AWARDED RESIDENCY CURATORS

THANK YOU Awarded Residency Curators!

 

Jerri Bartholomew
she/her

Jerri is a fisheries microbiologist and glass artist. with an interest in exploring the intersection of these disciplines. As a microbiology professor at Oregon State University, she and her team researched diseases that affect wild Pacific salmon populations, focusing on how human alteration of ecosystems and climate change affect disease interactions. A long-term project in the Klamath River integrates research and monitoring to predict disease effects on salmon both before and following removal of four dams on that river. Since retiring, she continues to direct the Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory, but increasingly spends time coordinating an Art-Sci Interdisciplinary Fellowship for students at Oregon State. This fellowship challenges students to explore how creative artistic practices can not only illustrate, but inform science. www.jerribartholomewglass.com

Renee Couture
she/her

Motherhood is the focal point of Renee Couture’s work since becoming a mother six years ago. Created from within her mothering experience, she has a diverse practice, encompassing sculpture, photography, and drawing.
Couture is a member of Carnation Contemporary in Portland, OR. She has been granted artist residencies at PLAYA Program, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Ucross Foundation, and MASSMoCA. She currently works as a project manager for Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.
Currently, Couture lives on seven acres in rural southern Oregon with her husband, six-year old daughter, and dog. She works out of a retrofitted 20-foot travel trailer-turned-studio space in her garden. www.rcoutureart.com

 

Shelley Etkin
she/her

Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, gardener and herbalist. Her research engages with relations between bodies and lands through the intersections of place-based and multi-local knowledges, particularly in connection with the plant world. Through socially engaged processes in community contexts that integrate practices from herbal medicine, embodiment and ecology, she asks questions about land stewardship, migration, ancestral knowledges, and social-ecological transformation.
Shelley initiated the Garden as Studio platform for artistic research into garden as body and body as garden and co-facilitates the Social Body Apothecary, working with plants as allies for marginalised communities. Shelley is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology/Ethnobotany (UCC Ireland) on ‘Herbologies of Repair’ addressing medicinal plants as allies for transformative justice. She teaches in a range of contexts, from community organisations to universities. She holds an MA in Ecology & Contemporary Performance (Finland) as well as a BA in Gender Studies (USA) and has training in permaculture design with Earth Activist Training as well as homeopathy. www.shelleyetkin.com

 

Emily Gui
she/her

Emily Gui (pronounced “Guy”) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in California. Her research focuses broadly on the climate crisis and consumerism. Currently she is exploring the hazy space where collective and individual desires and actions clash with expectations, assumptions and existing structures. Gui has exhibited in galleries throughout the US including The Print Center of New York, The University of Texas, and in California at BAMPFA, Root Division, SoEx, Berkeley Art Center and NIAD. She has attended residencies nationally and internationally. She received her B.A. in Studio Arts from Bard College in 2012 and her MFA from the UC Berkeley Art Practice Department in 2021. She currently teaches printmaking and drawing at both the Universities of California, Berkeley and Davis. www.emilygui.com

 

Farnaz Fatemi
she/her

Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet from Santa Cruz, CA, is the author of Sister Tongue زبان خواهر, (Kent State University Press). Farnaz is the recent Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate and founding member of The Hive Poetry Collective. She is also an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow and California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow. Farnaz’s poems and essays appear in Kenyon Review, RHINO Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, No Tokens Journal, Poets.org, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org and elsewhere. More at www.farnazfatemi.com

Nancy Floyd
she/her

Nancy Floyd uses photography, video, and mixed-media to address the ways in which lens-based media can connect deeply with experience and memory. Much of her work addresses the passage of time, loss, and her profound bond with barren landscapes and trees.
Floyd has received numerous awards including a Victoria & Albert Parasol Foundation Prize for Women in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, and a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. In 2008 her first book, She’s Got a Gun, was published by Temple University Press. In 2021, her 39-year self-portrait series, Weathering Time, was published by the International Center of Photography and GOST books and the work was featured in the New Yorker Photobooth. Floyd’s artwork is in the collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), the Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL), and in numerous private collections. www.nancyfloyd.com

 

ariella tai
they/them

ariella tai an experimental filmmaker, video and installation artist from Queens, NY currently based in Portland, OR. www.ariellatai.com

 

 

Scot Siegel
Scot Siegel is the author of four full-length books of poetry, most recently Tender Currencies, winner of the Sally Albiso Award (MoonPath Press, 2025), and The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2016). The late US Poet Laureate Philip Levine recognized Siegel’s long poem “Pages Torn From a Schoolmarm’s Diary” as a Finalist with Honorable Mention in Nimrod International’s 2012 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize competition. Siegel’s poems are part of the permanent public art installation along Portland’s MAX (light rail) Orange Line. Siegel also works as a city planner and has received national recognition for his work in advancing the state of land use planning in Oregon.

 

Paul Skenazy
he/him

Paul Skenazy is a fiction and nonfiction writer. He has published two novels: Temper CA (2019), won the 2018 Miami University Press Novella Contest; Still Life (Paper Angel Press) was published in 2021. His autobiographical essay on Chicago and Saul Bellow was selected as a “Notable” essay in The Best American Essays 2015, and stories and essays have recently appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He revised and edited a posthumous novel by a friend, Arturo Islas (La Mollie and the King of Tears, U. of New Mexico Press). His nonfiction work includes a book on James M. Cain, a collection of essays on place in San Francisco literature, and a selection of interviews with Maxine Hong Kingston. He published more than three hundred reviews of fiction and non-fiction for newspapers and magazines nationwide, for a dozen years was a mystery review columnist for the Washington Post. and has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. He taught literature and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz for thirty years before retiring to devote full time to writing. He’s had the chance to live and work at PLAYA multiple times since 2017; those weeks and months have involved some of his most important discoveries and rediscoveries about himself, his writing, and the landscapes that give both life.