Artists in Residence

Neena Pathak is a writer, editor, and audio producer whose work has been in podcasts like Invisibilia (NPR), This American Life, Another Round (BuzzFeed), The Daily and Still Processing (The New York Times). Her work has been honored by the Pulitzer Prize Board, Asian American Journalists Association, and Third Coast International Audio Festival.  She’s been itinerant for about a year now, and has been thinking a lot about community, practice, and death.

“After about a decade of working in audio journalism and documentary, I’m curious about other experimental and playful ways of telling stories in sound.  I’ve been thinking a lot about a question posed by an audio comrade, Jess Shane, who asked, “How do we make media that helps you be in, rather than escape from?”  To start, I want to interview community members while they engage in acts of drudgery.  At some point in the residency, I’d love to teach an audio storytelling seminar too. “

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kristina studied photojournalism at SF State but followed her love of rural communities, living and working in the Black Hills of western South Dakota for over a decade. She has documented news and communities for The New York Times, Mother Jones, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s and many others she’s incredibly grateful for. Early in her career, Kristina broke a 130-year run of men monopolizing the newsroom, becoming the first female staff photographer and later the first female photo editor at The Rapid City (S.D.)Journal. While Portland (Ore.) is now home, her favorite photos are made on the road across the Interior West. Kristina’s work as an independent artist focuses on the natural world, Alzheimer’s, grief, and mental health.

Guided by her introspective sense of place and belonging, Kristina is currently creating new art works around the idea of where our physical and non-physical worlds intertwine, exploring the bewildering experience of existing as a human. She plans to nurture her visual examination of themes around human consciousness reflected in nature through a unique, place-based exploration of the landscape. Kristina’s current practice is heavily influenced by the idea of memory and examining the state ofdreaming as a critical part of human life through observation of our shared natural environments. Thesupport of a month-long residency in such a place allows her to focus time and energy in a way that isnot easily supported in daily life as a self-employed freelance photojournalist

Janani Balasubramanian is an artist practicing across immersive media, conceptual art, and literary work and in long-term collaborations with scientists. Their work aims to invite deeper connection with nonhuman worlds and nurture social imagination for care, complexity, and play. Janani has received support from several prestigious funders and organizations, including the MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Institute, Pew Center, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, among others. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the San Francisco Exploratorium, Academy of Natural Sciences, Andy Warhol Museum, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their many awarded residencies include The Public Theater, Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics at NYU, and Sundance Institute Theater Lab. They have been artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017 and are a member of the Guild of Future Architects.

Janani will be in residence with Sultana Isham and they will spend their month at Green Box writing a dome Opera entitled Rouge Objects, an operatic, immersive, and inviting experience for dome cinema that brings the emerging science of brown dwarfs to audiences around the world. Through original footage, archival materials, and animation built with data from the new James Webb and Gaia space telescopes, and an original operatic score constructed from sonified data of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects welcomes us into the wonderful life of celestial objects that abound and sing in the dark. The residency will culminate with a workshop presentation of the opera.

Lynn Tomlinson is known for clay on glass animation: spreading a layer of oil-based modeling clay and altering the image to create a moving painting full of fluid transformations. Her creative work explores environmental themes, often imagining how non-humans might view humanity’s social and environmental impact. Her work has screened at festivals including Annecy, Ann Arbor, Cinanima, CineKid, Hiroshima, and Ottawa. Ten Degrees of Strange (2021), created to accompany a song by environmental writer Robert Macfarlane and musician/actor Johnny Flynn, is currently screening in festivals. The Elephant’s Song (2018) is a Vimeo Staff Pick and screened in over thirty festivals, receiving 18 awards including Best Music from TOFUZI Festival, The Global Insights Stellar Award from the Black Maria, Best Environmental Short from the Chesapeake Film Festival, Best of Festival at the Peekskill Film Festival, and Best Animation from the University Film and Video Association.  The Ballad of Holland Island House (2014), received a prize from Greenpeace, screened in three dozen festivals, and received numerous honors and awards including a nomination for the Student Academy Award. Tomlinson’s work has been exhibited in one-person shows at Cornell University and the University of Delaware and in group shows at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery, and is in the Education Department collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York). She has been a visiting artist at the University of Michigan, Bennington College, Tainan National University of the Arts, Bowling Green State University, Cornell University, University of Central Florida, and Northern Vermont University.  Her emerging media projects include Reverie de Giverny, a VR and dome film, and Kendra’s Bay (2016), an animated digital puppetry performance. Her work aired on ARTE and is in MoMA’s collection. Curatorial projects include Sister Cities Animated (2019) and Cross-Pollinated: Hybrid Art Abuzz (2015). Her writing has appeared in Animation Journal; Animation Practice, Process, and Production; Con a De Animación and HyperRhiz: New Media Cultures. She is Associate Professor at Towson University outside of Baltimore, Maryland.

Mk Smith Despres writes, teaches, and reads lots of books with their family in western Massachusetts. They have worked as an educator for over 15 years with kids and adults with disabilities, but also worked as a baker, made a magazine about food and farming, and spent exactly three days milking cows. Mk is the author of several new and forthcoming picture books including Night Song, illustrated by Hyewon Yum, and There’s That Sun Again, illustrated by Julie Benbassat.

Mk will use their time at Green Box to revise and develop a novel in verse for middle grade readers (ages 8-12) and to find and follow new picture book ideas. They are also excited to visit area elementary schools and work with students as part of their community engagement work in Green Mountain Falls.