PLAYA ALUMNI

Sae Jung Oh

Sae Jung Oh (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC and Seoul. She works with lossy data and glitch created when technology translates data, and when the brain translates memories. Recently, her interest has centered around ways of looking at a city...

Kelly Terwilliger

Kelly Terwilliger is a poet, oral storyteller and maker of art who grew up in a family of biologists. Her work in its various forms delights in multivocality, dialogue, and wonder—that mingling of curiosity and awe which engenders both questions you can answer and...

patricia Contaxis

Patricia Contaxis' writing appears in The Coachella Review, The Loch Raven Review, Pithead Chapel, Wrath-bearing Tree, Rivanna Review, The Pluralist, San Antonio Review, and Notes From The Seashore. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the California...

Shawn Skabelund

Shawn Skabelund (MFA, The University of Iowa, 1990) is an artist and curator working in landscapes to reveal their complex issues, ecologies, and cultural histories. For thirty years, he has been a successful site-specific, place-based installation artist, creating...

Rebecca Burrell

Rebecca Burrell (she/they) is an emerging interdisciplinary artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She is a 2024 graduate of Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she received an MFA in Applied Craft + Design and an MA in Critical Studies. In all her work, she...

susan Circone

Susan Circone is a fiber artist based in the Portland, Oregon area. Her work explores the minutiae of the physical and natural world, finding inspiration in its structures, textures, and forms. The slow process of stitching is used for mark-making and construction,...

Katharine Cashman

Katharine Cashman is a volcanologist who studies links between chemical and physical factors that control magma ascent, eruption, and emplacement on the Earth’s surface. She received her doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1986 and accepted a faculty...

helen lessick

Helen Lessick is a visual and public artist and creative catalyst originally from Philadelphia. She travelled west to earn her BA in Art from Reed College and MFA in Studio Art from the University of California Irvine. She was awarded Pollock Krasner and Bonnie...

Eve muller

Eve Müller lives in Eugene, Oregon with her sweetheart. She has recently published in Camas, Sequestrum, The Writing Disorder, Thieving Magpie, and Empty House. Some of her work has been anthologized, and her chapbook, Guide to the Ruins, was published by Plan B...

ocean

Ocean is a disabled novelist, poet, and visual artist working in pararealist themes. www.mirrorflower.org @mirrorflower_ocean  

stephen montalvo

Stephen Montalvo (b.1984) is an active composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music, as well as audiovisual installation artist, based in New Orleans, LA. Through his music, he explores concepts related to resonance and rhythmic interplay, works to promote...

Grant cutler

Grant Cutler (b. USA 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist working with sound, film, photography, textile, and media technologies across installation, performance, and expanded cinema. His current work aims to emphasize listening as a spiritual-erotic experience...

matthew williams

  Matthew Williams (they/them/theirs) is a Baltimore-based dancer, somatic facilitator, and lifelong student of the body. Their performance practice is inspired by the human body as a site for choice, liberation, and a means to be in relationship with place and...

renee adams

As an outdoor enthusiast and self-described beanbag botanist, Renee Adams finds immediate inspiration in the flora surrounding her home in rural central Washington State. She remains active in the regional arts scene as a curator and member of PUNCH Projects, an art...

EUN sun choi

Eunsun Choi is a multidisciplinary and conceptual artist born in Korea, currently living in Seattle. She is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in the DXARTS program. Recent solo...

abigail pierce

she/her Abigail Pierce is a place-based artist and landscape designer. Her work is informed by her interests in fostering people-plant relationships, the aesthetic experience of radical land care, and connecting with decay and disturbance processes. “Nutrient cycling”...

michelle robinson

she/her Michelle Robinson is a multi-disciplinary artist and animator. She studied architecture and visualization at Texas A&M University, and holds an MFA in visual art from New Hampshire Institute of Art. She has had her work published in 'Diffusion of Light',...

nancy watterson scharf

she/her Nancy Watterson Scharf is a visual artist working primarily with painting media. She focuses on the limitations and nuances of perception. A native Oregonian, Nancy was raised on a farm near Salem and has spent her life living in rural areas of the state. Her...

Sasha Michelle white

she/her Sasha Michelle White is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher who engages the material ecologies of the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes. Her current research focuses on the dyes, medicines, and life histories of fire-adapted shrubs and how these...

Wayne bund

he/him Wayne Bund is a photographer, writer, and teacher. He was raised on a farm in Boring, Oregon. He positions his camera to document people and systems - real and fictional - forging historical records. He crafts images that exist outside of normative structures,...

Ian Madin

he/him Ian Madin grew up hiking, backpacking, skiing and rafting in the mountains of California. His love of the outdoors led him to geology degrees from UC Berkeley and Oregon State University, where he did field research in the Pakistani Himalaya and the South...

Walt Anderson

he/him Walt is an accomplished author, wildlife artist, photographer, lecturer, and expedition guide who taught environmental studies courses for 27 years for Prescott College in Arizona. He is a pioneer of ecotourism with experience around the globe. Since retiring...

Emily Gui

she/her (pronounced "Guy") is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Moving between printmaking, sculpture, photography and installation, her work often pushes the boundaries of process and technique through layering and material experimentation. Her current work...

renee couture

renee couture

Motherhood is the current focal point of Renee Couture’s work. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing. Couture has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Studio Art and Spanish from Buena Vista University . In 2010, Couture earned her M.F.A. in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Art. She has been granted artist residencies at Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and Ucross Foundation. Couture currently works as a Project Manager with the Percent for Art/Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.