Current Artist-in-Residence
Njari Anderson
He/Him
Njari Anderson (Clarendon, Jamaica. 2001) narrativizes themes of loss, visibility, danger, and the pleasures of ambiguity through his investigation of Black, cultural exploitation. Interested in Blackness and the spaces it is consumed, Anderson invokes himself, the Internet, and extended metaphors to interfere in this exploitive capital exchange. Oscillating between criticism and provocation, his work moves fluidly between social sculpture, film, writing, performance, and archives to make conceptually, rich interventions.
Anderson holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an AB in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is an alumna of the Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program.
Notable exhibitions include solo presentations at La Papeleria (Madrid, Spain) and the RISD Museum (Providence, RI), two-person presentations at Galeria Cromática (CDMX, Mexico) and Estrella Gallery in addition to recent group showings at the Experimental Loop Film Festival (NYC, NY), Touchstone Gallery (Washington, DC), and Bridge Red Studios (Miami, FL).
Lily Bennett
She/Her
Lily Luna Bennett was born and raised in Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Sierra Nevada College, and her MFA from University of Montana. Lily has shown her work nationally in over eight states and internationally, including Ireland, Greece and the UK. Lily is also dedicated to art education, and has taught ceramics, sculpture, and drawing at the University of Montana. This year, she has participated in a residency at Burren College of Art in Ireland. Her upcoming residencies this spring and summer are at Anderson Ranch Art Center and then off to Viafarini in Milan for three months.
Molly Routhieaux Braley
She/Her
Molly Routhieaux Braley was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin and is a resident of Independence, Missouri. She received her BFA in Ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1987.
Molly uses the medium of clay and atmospheric firing techniques to investigate the concept of vessels as landscape. Using clay, she creates forms that reveal and capture light, shadow, mass and gravity alluding to a sense of experienced and remembered places. Molly is a professional gardener and naturalist who in daily life has developed a working understanding of and relationship with the land, plants, natural environments and weather. These honed skills are integral to her exploration of her clay forms with the intention of branching into other materials including wood, fiber, and plant materials.
Ash Campbell
She/Her
Ashley (Ash) Campbell is a Filipino-American ceramic artist and educator. Her work is deeply influenced by her childhood experiences and loneliness felt growing up as a mixed race kid in 90s suburbia. She gathers color inspiration and imagery from the myriad of cartoons and tv shows she watched as a kid. She often experiments with texture and non-ceramic materials to create visual “love letters” for the salad days of youth full of imagination and child-like curiosity. Ashley works mostly in porcelain, using a variety of pigments to stain her clay. She utilizes bright colors mixed with pastel tones to create playful landscapes, evocative of playground structures from a Utopian future. Ash lives in Seattle with her partner, two cats and three chickens, where she has a vibrant home studio practice. She currently teaches at Pottery Northwest and various other studios around the Pacific Northwest.
Bill Cravis
He/Him
One summer long ago Bill Cravis bicycled from his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts to San Francisco. Consequently, Cravis has spent most of his adult life on the west coast of the United States. Lifted by the pandemic-era wave, dubbed the Great Resignation, he left his 10-year career as full-time faculty in the Visual Art Program at Central Oregon Community College. He has established a home ceramics studio in the small town of Sisters, Oregon, where he is committed to his evolving art practice. Among his distinctions, Bill Cravis has received a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission, an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Previous artist residencies include Northern Clay Center, Vermont Studio Center, Boston Center for the Arts, Budapest Art Factory, and an Art/Industry residency at the Kohler Company in Wisconsin. Cravis holds a BFA, Ceramics from California College of the Arts and an MFA degree from Carnegie Mellon University.
Isa Ghanayem
She/Her
Isa Ghanayem was born in Downers Grove, Illinois, raised by the forest preserves of the Midwest and Lake Michigan. She spent her formative years in a ballet dance studio deepening her relationship to the body and to visual storytelling, which she now integrates into her making. Through printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, photography, dance, and sound, Isa’s work takes form as large-scale multi-media installations, as well as in prints, small sculpture, and artist books. In 2019 she received her B.F.A. in Drawing, Painting, & Printmaking with a minor in Sculpture & Ceramics at Loyola University Chicago. In 2023 Isa received her MFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Lola Lefrancois
She/Her
Inspired by the staged quality of Western landscape paintings, my work exposes the stark contrast between these idyllic scenes and the contemporary treatment of nature and animals. Drawing from my childhood in Auroville, India—a commune founded on utopian ideals of perfect humanity—I explore the alluring facade of a perfect place that ultimately reveals humanity’s capacity for violence.
I grew up in Auroville, an experimental township in India devoted to human unity, founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa (“the Mother”) and designed by architect Roger Anger. Living there for eight years my education was focused on the environment, awareness, and empathy. With time I became fascinated by the contrasting reality between the ideal image I grew up with and the reality of the world around us.
Interested in challenging the Western traditional painting heritage, I reference and alter both landscape painting and classical interior décor imagery. Referencing movements like the Hudson River School and 18th- and 19th-century European landscape painting, I create fragmented and decaying landscapes. These sceneries are dark yet familiar, inviting viewers to lose themselves in an illusory beauty.
Jess Lincoln
She/Her
Jess Lincoln makes paintings depicting people and the places they live. She pays close attention to effects of scale, perspective, surface and illusion, and draws on visual conventions from both art history and contemporary vernacular décor. In her work, she considers how the place we encounter an artwork changes our experience of it, and explores these ideas by pursuing both traditional and non-traditional spaces and formats for paintings. She grew up in Calgary, Alberta and currently lives and works in Toronto. In recent years, she has exhibited work Toronto, Ottawa, Kitchener, Nova Scotia and Montreal, and received support for her work from the Toronto Arts Council, Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Last year she attended residencies at the Golden Foundation and Wassaic Project to work on an ongoing project about gardens and gardeners.
Caely Melford
She/Her
Caely Melford is a furniture and lighting designer based in Mystic, Connecticut. She founded her studio in 2017, where she specializes in crafting handmade pieces that are guided by the belief in a sacred, intimate connection between the material, maker, user, and environment. Her designs are a harmonious blend of her background in experiential design and traditional craftsmanship, resulting in functional objects that imbue a sense of spirit and expressiveness within a space.
Caely’s current body of work explores how the activation of materials can mirror temporal shifts, the fluidity of our realities, and call into question the positioning of perspective. Through the interplay between an object and its surroundings, she illustrates the notion that nothing is fixed, finding beauty in uncertainty and strength in vulnerability. Her materials serve as metaphor, bridging the dualities of impermanence and permanence, and as commentary on how these constructs have been tied to gender hierarchies embedded in traditional craft practices. In her eyes, her pieces are not just objects; they are vessels—capable of holding, absorbing, and emanating a sense of both lastingness and fragility.
Henry Merker
He/Him
Henry Merker (Philadelphia, b. 1996) designs experimental home goods in wood using a combination of CNC machining and traditional woodworking processes. As a graduate of Drexel University’s Product Design program, Henry playfully leverages the constraints of these fabrication tools to bring definition to a medium typically defined by its natural irregularity. Utilizing the precision of computer-aided design and CNC routing, Henry’s work often invokes motifs of organic topology, primitive geometry, and cryptic symbology in pursuit of rare shapes.
Katherine Simóne Reynolds
She/Her
Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ feels you looking, and at times enjoys it. Her practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness within the Black Midwestern landscape. Her work cautiously attempts to physicalize emotions and experiences by constructing works that include photo based works, film, choreography, sculpture, and an anxious writing practice. Utilizing Black embodiment, vulnerabilities and the interior alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour, residue, the Black church while interrogating the notion of “authentic care”.
Reynolds has exhibited and performed within many spaces and institutions including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Museum of Modern Art New York, Sculpture Center, and the Graham Foundation. She has exhibited in national and international She also is mounting two exhibitions for The Stanley Museum of Art, and The Clyfford Still museum for the winter of 2025.
Mary Robinson
She/Her
Mary Robinson is a mixed media artist based in South Carolina. She prints on repurposed fabric and handmade paper, piecing elements together to discover new relationships in color and form. Her imagery is inspired by patterns and rhythms in nature. In her work, she gives visual language to the energy she imagines underlying and connecting all living beings. Robinson was a Professor of Printmaking at the University of South Carolina for 22 years. Her work has been exhibited at the Janet Turner Print Museum; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art; Morris Graves Museum; Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Design; Roennebaeksholm Arts and Cultur Center; Penang State Art Gallery; Universitat der Kunste Gallery; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica; Western Colorado Center for Arts; Columbia Museum of Art; Marin County Museum of Art; Bristol Art Museum; Wiregrass Museum; and Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Robinson’s work is represented by Spalding Nix Fine Art in Atlanta, GA and Mike Brown Contemporary in Columbia, SC.
Sarah Stellman
She/Her
Sarah Stellman is a painter based in Austin, TX. She received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions around the country.
Shan Wu
She/Her
Shan Wu is a Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. Her work spans photography, video, installation, and conceptual sculpture, exploring themes of cultural identity, materiality, history, and power structures. Often investigating the intersection of technology, memory, and perception, her practice is rooted in both personal experience and broader socio-political narratives. Her work reflects on Taiwan’s geopolitical landscape, environmental concerns, and the entanglement of narrative, memory, and mythology.
She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Film and Video and Integrated Media. Her films have been screened at international festivals including 25FPS, Vienna Shorts, Odense International Film Festival, and Women Make Waves International Film Festival. She has received the Best Experimental Film award at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, the Tim Disney Prize for Excellence in the Storytelling Arts, and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize.
Emily B. Yang
She/Her
Emily B. Yang is a Taiwan-Malaysian artist based in Brooklyn. Working at the intersection of ceramics and block printing, she merges these traditions to craft new narratives of diasporic storytelling and feminist cultural speculation.
Beyond her artistic practice, Emily has worked as a federal employee and, along with her colleagues, is currently facing the threat of removal from her position. Inspired by the recently declassified WWII-era CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual—which outlines everyday tactics for disrupting oppressive systems—her residency at Anderson Ranch will explore one of its strategies: “Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job.” In response, she will create a body of work that intentionally expands the number of steps in her process; intertwining block printing and hand-built ceramics to produce speculative artifacts that explore the possibilities around the future of diasporic visual languages, craft, and the societies that shape them.
Sangwoo Yoo
He/Him
Sangwoo Yoo is a Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist whose work explores ephemerality, materiality, and ecological cycles through sculpture and installation. His practice investigates how natural objects shift within cultural contexts, revealing the essential values lost in the process. Rooted in material innovation, he develops sustainable substances that embody life and mortality, integrating them into his work to reflect social and ecological realities. He earned a MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States and a BFA in Environmental Sculpture from the University of Seoul in Korea.
Yoo has been awarded fellowships from the Eldon Danhausen Foundation, MASS MoCA, Loghaven, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has also been nominated for the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship and the MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture at the SAIC. His accolades include the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts Award, the Kumho Young Artist Award, second place in the William and Dorothy Yeck Award, and the Grand Prize at the Hoguk Art Exhibition in Korea. His award-winning work is part of the collection of The War Memorial of Korea in Seoul.
Spring 2024 Artist-In-Residence Slide Night
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Artist-In-Residence Program Information
