Visual Arts Fellows
José De Sancristóbal
José De Sancristóbal is an artist and wannabe translator. For the past three years, he’s used photography, video, film, and writing to consider different functions lens-based images perform within the configuration of the nation-state. His recent films and videos draw equally upon formal rigor and fantasy, producing self-differing subjects and objects. Informed by the camera’s history as a tool to regulate citizens and their movement, his work disorganizes established identification techniques by viewing them through the lens of unmeasurable practices: fiction, role-play, memory, translation, and magical realism are used to poke holes in those devices purporting to administer the self—such as passport photographs, biographical information, legal status, or national borders.
Alejandro Guzmán
Born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, Alejandro Guzmán materializes an inter-spatial, inter-human, and even spiritual experience instigated by chaos, improvisation, and ecstasy to confront the relationships between peoples and the structures they inhabit. Guzmán is a returning Fellow from 2013-2014.
Elena Kovylyaeva
Elena Kovylyaeva is a visual artist based in Leipzig, Germany, whose work examines the intersection of materiality and memory. Using found materials, she creates detailed tactile surfaces that engage the body, incorporating elements of painting, textile art, and sculpture. Born in Russia and raised in Düsseldorf, Germany from the age of five, Kovylyaeva studied film and literature in Berlin before pursuing painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, where she graduated with a diploma in 2020. She then earned her MFA in painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, supported by Fulbright and DAAD scholarships, from 2021 to 2023. In 2022, she participated in the Fulbright Artist Residency at the Silvermine Arts Center in Connecticut. Kovylyaeva’s work has been exhibited in both Germany and the USA, including at the Grimaldis Gallery and the Peale Museum in Baltimore.
Dani Levine
Dani Levine is an artist and educator living in Astoria, NY. Mixing pigments, binders, and other found materials, her alchemical practice questions assumptions about craft and abstraction. In recent paintings, she converses with queer-feminist aesthetics to explore themes of chance, agency, and resilience—ideas that recur throughout her work. As an educator and lecturer at schools such as Pratt Institute, Princeton University, and Boston University, she aims to expand conversations about color as material, linking its history and contemporary uses to narratives of trade, science, and sociocultural ideas. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Select honors include exhibitions at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, My Pet Ram, The Alfred Museum, SOLOWAY, and The Abrons Arts Center. In 2023, she was selected to be Artist in Residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Mengwei Ma
Mengwei Ma is a writer, director, and actress from Zibo, China. After earning her MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University in 2017, she has been based in Beijing, working on independent projects. For Ma, the artistic process is about discovering the true connection between the self and the world. And she enjoys it.
She is currently in the midst of fundraising for her new short film, “A Piece of Shit,” while also developing a feature film script and a novel.
Ian Page
Ian Page observes and reflects our belief in continuity. Page notices that continuity attempts to minimize change yet make progress, or at minimum to preserve value, in the phrasing of strategic bankruptcy. In the process, loopholes emerge to stretch the boundary of too tight moral law. Disobedience is rasterized. Insightful and ignorant vernacular forms come in and out of focus as needed. Page chooses to focus on the forms that “simply won’t go away.”
“Why don’t they go away?” asks Page. “What is so fundamental about candy bars?”
In the work of Page only a re-enactment is allowed to dissociate from its origin.
Zeinab Shahidi Marnani
Zeinab Shahidi Marnani was born in Isfahan, Iran in 1983. Shahidi lives and works in Tehran and New York. She holds an MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art and a bachelor of visual communication from the University of Tehran, College of Fine Arts. She works in various visual art disciplines including video installation, painting, and collage. Shahidi was an artist-in-residence and a young artist mentor at The Watermill Center in 2019 as an alumnus. She was the recipient of the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship from The Watermill Center in 2016. In 2015, she received Art Jameel and Edge of Arabia’s second annual artist residency program fellowship at The International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, among other residencies. Her work has been exhibited internationally at many venues, including at the Azad Art Gallery in Tehran; the Museum of Moscow; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen; ALLGOLD at the MoMA PS1 Print Shop in New York; Devi Art Foundation in India; and Emrooz Art Gallery in Isfahan. Shahidi Marnani is a returning Fellow from 2023-2024.
Edd Ravn
Edd Ravn is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. His practice spans growing bacteria, painting with rainwater, recording soundscapes, and designing public furniture to co-create animate objects that question perception, connection, and change. He holds a BFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art. His work has been exhibited at institutions including RAINRAIN Gallery, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Brazilian Embassy in London. Ravn has performed poetry at the Barbican Centre in London and the Ilkley Literary Festival. He has served as visiting artist and critic at Yale University, Princeton University and the University of Michigan. In 2017, he participated in the Porthmeor Studios Residency in St Ives, and in 2020, he received an Art and Social Justice Initiative Award from Yale University.
Cherrie Yu
Cherrie Yu is an artist born in Xi’an, China and lives in the United States. She works in choreography, moving images, writing and installation. Her practice explores the transmission of embodied knowledge, the critical functions of the archival form, and the artist as amateur. She received a BA in English from the College of William and Mary in 2017, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2019. She has produced dance films, lecture performances, and documentaries in the past few years, and she continues to form collaborative relationships with artists and non-artists alike. Recently she is thinking about questions such as moving images as a storage for collective memory, and the function of avant-garde art in relation to colonial dispossession. Besides being an artist, she is also a practitioner of table tennis.
She has been an artist in residence at McColl Center, Yaddo, Anderson Center, Kala Art Institute, and Sharpe Walentas Program. Her works have been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Maine, the Mint Museum in North Carolina, the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, Gallery 400 in Chicago, IL, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and the Center for Performance Research and Pageant Space in New York.
Carlos Zerpa
Carlos Arturo Zerpa is an interdisciplinary artist, creative producer, educator, and social entrepreneur based in Caracas, Venezuela. Rooted in cooperation and solidarity, his work branches into scriptwriting, design, animation, and street art, and it’s moved by the power of storytelling and innovation as engaging forces for change, especially in addressing social issues of South America and the Caribbean.
Since 2010, Carlos has led ECL-MECHA, an award-winning creative cooperative focused on empowering underrepresented characters by crafting transgressive, insightful, and irreverent animated stories. In 2022, he co-founded RIMA, a digital platform that connects Global South artists with international mobility and financing opportunities. From 2012-2016, Carlos co-founded and taught in ENGRAPO, a public experimental visual communication school that hosted two cohorts of disenfranchised youth.
He’s received fellowships from Locarno Open Doors, Berlinale Talents, the Global Cultural Relationships Platform, and has been an artist in residence at Santa Fe Art Institute, the Bemis Center, the Saari Residency, Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, Kulturhaus Villa Sträuli, La Maison des Auteurs, and Instituto Sacatar, amongst others.
Writing Fellows
Acie Clark
Acie Clark is a trans poet from Florida and Georgia. They received their MFA from the University of Alabama where they worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor. They are an Assistant Professor in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Department at the University of Central Arkansas and they also teach at the Interlochen Summer Arts Program. Their recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Foglifter, Passages North, and The Massachusetts Review. They are working on their first collection of poems.
Kai Conradi
Kai Conradi is a poet and fiction writer who grew up on K’ómoks territory in Cumberland, B.C. Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Malahat Review, Grain, PRISM, and Best Canadian Stories, and been shortlisted for the Journey Prize. Kai received an MFA from the University of Victoria, and is the recipient of funding from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. They are currently at work on a novel and a full-length poetry collection.
Jason Ferris
Jason Ferris is a fiction writer and essayist from Maryland’s inner shores. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship, the James Patterson Writer Education Scholarship, and the Jeffrey and Kimberly Chapman Writing Fellowship. His work has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, chosen as a finalist in the 2021 Carve Magazine Prose and Poetry Contest, and published in RiverCraft, Essay, and Carve Magazine. He is at work on his first novel.
Kevin Fitchett
Kevin Fitchett lives in Negaunee, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His novel in progress follows a mediocre, almost-divorced narrative poet on his Winnebago pilgrimage to Augusta National. Fitchett is a returning Fellow from 2019-2020.
Parker Hobson
Parker Hobson is a poet from Louisville, Ky. His work has appeared in Best New Poets, 32 Poems, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kentucky in 2018. He is also a songwriter and a musician, and his latest full-length album, Loss Program, is coming out in September of 2024. He also works as a radio and multimedia producer for Appalshop, a non-profit media arts collective based in the coalfields of East Kentucky.
Jiaqi Kang
Jiaqi Kang is a doctoral student in art history and the founding editor-in-chief of Sine Theta Magazine, an international, print-based creative arts publication made by and for the Sino diaspora. They are the winner of the White Review Short Story Prize 2022 and the Wadham Rex Warner Prize for Creative Writing 2021, and they are a Lambda Literary Fellow 2023. Their work has been published in Joyland, The London Magazine, TOLKA, and elsewhere. Originally from Geneva, Switzerland, Kang is currently based in Oxford, England. In Provincetown, where they will be living on the unceded homelands of the Wampanoag nation, they look forward to reading, walking, cooking, and writing little stories. Kang knows that Palestine will be free in our lifetimes, and they call on all literary and artistic organizations to commit to PACBI. Down, down, with occupation; up, up, with liberation!
C. Mallon
- C. Mallon is a graduate of the University of East Anglia and holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a writer of literary fiction, working with a heavy emphasis on themes of masculinity, violence, and the shrapnel radius of serious trauma across communities and generations. Having taken early influence from modernist poetry and beat literature, she carries an abiding interest in the implicit interplay between the sound of a word and its meaning, endeavoring to construct prose that can be heard and felt, first, by the reader, furnished in sound and in picture a split second prior to conscious understanding. She works with a narrative focus on purgatorial places, characters damned and haunted, landscapes arresting and hostile, informal, dark spirituality, and sometimes the transformative spirit of a good dog. She prefers magic powers over straight realism. She is so thankful to be here.
Sara Martin
Sara Martin lives in Philadelphia and has worked in many fields including reptile care, donuts, 19th century prison tours, marine debris removal, ice cream, pet insurance investigation, libraries, urban farming and Halloween parties. She is currently working on a manuscript and documentary concerning death rituals in the United States and is specifically interested in cultural attitudes surrounding cremation. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received support from Yaddo Corporation, Jentel Foundation and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her published work can be found at saramartin.org. Martin is a returning Fellow from 2018-2019.
Lucas Martínez
Lucas Martínez is a writer and translator with experience in labor organizing and teaching. He was born in San Bernardino County and raised primarily in Claremont on ancestral Tongva-Gabrielino land. He grew up speaking Spanish and English and considers both to be his native tongues. Martínez holds a BA from Lewis & Clark College and an MFA from the University of Virginia with a concentration in Poetry. They have received the Battestin Fellowship from the Virginia Bibliographical Society to study Jorge Luis Borges manuscripts at UVA’s special collection’s library in 2022. They have translated the work of Nicole Cecilia Delgado for a chapbook published by the Virginia Center for the Book. In Provincetown, he plans to work on translations as well as a manuscript of writing that includes collage, translation, essay, and poetry.
Matthew Wamser
Matthew Wamser is a fiction writer and essayist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work has appeared in The Missouri Review and Salamander. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and has received additional support from MacDowell.
