AUSTIN BALLARD creates sculptures both surreal and therapeutic. Exploring the limits between body and architecture, anxiety and intimacy, Ballard works through lo-fi pattern-making and ceramic coil-building. Born in Charlotte, NC, Ballard received an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, where he also served as an Assistant Professor in Textiles. Ballard has received numerous awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Sculpture Scholarship, a Windgate Foundation Fellowship, a Kenneth Stubbs Endowed Fellowship, a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, a Dan Bown Project Award, and the Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Studies Grant. He has been awarded full fellowships to the Museum of Arts and Design, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Ox-Bow School of Art, the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation. Ballard has been featured in Maake Magazine, Art Maze Magazine, Wall Street International and Wide Walls. Ballard has held solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon, NY, Wave Hill, NY, Napoleon, PA, Real Art Ways, CT, and Ithaca College among others. Ballard currently lives and works in Ridgewood, NY. (Second Year)

KEVIN BRISCO JR. was raised in Memphis, TN. His work is concerned with issues of place and representation, more specifically how the two inform one another – the slippage between background and figure in painting, pop culture, and daily life; as well as the dubious nature of “home” for African Americans living in the Southern U.S. His work takes the form of painting, sculpture, and performance. He earned his B.A. from Wesleyan University and his M.F.A. from Yale University in 2020. He has exhibited across the U.S., and was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.

WIDLINE CADET is a Haitian-born artist. Her practice draws from personal history and examines race, memory, erasure, migration, immigration, and Haitian cultural identity from within the United States. She uses photography, video, and installations to construct a visual language that explores notions of visibility and hyper visibility, black feminine interiority, and selfhood.Cadet is a recipient of a 2013 Mortimer-Hays Brandeis Traveling Fellowship, a 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture artist in resident, a 2019 Lighthouse Works fellow, a 2019 Syracuse University VPA Turner artist in resident, a 2020 Lit List finalist, the 2020 Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Snider Prize winner, a recipient of a 2020 NYFA / JGS Fellowship in photography, and a 2020-21 artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work has been exhibited in the U.S. and internationally and has appeared in The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, Wallpaper*, Foam Magazine, among others. She earned her B.A. in studio art from The City College of New York and MFA from Syracuse University.

SARA EMSAKI B.1989. 32°39’08.9″N 51°40’20.9″E
Sara Emsaki is an artist whose practice spans a broad range of media including video, painting, printmaking, performance, and writing. Emsaki’s videos are often composed of polyphonic and non-linear storytelling techniques that shift between theoretical, factual, fictional, and vernacular modes of address to offer a range of temporal and spatial perspectives, a macro-micro travelling of thought. She studies the simultaneity of geological and psychological impacts of exploitation of natural resources on land and its inhabitants. Sara Emsaki earned a BA in Studio Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2020. She is the recipient of Helen Winternitz Award in 2020, a fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2019, the Eisner Prize for the highest achievement in the creative arts in 2016, and the Wendy Sussman award in 2015.

NICK FAGAN‘s artwork is a material reaction to his experiences with mental health, disability, religion, and labor. With his personal history in mind, the artist’s practice spans topics including the spirituality of banal objects, ritual and transformation, the abstraction of language, and the humor and duality of masculinity. Language exists in Fagan’s work along a spectrum of somewhat readable text to a tangle of unrecognizable forms resulting in abstract, illegible groupings. This abstraction stems from the artist’s experience with dyslexia and seeing language as a confusion of symbols. The artist’s transformation of text-like forms into abstract shapes embeds them with cultural signifiers related to cartoons and animation, Gilded Age architecture, and male anatomy. By creating playful curves, flaccid forms, and soft colors within a larger-than-life scale, Fagan references manhood according to the duality found between strength and humility.

ELIZABETH FLOOD is an artist currently living and working in upstate New York. Her paintings survey the complex layers of extraction, violence, and expression within the American landscape. Through her experiential practice of working on location, she forecasts future impact and keeps watch over a country and land in crisis.Flood earned her MFA in Painting from Boston University (2019); her BA from the University of Virginia (2014), where she studied Studio Art, History, and Religious Studies; and attended the Mount Gretna School of Art (2014, 2015). In 2019, she was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA.She has received several grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship, and the John Walker Alumni Award at Boston University. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions, most recently at Greene House Gallery in Brooklyn and Anna Zorina Gallery in Chelsea. Elizabeth is originally from Virginia and currently lives in Hamilton, NY where she is a Visiting Lecturer in Painting at Colgate University.

LAVAUGHAN JENKINS is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor. He was raised in Pensacola, Florida and currently lives and works in Boston, MA. Since earning his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2005, Jenkins has received the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize, awarded annually by the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Jenkins is also the recipient of the 2015 Blanche E. Colman Award. He has exhibited his work most recently at venues such as Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (Boston), The Painting Center (NY), and the Fitchburg Art Museum (MA).Tired of viewing art history through a lens devoted to Western European Art, Lavaughan Jenkins decided to contribute his vision, a vision where Black people were not subordinate to a European construct, but instead were featured, by a Black Artist. His sculptural paintings tell a story, a story that reflects the ordinary, the non-heroic, the quiet countenance of a single Black individual, a “Watcher,” a witness to their experience.

TOM PAPPAS is a painter working in an intuitive, material-based tradition. Born in Miami Florida, Pappas received an MFA in Painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 1989. He was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work center in 1990-91, as well as residencies at Yaddo, Dorland, VCCA and Bemis Foundation. From 1995-99, Pappas was Tenzo (head chef) at the Zen Mountain Center, San Jacinto, CA and authored The Three Bowl Cookbook; Secrets of Enlightened Cooking / Carroll & Brown Publisher. He was awarded an Elizabeth Foundation grant in1999. 2011-13, he lived and worked at Meadow Road, Provincetown FAWC’s long-term residency.  Pappas has traveled extensively and currently lives and works in Ridgewood, NY.

SICHONG XIE combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms, including masks, costumes, and other objects. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, Xie investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Xie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, CA. Her most recent multi-media multi-channel installation “Do Donkeys Know Politics, Scaffold Series I” is currently on view at USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, CA.She was a fellowship artist at The Studios at MASS MoCA and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. In the summer of 2017, Xie was chosen to participate at Hauser & Wirth Somerset exchange residency at Somerset, UK. She did a four-hour durational performance/installation “Walking With The Disappeared” at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Recent exhibitions include the Wende Museum, Los Angeles, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, OCAT Art Museum in Xi’An, China, LACE Gallery, Los Angeles, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, Automata Arts, Los Angeles, Chashama Gallery, New York, Eli Klein Gallery, New York, and The Watermill Center, New York.

SHASTRI AKELLA earned his MFA in Creative Writing and PhD. in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He previously worked for a street theater troupe and for Google. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica,The Master’s Review, Electric Literature, World Literature Today, Rumpus, PANK, and The Common, among other places. He’s currently finishing up his novel, a queer love story between a gender fluid street performer and a Jewish migrant set in 1990s India. He teaches English at Deerfield Academy and is the fiction editor at Cosmonaut’s Avenue.

LAURA CRESTÉ is the author of the forthcoming chapbook You Should Feel Bad, which was selected for a 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University and a BA from Bennington College. The winner of Breakwater Review’s 2016 Peseroff Prize, her poems have appeared in journals including No Tokens, Tinderbox, and Bodega, and she has received support from the Community of Writers.

TRACY FUAD is a poet and artist from Minnesota. Her debut collection of poetry,about:blank, was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook PITH (Newfound, 2020) and the art book DAD DADDADDADDADDADDAD (TxtBooks, 2019). She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and she is currently working on a novel. She has lived in New York, Kurdistan, and Berlin.

STERLING HOLYWHITEMOUNTAIN grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. He holds a BA in English creative writing from the University of Montana and an MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa. He was also a James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and more recently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His work has appeared in volumes 1 and 2 of Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers, Montana Quarterly, ESPN.com., The Yellow Medicine Review and The Atlantic. He is an unrecognized citizen of the Blackfeet Nation.

VEDRAN HUSIĆ was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and raised in Germany and the United States. His collection of stories, Basements and Other Museums, was published in 2018. He has work published in The Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review, Ecotone, Blackbird, Image, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.(Second Year)

EDUARDO MARTINEZ-LEYVA was born to Mexican immigrants and grew up in the U.S. Mexico border. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, and Columbia University, where he obtained his MFA.

GOTHATAONE MOENG was born in Serowe, Botswana. She was awarded a 2018-2020 Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship, and her writing has also received fellowships and support from Tin House, where she was a 2019 Summer Workshop scholar and from A Public Space, where she was a 2016 Emerging Writer Fellow. Her writing has appeared in A Public Space,The Oxford American and One Story, amongst others. She holds an MFA Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Mississippi.

SAMYAK SHERTOK‘s poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2020 National Poetry Series finalist and a recipient of fellowships from Aspen Words, the Virginia G. Piper Center, and the Vermont Studio Center, he received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2020.

H.R. WEBSTER has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, Fairy Tale Review, Sugar House Review, 32Poems, Seattle Review and Ecotone. She currently serves as Managing Editor at the Michigan Quarterly Review. (Second Year)

ZEYNEP ÖZAKAT was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Her writing has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, where she won the Fiction Open Contest, in Black Warrior Review, and in Gulf Coast Online. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where she received The Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction, The Leonard Brown Prize in Poetry, and a Graduate Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Work. She is working on a collection of stories and a novel.