Current Residents

Jim O’Connor (he, him) is a Pacific Northwest native long interested in the processes and events that shape the remarkable and diverse landscapes of the region. Following this interest with a Geological Science major at University of Washington and M.S. and Ph.D....

Paola Davila (Oaxaca, Mexico, 1980) With 14 solo exhibitions and more than 60 group exhibitions in Mexico and abroad, Paola Dávila has received numerous awards, including the Biennial Photography Award (Mexico, 2021), as well as the Tierney Foundation Grant (N.Y.,...

Barb Lachenbruch (she/her) is a forest ecologist, wood scientist, and former professor at Oregon State University who splits her time between Corvallis and her cabin in Alsea. Her writing is inspired by her connections with nature and the challenges of balancing...

Rachel Frank’s (She/her) practice combines sculpture, video, and performance work to focus on the connections between non-human species that aid in the protection, healing, or repair of surrounding ecosystems. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include MOCA Tucson...

Brie Schettle (She/Her) is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art and ecology with a background in painting, printmaking, installation, photography, and video. Schettle holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Boise State University and a BFA in...

Lola Milholland (She/her) is a food-business owner, social-practice artist, and writer. Her work has been published by The Guardian, Time Magazine, Oprah Daily, Gastronomica, Oregon Humanities, and others. A former editor for Edible Portland magazine, she currently...

Caroline Van Hemert (she/her/hers) is an Alaska-based writer and wildlife biologist with a passion for birds and northern landscapes. Her creative work explores the intersections between wildlife, climate science, and adventure travel, with essays and articles...

Angelina Almukhametova (b. Kazan, Russia) is a US-based artist whose work investigates cybernetics and techno-culture through digital and analog technologies set in conversation with each other. Her works are indeterminate systems that manifest as performances,...

Faith (She / Her) is a nonfiction writer from Waldorf, Maryland. Her writing has appeared in Trails Magazine and has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Wyoming....

Barry Baker (he/him) is a forensic biologist and the Deputy Director of the U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory in Ashland, Oregon. As a scientist, he supervises an interdisciplinary team of biologists and forensic experts in combating international...

Carrie Cogan (she/her) writes about loners, light, open spaces, animal encounters, and the human heart. She is a past winner of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Society Fiction Prize and the Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest. Her work has appeared in Kenyon...

Claire Fall Blanchette (she/her) (b. 1994, Maine, USA) is an artist working across multiple disciplines including sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Using organic and unconventional materials, Claire investigates the boundaries that humans have established between...

Jess (She/Her) is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. For the past two and a half years, her art and research have focused on the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fires—two wildfires that drastically altered the area where she grew up. She spent two summers...

Nida (she/her) has been making art since she was young. She continued to study art in college, at University of California, Irvine, focusing largely on ceramics, photography, and printmaking, and delving into feminist issues in her work. Nida spent a year studying...

Kacy McKinney (she/they) is a queer visual artist, avid birder, and scholar/educator with a PhD in human geography. She works in comics, drawing, illustration, and textile and garment design and production. Her book of comics poetry, Mourning Attire, will be released...

Morrison (she/her) earned her BFA in Photography and Ceramics from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating with the prestigious Anne Bremer Foundation Award. Her work has been recognized through numerous...

Rebecca Cummins (she/her) is inspired by science, its history, and instrumentation. She explores the possibilities of light, optics and natural phenomena in installations that have included a machine for making rainbows, a photographic rifle, sun and moon pointers,...

Paul DeMarinis (he/him) has been making noises with wires, batteries and household appliances since the age of four. He studied film with Paul Sharits at Antioch College and electronic music with Robert Ashley at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College and...

Wayne Bund (He/him/they) is a visual artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Born in Portland and raised on a farm in Boring, Bund's work explores the intersection of fantasy and identity, creating spaces that embrace transformation, play, and the fluidity of...

Stephen is a microbiologist with broad interest in many scientific fields. In his current position as a Research Associate Professor at OSU, he investigates the structure, function, development and genetics of fish parasites. He also discovers and describes new host...

Erin Mallea (she/her) (b. 1990, Seattle, WA) is an artist working across sculpture, video, photography, and print publications. Her work explores place as an entry point into contemporary cultural, environmental, and political conditions. Erin has exhibited at...

Carolyn Hall (she/her) holds an MS in marine science with a focus on historical marine ecology, is an award-winning professional contemporary dancer, and a science communication facilitator. She enjoys finding ways to combine her interests to creatively engage the...

Clarinda Mac Low (they/she) started out working in dance and molecular biology and now creates participatory events investigating social constructs and corporeal experience. They are also a professor in design and technology and a former HIV/AIDS researcher and...

Eliana Miranda (she/her) is a visual artist who currently lives in Dallas, TX. In 2010, she completed her BA from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She obtained her MA in 2012 and an MFA in 2015 from the University of Dallas. She’s been in numerous exhibitions...

Tove Danovich (She/her) is the author of Under the Henfluence which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She often writes about the relationship between humans and the natural world and how perceived domesticity or wildness changes how we see non-human animals....

Zoe Butler (She/They) is a New Media Performance Artist who uses abstraction to explore the relationship between material culture and embodiment. Butler’s recent work engages with both personal and museum archives to explore artifacts that resist histories of...

Pepper Trail (He/Him) is an ornithologist who has devoted his life to the study and conservation of the birds of the world. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984, and was awarded post-doctoral fellowships by the National Science Foundation, the...

Dr. Beth Reinke (she/her) is an evolutionary biologist specializing in animal coloration. Coloration can be investigated with quantitative and experimental approaches and she uses both in her research. She works primarily with reptiles, especially painted turtles, and...

Katelyn Patton (she/her) is a visual artist working in Chicago who was born and raised in the Midwest. Her practice focuses on the urban ecology and biodiversity of plants in the city and beyond, how materials and color are naturally derived from them, and how this...

lizzy storm (she/her) (b. 1990, NJ, USA) is an artist and educator residing in Atlanta, GA. Her layered, textured abstractions evoke human consciousness and environmental awareness in deep time. She received her MFA in Studio with a concentration in Drawing &...

Rebecca Gilman’s (she/hers) plays include Swing State, Luna Gale, Boy Gets Girl, Twilight Bowl, Spinning into Butter, Blue Surge, The Glory of Living, The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Dollhouse, The Crowd You’re in With, and A Woman of the...

NC-based artist, Ingrid Erickson (she/her), has lived and worked in China, Thailand, Iceland, and Finland. Erickson’s installations reflect the intersection of art and science. Her work is about the fragility of ecosystems. She is interested in everything in the...

Ruby McConnell (she/her) is a writer, geologist, and explorer whose work centers on outdoor advocacy, place, and examining the relationships between the landscape and the human experience. Her work has appeared in scientific journals and outlets including Alta...

Sophia Hatzikos (she/her) is a Greek-American sculptor whose practice is rooted in embodied research through swimming. From the water, she examines how human intervention shapes our entanglement with the landscape. Through sculpture and video, she translates fleeting...

Roundhouse Platform is a collaboration between artists, designers, educators and curators Noémie Despland-Lichtert (she/her) and Brendan Shea. Their practice is conceived as a curatorial platform for public engagement with liminal spaces, architectural archives,...

Hannah Steele (she/they) is a researcher and artist studying snow hydrology and water management. Using GIS, remote sensing, machine learning, and participatory methods, their work focuses on improved measurement and modeling of mountain snowpack and water...

Oregon born, and Appalachia raised, Jennie J. Castle is an artist and curator interested in the connections between identity and place. Through a photography centered practice, she explores how societal paradigms affect the individual, often challenging dominant,...

Jennifer Loyd (she/her) is the author of Ghost in the Archive (2025), selected by Bob Hicok as the winner of Conduit Press’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. For her poetry exploring the archives of Rachel Carson, she received a Stadler Fellowship, as well as...

Marcie Begleiter (She/they) is a California-based artist whose work engages with stressed bio-systems. “Chimera: the Future of Nature” includes videos, sculptures and photographs that are based on specific biomes, envisioning dramatic and unpredictable futures of...

B. Stacey Villalobos (they/them & elle) is a cultural steward and interdisciplinary artist from the San Gorgonio Pass of Southern California with native and ancestral roots in Jalisco, México. They are a queer descendent of immigrants and comes from a lineage of...

Learn more about PLAYA's local wildfire + water expert collaborators here!

Sasha Michelle White (she/her) is an artist, ecologist, and interdisciplinary researcher who engages the aesthetic ecologies of the Pacific Northwest’s fire-prone landscapes. As a child growing up in rural Michigan, Sasha wandered through fields and forests,...

Sarah Grew (she/her) is a photographer and painter based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work expands into installation and environmental art, or contracts into collage and printmaking. Infused in ideas bridging art history, philosophy, and the natural sciences, her art...

Michelle Swinehart (she/her) is an avid fan of all things story. She's had the pleasure of living stories through her work at StoryCorps, Narrative 4, Object Stories and The Right Brain Initiative. Michelle received a MAT from Lewis and Clark College and a MFA in Art...

M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates socially-engaged events, public-exchanges, and artworks to help reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people and the land they live on. Her works start by slowing down, asking questions, gathering...

Sabina Haque (she/her) is a multimedia artist whose work explores the transformation of place and identity. Her new exhibition, The New Abnormal 2.0, on view at Waterstone Gallery, examines the interconnectedness of global environmental crises.Raised in Pakistan by...

Suze Woolf (she/her) studied ceramics and printmaking at the University of Washington. An early adopter of computer graphics, her career has included print and interface design. Though known as a watercolorist, she explores a wide range of media from painting,...

Working in a range of digital media, Julia Oldham (she/her) visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a world on the edge of environmental collapse. With tenderness and humor, Oldham explores her own conflicting feelings about human progress through...

Daniela Naomi Molnar (she/her) is a poet, artist and writer who creates with color, water, language, and place. Her paintings are created with pigments she has made from plants, bones, stones, rainwater and glacial melt. Poems and essays are created alongside the...

Emilie Lygren is a poet and outdoor educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. Emilie’s poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. She’s also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor...