Our Artists-in-Residence
The Snowed-In Residency awards week-long solo retreats to a handful of artists each year. Now in partnership with the Kirkland Art Center in Clinton New York, this program was designed to fill a gap between working artists with families, day jobs, or a lack of institutional access and support for their art. While we love traditional long residency programs, we know that not everyone has a month or more of flexible time to create— that’s why our program focuses on week-long solo residencies.
2024 Residents
Maryum Saifee
Maryum Saifee is an artist, writer, and storyteller who has spent the last decade advocating for a world where women and girls can live free from violence.
In 2015, Maryum was part of a wave of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) survivors in her community, the Dawoodi Bohra Muslims, who leveraged storytelling in the age of social media to mobilize action. In this artist residency, Maryum hopes to explore the commodification of Black and brown pain to fuel gender justice movements that are often financed and dependent on institutions that don’t always reflect or are informed by the communities they serve.
Through a series of paintings and short essays — Maryum aims to reimagine a world where trauma survivors on the periphery of power can reclaim their agency and become protagonists of their own stories.
Maryum’s day job is diplomacy — she has been posted at U.S. embassies in some of the most beautiful cities on earth: Cairo, Baghdad, and Lahore. She is participating in this residency in her personal capacity. And will cherish the gift of time, space, and solitude in upstate New York to push pause on her work life for a week and reconnect with her art and advocacy work.
More on Maryum’s art and writing: https://www.maryumsaifee.com/
Judette Elliston
Judette Elliston (they/she) is a Haitian-Canadian vocalist, composer, and improviser based in Brooklyn, New York. Their work focuses on amplifying our inner worlds; exploring the emotional and ancestral histories that reverberate within. Through song, they hold space for listeners to engage in collective remembering, self-exploration, and ultimately move towards healing. Their music draws from the improvisational spirit of jazz, the storytelling styles of folk music, and the rich rhythmic and harmonic traditions of Haitian folkloric music.
Nic Gareiss
One of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch," Nic Gareiss (he/they) has been hailed by the New York Times for his "dexterous melding of Irish and Appalachian dance" and called "the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald. They reimagine movement as a musical practice, recasting dance as a medium that queers both eyes and ears. Gareiss engages many percussive dance traditions, weaving together a singular dance practice marked by his love of clog, flatfoot, and step dance footwork vocabulary; improvisation; and musical collaboration. Nic received the 2020 Michigan Heritage Award, his home region’s highest distinction bestowed on traditional artists. They have performed in seventeen countries including at London's Barbican Centre, the Irish National Concert Hall, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center. Nic will be attending in joint residency with Jack Devereaux.
Jack Devereaux
Jack Devereux is a trans-continental hillbilly who makes violins and plays fiddle music. Not many people know who he is, but the ones that do seem to think he’s quite good at what he does. In 2023, he belatedly released Red Steer, an album recorded in an Asheville living room in late 2014. At the time he thought his playing sounded indulgent, but after a decade, he regards the recording as a snapshot of the endearing exuberance of a 24-year-old in love with the fiddle. (Jack says everybody else on it still sounds great.)
Jack will be attending in joint residency with Nic Gareiss.
Carrie Usmar
Carrie Usmar is a photographer, writer, and mother living in Rhode Island with her husband and four children. In 2012, she chose to pause her career and care for her children full-time. She uses humor and a documentary approach to address the stigmas and celebrate being a stay-at-home mom. Her narrative work is devoted to exposing shame, being vulnerable, and building connection.
2023 Residents
Rebecca Irene
Rebecca is a poet, editor, & performance artist based in Portland, Maine, the land of her ancestors. Creative obsessions include scriptural mandates for women, the impact tipping practice has on self-esteem, female invisibility/immobilization after forty, ocean tides, & cicadas. A waitress by night, she writes for both the line cook & the academic, the platinum-card CEO at table nine and her fellow-server reciting specials.
Alexis Robbins
As a tap dancer, Alexis is a percussionist and jazz musician who lives in a world where dance and music are one. She enjoys playing with time and rhythm by juxtaposing meterless soundscapes and melodies with specific time signatures. Her work, which also employs original poetry or text and contemporary dance, often explores questioning identity, our relationships with our physical vessels and how that affects how we interact with the world and family legacy.
Amanda Helms
Amanda Helms is a mixed Black writer and mother whose work explores themes of belonging and outsiderness, particularly as they pertain to her own biracial heritage. She believes that the lens of speculative fiction is particularly suited to exploring those and other uncomfortable truths. A native of the land-locked state of Colorado, she also sometimes depicts oceans as being full of monsters, but asks that coastal folks don't hold that against her.
Andrea Wenglowskyj
Andrea Wenglowskyj is an artist/photographer/mother living in Buffalo, N.Y. Her artwork explores connections to her Ukrainian heritage such as language and traditions, as well as current events and customs in Andrea’s family, the diaspora, and the homeland. During the residency Andrea will be working on a long-term project about a Ukrainian summer camp in Western New York.
2022 Residents
MYQ FARROW
MYQ Farrow is a singer-songwriter, street performer and reluctant poet residing in Buffalo NY. Hobbies include telling people on Facebook to use Google before posting and relishing in black joy.
Kay Reese
Kay is an award-winning visual artist and photographer from the Bronx NY, now based in Irvington, NJ. Her multi-medium works-on- paper, paintings, prints, assemblages, sculptures, and digitally collaged imagery to examine the intersections of race, identity, power, and violence in our society.
Aaron Larget-caplan
A riveting classical guitarist and composer with a passion for bringing the art form to young people and new audiences, Aaron works with new music composers from around the world in his New Lullaby Project. His album Honey Cadence is out now.
Aaron was our inaugural Community Music Resident, a residency established in honor of Tom Bell & Ginger Parker.
Delilah jones
Delilah Jones is a non-binary mixed media collage artist, photographer, art therapist and poet from Queens, New York. Their work is rooted in a primal hunger to understand the contradictory nature of presence as it relates to the psychic pasts of human experience.
2021 Residents
Rebecca Pappas
Rebecca makes projects that address the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her work has toured nationally and internationally and she has received residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Clorox Foundation, and Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME). She is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Trinity College in Hartford, CT and Guest Faculty in the Masters in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis.
Michelle jones
Michelle is a photographer and painter, based in Buffalo,NY, whose most recent work From the Inside Out, is a collection of shared stories through multimedia, taking a closer look at domestic violence in Buffalo. Her creative work focuses on proximity; to connect with and view her subject at a close angle. Her passion for the arts stems from wanting to create a platform for social justice issues to be seen and heard through her work. One of her goals is to create public art to document, and create access to the arts for all, generating important dialogue, on relevant social justice issues. As a participant in the 2020/Vision: Women Artist in Western New York Exhibition, her work was installed at the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University. Michelle’s completion of the 2020 Cooperative Academy; a course designed to explore how to build worker-owned cooperative businesses, and learn the culture of cooperative economics, is the catalyst to her starting an arts based cooperative on the East Side of Buffalo, to provide access to the arts to underrepresented communities of color.
Andrina Wekontash
Andrina is a Shinnecock writer, storyteller, actor, and educator who has spent her career exploring the various components of the human condition. Her recent collaboration with Facebook's "Uplifting Black Voices" project has garnered over 3.2 million views. Prior to the pandemic, her sketch team "Like Butter" had a weekend residency at The PIT theatre. This summer, she directed a dramatic stage reading of Jeffrey Colvin's novel 'Africaville.' Andrina's solo work has been featured in festivals through NYC and the Tri-State area with her work being featured in the Diverse AF Festival, Solocom, and The Downtown Urban Theatre Festival. She is an alum of The Watermill Center Artist-in-Residence program.
2020 Residents
Maria A. Pinto
is a writer whose fiction has appeared or will appear in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, The Butter, Word Riot, and Dostoevsky Wannabe Cities: Boston. She studied Creative Writing and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brandeis University, where her work was awarded the Dafna Gesundheit Prize for Fiction. She has received fellowships from The Writers' Room of Boston and The Mastheads. When she's not reading fiction for The Drum or Harvard's Peripheries Journal, writing her second novel, teaching creative writing, or freelance editing, she can be found in the woods exercising her left brain functions by studying fungi. Maria was a resident in Winter 2020
marianna tessello
is a digital producer based in Brooklyn, researching practical ways in which communities can develop greater resiliency to climate grief and other forms of ecological anxiety. An Austin native via Tucson, she has over a decade of experience working with various nonprofits and news organizations as an educator and journalist. Marianna was a resident in Winter 2020.
Lara ehrlich
is the author of the short story collection Animal Wife, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in September 2020. Animal Wife won Red Hen’s Fiction Award, judged by Ann Hood. Lara’s writing appears in F(r)iction, StoryQuarterly, and Hunger Mountain, among others, and she lives in Connecticut, where she is the director of marketing for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven. More about Lara & her work can be found at www.LaraEhrlich.com.
Lara was a resident in Winter 2020