiful to me. My focus is on the magic!"

Bill Zindel is an independent artist, illustrator, and designer who creates collages that are structured yet unrestrained, employing bold colors and patterns with geometric leanings and retro-futuristic tendencies. He draws inspiration from typography, signage, old records, and sacred geometry. His work as a designer informs his art formally, but his love of cutting, pasting, and collecting goes back to childhood. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Bill lives in El Cerrito CA and works as a Studio Facilitator at NIAD. This residency is a part of our partnership with NIAD, which brings teaching artists from local nonprofits supporting artists with disabilities to spend a week at Chalk Hill to work on their artistic endeavors.

Bay Area artist Jo Ann Biagini presents new works on paper that simultaneously embody whimsy and lushness. Inspired by books about nature as well as by the natural world itself, Biagini puts book pages into new environments layered with drawn and painted imagery. With shape, color and scale she conjures up new visions of the natural world. Born in Oakland, California, Jo Ann received an MFA in ceramics from the California College of the Arts in 1993. Jo Ann has shown her work regionally and nationally. She currently teaches at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland CA. This residency is a part of our partnership with Creative Growth, which brings teaching artists from local nonprofits supporting artists with disabilities to spend a week at Chalk Hill to work on their artistic endeavors.

Lacey Johnson’s work is part manifesto, part pedagogy, and part girl gang.  Using interdisciplinary art practices to explore her code of ethics, she began her work as the Video and Animation Instructor at Creativity Explored in 2019. Lacey is mostly concerned with telling triumphant tales of the feminine divine in non linear ways, and considers visual expression to be both her love language and a tool to inspire transformative cultural practices. Always a collaborator, she has been a part of multiple art and activism collectives and has presented her work locally in The National Queer Arts Festival, and at Artist Television Access, and SOMArts. She is from the Texas Gulf Coast and lives in Oakland, California. This residency is a part of our partnership with Creativity Explored, which brings teaching artists from local nonprofits supporting artists with disabilities to spend a week at Chalk Hill to work on their artistic endeavors.

Sonja Hinrichsen* examines urban and natural environments through exploration and research. As an artist she feels the responsibility to address subject matters our society tends to neglect or deny, particularly adverse impacts to the natural world. Her work manifests in immersive video installations, video performances and interventions in nature. Sonja graduated from the Academy of Art in Stuttgart, Germany in 1997/98, and received a Masters degree in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001.

*Due to changes in his scheduling, Will Clift will not be able to attend and instead, Sonja's residency was extended.

Bennett Ewing*, informally known as "Eyevan Tumbleweed”, is best known for his sculptural series of faces composed of found wood. He has spent the majority of his artistic focus creating an ongoing series of visages comprised from pieces of wood he collects from mountains, deserts, swamps, riverbanks, forests, and beaches. The wall-hanging relief faces in his series are pieced together meticulously and somewhat extemporaneously, using the natural colors, patterns and directions of various wood fragments to create countenances described as powerful, whimsical, even haunting. Bonded with glues and reinforced with two-part epoxy, the sylvan entities and their expressions of thought and emotion portray a glimpse of an otherworldly realm that is not altogether unfamiliar.

*Due to changes in her scheduling, Mary Jane Ward will not be able to attend and instead, Bennett was invited to attend Chalk Hill Artist Residency 2021.

Greg Crawford is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is also a substitute teacher at Creative Growth- a community program we are proud to partner with! His amazing work examines American consumer culture through a process in which he transforms found materials into new narratives.