Greenhouse Artists In Residence
Our Artist in Residency (AIR) program are four 1-month residency sessions for artists who want to dive deeper into their artistic practice while in community with others.
Cristen Alexandria
@999c__
Cristen Alexandria is an Egyptian contemporary author and liminal space artist of first-generation descent. A student of ancient Kemetic wisdom and Soto Zen Buddhist traditions, Cristen combines ecological studies with sensory awareness, studying the interplay between spirituality and ecology. She most recently participated in an immersive regenerative land stewardship program with the San Francisco Zen Center, where she farmed, tended, and shared principles of eco-dharma, exploring the ecology of how we stay in relationship with the land and maintain reciprocity with the natural world at Green Gulch Farm. A former resident of Mendocino, Cristen grew up running along the headlands and developed a deep appreciation for contemplative practices as a lifelong learner. Cristen is a compassionate care provider for trauma survivors and has received training in mediation and conflict resolution at the University of New Mexico School of Law, as well as through leadership initiatives with the National Outdoor Leadership School.
Cristen views her work as that of a translator, engaging with language to form and build worlds in an aim of deepening collective understanding of spirituality and consciousness. Her works intend to honor future ancestry and heritage, telling stories through visual works and narrative that breathe spirit, life, and truth. Cristen's work has received national recognition, most recently debuting in the Southwest at Studio & Gallery in Durango, Colorado. Her work has been featured internationally in global commercial and independent publications, including the Santa Fe Reporter and GOODS Magazine (UK), and she has contributed work to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She has also received grant funding through the Durango Creative District Creates grant and most recently showcased large-scale oil paintings as a participant of Nameless Narratives, an inaugural contemporary showcase of BIPOC artists in the Four Corners region.
Valerie Skakun is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City, where she received a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and an MFA from Hunter College of The City University of New York. She collectively co-exists with and cares for several communities of microorganisms. Her work is based in fermentation time and travels between research, sculptural, performative, and archival stages.
She is appreciative to the Canada Council for the Arts for awarding a Digital Originals grant, New York Foundation for the Arts for a City Artist Corps Grant, Queens Council on the Arts for two SU-CASA grants, The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences for a Wisebram Culinary Distinguished Fellowship,
Valerie Skakun
@aprilmayjuneskakun
Swale Lab for a residency and private studio on Governors Island during COVID (2023), Penland School of Craft for a Winter Residency Fellowship, Marble House Residency for a fully funded residency, PlySpace Residency Program for a Resident Artist Fellowship and a private living space + studio during COVID (2020), Vermont Studio Center for an Artist Opportunity Fellowship, and ChaNorth for a private living space + studio during COVID (2021).
Ian Schiffer
A kuuy/gər (meaning "guest" in Tongva/Hebrew) activist, ritualist, and resource mobilizer of Ashkenazi descent, born and raised in Tovaangar/LA. I love where I live, Tovaangar, in East Brent, where it's been ablaze but not consumed, and I dream of returning and being in circle under the oak tree I grew up with others who are seeking a place for safety, kinship, repair, and aliveness.
I'm a legal apprentice with the Land Clinic, and through relationship and teamwork, I support the release of resources and the return of land. I worked with the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, supporting the rightful return of land (called Huhuunga), where, because of the removal of eucalyptus trees and colonial junk, the Eaton Fires had a relatively minor impact on the land.
I'm part of the shomeret shalom (tenders of peace) teshuvah/repair pilgrimage lineage/cohort, co-teaching "Ger: Guest Laws and Land Back," and I dream of radical diaspora.
In this pocket of time, I hope to play, pray, dream, scheme, write, sing, dance, walk, and learn. There are curiosities about being with decolonial pilgrimage and embodied rituals for release, healing, the Bhoodan movement, homefulness, and land return, as well as cultural burns and natural building to support a liberatory recovery that doesn't leave the land, water, or any beings behind.
Emily Coletta is a writer based in Santa Cruz, California. Her fiction has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review and Catamaran: A Literary Reader. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San José State University, where she was a recipient of the Steinbeck Graduate Fellowship. Currently, she is at work on a short story collection about islands and—apparently—dogs.
She hopes her time at the Mendocino Art Center will bring the strange, illuminated moments necessary to writing fiction.
Emily Coletta
Lili Elena
Born during a total lunar eclipse, and from a young age, inspired by subversive lives,
As a teen, Lili managed a haunted movie theatre, wrote short story collections, and passed untold hours on long-haul buses and commuter trains, the world in the window a perpetual scroll of liminal spaces and rapidly retreating, just-glimpsed lives.
Living amongst the granitic islands of the Penobscot bay watershed, a bay feeding into the gulf of Maine: aswirl in a gyre of currents, with the distinction of being the world's fastest warming body of water. Lili's perspective holds fast at the intersection of this collapse and regeneration, in the vastness of queer nature, and in the built, feral, wild, and human, where weeds take root and change is apparent. they draw on their time farming, foraging, community organizing, and in ecological design and land stewardship to inform their work as a writer and visual storyteller, with plants as a compass, and themes of access, otherness, and belonging.
They are honored and delighted to join this residency.