Twenty-two resident teaching artists, one per branch, teaching free weekly classes from September through June.
Jesse Cushing is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Their work is inspired by nature, folklore, and the otherwise fantastical and revolves around community, connection, and communication. Their work often features characters that represent different ideas and concepts. These characters reappear throughout their work, building interwoven narratives that allow them to explore the nuances of these broad and complex topics.
Shanae Brooks is an Ohio-based artist working with wood, acrylic, and resin. With a background in carpentry and engineering, she developed her craftsmanship through woodworking and the creation of functional art. Her practice brings multiple media into conversation while allowing each material to retain its distinct character. Through this approach, Brooks creates installations that explore new possibilities for making and invite viewers to form their own interpretations of the work.
Sharareh Khosravani is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Cincinnati. Her practice spans installation, sculpture, painting, interpretive projects, and participatory works. She approaches each project through research and discovery, using materials, making, and observation to explore new possibilities. Her work invites dialogue, reflection, and shared discovery, encouraging audiences to bring their own perspectives. As an educator, she creates open environments that foster creativity, curiosity, and confidence.
Amber Abboud is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, collage, animation, illustration, and interactive media. Her work focuses on making invisible experiences visible and exploring how art can help us understand ourselves and the world around us. As a teaching artist, she encourages experimentation and self-expression, helping young artists follow their ideas, take creative risks, and develop confidence in their own ways of making.
Chloé River is an interdisciplinary designer from Detroit. She received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Art + Design from the College of Creative Studies and will complete her MFA in 2D Design at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the spring. Drawing from the sounds, visuals, and spirit of Detroit, River works across illustration and graphic design. Her practice prioritizes play and community outreach, using joy as a form of activism.
Irene Perez is a Mexican American artist and educator working across textiles, installation, and sculpture. Her practice draws from family, labor, migration, and cultural memory, using familiar materials to explore what is carried forward. Through repetition, accumulation, and visible making, she creates spaces for complexity and contradiction. As a teacher, she encourages experimentation, material curiosity, and personal expression, helping students connect art to their own histories, communities, and lived experiences.
Olivia Eshe Holt is a craft artist and designer from Detroit, Michigan, with a BFA from the College for Creative Studies. Her practice spans ceramics, sculpture, art furniture, 3D modeling, and spatial design, exploring how materiality can give form to personal stories and the Black American experience. Holt believes in the transformative potential of artmaking and aspires to equip community members with creative tools to actualize their ideas and futures.
Stephanie Mae Howells is a multimedia artist, educator, and community arts curator in Detroit with a BA in Honors Psychology and Art minor from Wayne State University. A Teaching Artist for 13 years, she has worked in classrooms, after-school programs, hospitals, and carceral spaces. Her pedagogy combines therapeutic approaches with technical skill-building. Her artistic practice includes botanical illustration and communal altar installations honoring grief, resilience, and social justice.
Amy Cofiño is a Miami-based eco-conscious artist dedicated to low-impact studio practices. Using foraged natural elements, recycled paper, and locally sourced materials, she creates texture-rich works that respect the earth. Her whimsical scenes spotlights women, animals, and idealistic yet wild landscapes. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida International University and studied abroad in France and Italy, earning a certificate from The Academy of Portrait and Figurative Art.
Bailey Triggs is a multimedia artist based in South Florida, who holds a BFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design. Through vivid, tropical colors and tactile paintings, sculptures, and short films, she delves into the emotional and material aspects of memory. As a teacher, she encourages her students to challenge themselves with materials and concepts, and find joy and freedom in the sanctuary of the art room.
Isabel Oliva is an interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and weaving. Her practice explores nature, memory, mythology, and transformation, creating dreamlike landscapes and fantastical ecosystems. As an educator, she brings this curiosity into the classroom, encouraging students to observe the natural world, draw from their experiences and imaginations, and experiment with materials. She strives to foster confidence, creative risk-taking, self-expression, and a sense of wonder.
Nichole Caridad Hernandez is a Miami-based multimedia assemblage artist who holds a BFA in Fibers from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Her practice spans collage, natural pigments, and metalsmithing, forming an archive of material interventions grounded in syncretism and her Cuban-Dominican heritage. Through imaginative play and experimentation, Hernandez brings tools, materials, and aspects of self into conversation, weaving supernatural experiences and questions of identity into transformative landscapes.
Nicole Giraldo is a multidisciplinary artist born in New York and raised in Miami. She holds a BFA and MS in Art Education from Florida International University and works across oil painting, ceramics, and illustration. Giraldo’s practice explores identity, personal history, and cultural heritage, often through anthropomorphic bird characters. Through these figures, she reflects on her relationship to the past and considers how it informs her present perspective.
Andrew Samuel Harrison is a New York-based artist, educator, curator, and writer from Richmond, Virginia. He received his MFA from Parsons School of Design in 2025. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the Brooklyn Public Library, NYU’s Clive Davis Gallery, and the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. He has participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, NARS Foundation, and Sculpture Space.
Hedwig Brouckaert is a Belgian-born, Queens-based multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, mixed media, sculpture, and site-specific installation. Her practice transforms remnants of consumer culture, including mass-media imagery and discarded plastics collected from New York City waterways. Brouckaert holds MFAs from the University of California, Davis and Sint-Lukas Hogeschool in Brussels and is a laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Belgium. She exhibited at the Bronx Museum in 2026.
Juana Vargas Moreno is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn with an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design. With a background in painting, her practice expanded toward sculpture in pursuit of more tactile engagement, working with materials including wax, sugar, and ceramics. Reflecting on language, translation, and how they shape our relationships with others, Vargas Moreno creates installations that invite viewers to slow down and engage in sustained observation.
Nádia Yracema is an Angolan interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York City. Grounded in Black histories, ancestral memory, and radical imagination, her practice moves across performance, sound, sculpture, and film. Through experimentation, she explores memory, trauma, pleasure, joy, ancestry, and radical dreaming, creating speculative spaces where experience, knowledge, and imagination intersect and open onto other ways of being and becoming. She holds an M.A. in Human Rights & the Arts.
Sixing Xu is a Brooklyn-based artist from Beijing, China. Working across installation, sculpture, text, and printmaking, she reimagines meanings and storylines from the minute and accidental. Informed by her bilingual background, her work reflects on narratives of language, identity, and relationship. She extends this attentiveness to her teaching, creating classrooms that combine material experiments and generative play. Xu holds a B.A. in Media Studies from Vassar College.
Ming Wang is a visual artist based in NY/NJ. She holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Columbia University. Inspired by shadows, moonlight, fountains, and the people and places around her, she paints quiet moments that invite us to pause and connect with the world. In class, Ming encourages curiosity through making, helping students build skills, share ideas, and find their artistic voices.
bailz is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and creative director. They produce mixed- media and performance work exploring themes of visibility, connection, and nonlinear time. bailz often incorporates upcycled and natural materials into art and installation. They work collaboratively to organize accessible community arts events, and are currently directing a longitudinal movement & sound project. An advocate for empowerment through art-making, bailz is committed to creating brave spaces to express and learn.
Kate Shea Duncan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Pittsburgh, PA, with a BFA in Theatre Production from Point Park University. She has honed skills in ceramics, painting, and bookbinding and often revisits the same idea repeatedly in several mediums until it feels fully explored. Centering on childhood nostalgia and grief, her work often uses magical realism to recreate how something felt rather than how it really was.
A paid term, studio space in the branch, and the selection process behind this cohort.
About the residency