Artists in residence
Previous Artists
Green Box’s residency program kicked off in 2020 and each artist makes a lasting impact in our community.
GAEYA
GAEYA Rooted in Sweden, GAEYA blends Scandinavian mystery – driven by powerful vocals – with sounds of natural ancient worlds and ambient synth-soundscapes by converting them into atmospheric landscapes. GAEYA takes you on an immersive journey to a different place for you to explore the earth by getting drawn into freshly woven webs of intergalactic pop music and deep-rooted Nordic frequencies. GAEYA invokes a desire to return to nature.
GAEYA will be kicking off her Green Box residency with a concert from her tour. Prior to arriving in Green Mountain Falls, GAEYA will have been on tour performing in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and New Mexico. She will also be hosting special sound experiences in the Green Mountain Falls Skyspace and throughout her residency GAEYA is looking forward to the inspiration and connection she will find in the surrounding landscape of Green Mountain Falls as she creates, writes, and records new music. Her residency will culminate in an informal concert of the works she’s written during her stay.
Kristina Barker
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
Thu Kim Vu
Thu Kim Vu graduated her BFA from Hanoi University of Fine Arts, Vietnam and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, United States. Focusing on line drawing, paper material and using temporary spaces, she had been working on different projects through traveling to create a new experience based on how her line drawing changed the atmosphere of each space. Vu has participated in numbers of residencies worldwide which contribute a great influence in shaping her works in many directions.
In 2008, Vu participated in a residency Program at Vermont Studio Center and New York Mills Regional cultural center, Minnesota. Her works was expanded to doodle drawing and combined with different paper construction settings dealing with emotional, mental as well as physical aspect of using lines, brushstroke as a method of meditation. In 2009, Vu came to Goyang National Art studio, Korea and discovered a new dimension in her work experimenting with Korean traditional Hanji paper and expanding her brushstroke into an enormous scale larger than herself, creating spontaneous movement. In late 2010, Vu started a new exhibition at Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen in Germany, opening new ideas on how she de-forms the construction of spaces. From 2011, Vu participated residencies: Mc Coll Center of Visual Art (USA) (2011), Rockefeller Bellagio Center (Italy) (2011) and Museum of Contemporary art in La Coruna (Spain) (2013), Sylt Foundation residency in Johannesburg, South Africa (2016) where she has been continuing her idea of an imaginative city through drawing.
During her time at Green Box Residency, Thu will be creating an ephemeral installation inside the Lakeview terrace building as a series of light sculptures in response to natural landscape. This installation will be lanterns of organic forms that inspired by your local nature using paper cutting, drawing, folding, collaging and illumination of LED lights.
Vu is based in Hanoi, Vietnam as freelance artist.
Janani Balasubramanian
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.
Sultana Isham
Sultana Isham explores sound as biology through composition and ethnomusicology. She is an award-winning composer, violinist, scholar, curator and interdisciplinary fellow at The Sundance Institute. Her recent score for the Emmy-nominated documentary, “The Neutral Ground,” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and earned her an IDA nomination for best score of 2021. In 2023, she made her composer/conductor debut with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Her upcoming score for the doc-series “Stax Records” will broadcast nationally on HBO in 2024. Her scholarship has expanded into a touring multi-sensory archival exhibition on the lives and works of performers-musicologists Dr. Geneva Handy-Southall and D. Antoinette Handy. Her curation is done in collaboration with their descendants of Handy Heights, Emory University, University of Minnesota, and University of Iowa Women’s Archive.
Sultana will be in residence with Janani Balasubramanian 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.
Mk Smith Despres
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.
Paula Bohince
Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, all from Sarabande: Swallows and Waves (January 2016), The Children (2012), and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, POETRY, The TLS, The Irish Times, Australian Book Review, and elsewhere. She has been the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholar, the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place, a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt House Resident, the inaugural Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a Hawthornden Fellow. She has received the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Second Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition for her poem “Among Barmaids.” She has taught at New York University, the New School, The Poetry School, and elsewhere. She lives in Pennsylvania.
Paula will be advancing her fourth poetry collection, Illume, which considers the role of artificial light on climate change and wildlife, meditating on geopolitical implications of the fossil fuel industry broadly but how in subtle ways plant, human, and animal are impacted.
Arvin Ramgoolam
Arvin Ramgoolam is a father, writer and co-owner of Townie Books and Rumors Coffee & Tea House with his wife Danica in Crested Butte, Colorado. He is the 2020 recipient of the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story and a recent MacDowell Fellow. His work focuses on otherness and place, especially minorities in the American West.
Arvin will work on his novel in progress which unsettles the west and at its core is the story of a family living with grief with themes of memory, land, and belonging. The story is rooted in the geological, mythological and human history of Southern New Mexico.
Brooke Smiley
Brooke Smiley is an artist who guides land and body learning. Brooke is a Somatic Movement Educator (SME) from Body Mind Centering® working in the BMC® practitioner training, and therapist in Somatic Experiencing® (SE), practicing from both Western and Indigenous perspectives. Her passion for working with the earth comes from being born into a family of builders. She holds a California General Contractor’s License, and specializes in Superadobe, as a graduate and long term apprentice of California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (CalEarth). She has experience building earth domes for the Tarahumara women in Guachochi, Mexico, the Havasupai in Arizona, sculptural play gardens outside the Hayward Gallery in London, and the “Hollywood Dome” featured on HGTV. She is awarded as a United States Dance Scholar from the California State Senate, California Legislature, and United States Congress.
Brooke will spend her residency developing an EARTH.SPEAKS project with/for/by the community. EARTH.SPEAKS is a series of land-based public art projects aimed at healing through community creation of earth markers, a sustainable practice of structure building. This work centers Indigenous identity through reconnecting with our bodies, one another, and the land. Brooke will guide the community in building two earth markers, to uplift awareness of Indigenous history, present day visibility, and messages of the land.
Nikki Pike
Nikki Pike is an Artist and Activist committed to serving the community through her art practice and role as an educator. Through the use of universally positive human experiences such as curiosity, music, surprise, and gifting along with the influence of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, she spreads values of empowerment, vulnerability and connection in the form of experience as opposed to product. Nikki sees herself as a Cultural Agent working together with local communities promoting activity and creativity. With her expansive practice, Nikki straddles Public Arts, Social Sculpture, Service Art and is exploring ideas of Relief Art intended to aide communities responding to disaster. Her methods start from the ideals of democracy and her work has been featured at the Denver Art Museum, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and Art Basel Miami to name a few. Currently Nikki resides in Denver, Colorado and holds a professorship at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
During her residency, Nikki Pike will create an outdoor sculptural work utilizing bark-skinned forms, adding to Green Box’s public collection. Additionally, Nikki will develop a series of drawings related to the work and embark on community engagement workshops throughout her residency.
Edwin Ushiro
Edwin Ushiro is an artist from Hawaii who currently resides in Southern California. After earning a BFA with Honors in Illustration from the Art Center College of Design, he has been working in the entertainment industry as a Concept Designer, Storyboard Artist and Illustrator for clients including: Sony, 20th Century Fox, Fox Animation, Jim Henson, Warner Brothers and Lady Gaga. In addition, he has been exhibited at venues worldwide including the Villa Bottini in Italy, the Museum of Kyoto, and the Honolulu Museum of Art.
During his residency, Edwin will create paintings which explore the oral traditions, focusing on ghosts and legends, of the Pikes Peak region. The final result will be displayed on Lake Street through the winter. Edwin will interview residents of the community in service of the art, by collecting local folklore and ghost stories and will provide various workshops inclusive of Plein Air sketching, composition, drawing and painting.
Carole d’Inverno
Carole d’Inverno is an abstract artist who grew up in Italy & Belgium, moved to the United States in 1979 and now lives in Brooklyn. d’Inverno has had numerous solo and group shows in the United States. Solo shows include Transumanza: Duluth and Minnesota, at the Duluth Art Institute, Duluth, MN (Winter 2020); Transumanza: Massillon and Ohio, at the Massillon Museum of Art and History, Massillon, Ohio; Appalachia: an Abstraction, at the Western Carolina University Art Center; A Way of Saying, at SUNY Rochester Monroe College, Rochester, NY. d’Inverno is the recipient of The Art of Ivy Side, National Competition Winner, PENN State Altoona, PA; she has been accepted into the historical Artist Lab at Rokeby Museum,VT, and has been awarded Fellowships and Residencies at the Art and History Museums, Maitland, Florida, the Studios at Key West, La Playa, Summer Lake (OR,) Willapa Bay AIR, Willapa (WA), the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson (VT), the BAU Institute, Otranto (Italy,) Starry Night, Truth or Consequences (NM,) and the Wassard Elia Center, Ascea, (Italy.) Her work is in the public collections of the Microsoft Art Collection, Kirkland, WA; Group Health Headquarters, Seattle; Swedish Hospital, Seattle; Seattle University, Seattle; The Maitland Art and History Museum and in private collections across the US and Europe.