"As artists we are not singular, we are constantly engaging in dialogues with other art, maybe it be of the past, or of our peers and mentors. Thanks to the Djerassi Program, lasting friendships have formed throughout this month, and I am absolutely certain that the art of these new friends will in some way or another inform my own practice in the future." Monika Zobel (2018)
Current Artists in Residence
Session 3 Artists | May 14 – June 11, 2024
Asale Angel-Ajani | Literary Arts | New York, NY
Asale Angel-Ajani (she/her) is the author of the novel A Country You Can Leave, published by MCD+FSG. A Country You Can Leave was a 2023 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Read, NYT Recommended Book, and an Amazon Editors Fiction Pick. Her work in nonfiction includes, Strange Trade: The Story of Two Women Who Risked Everything in the International Drug Trade and the forthcoming, Intimate: Essays on Racial Terror.
Dazaun Soleyn | Choreography | Oakland, CA
With an intention to create art that aims to illuminate the human soul, Dazaun Soleyn (he/she/they), has presented work in the Bay Area since 2013. He received a BFA in Modern Dance Performance and Choreography from the University of South Florida and continued his dance education at the Alonzo King LINES Ballet Training Program. Recently, Dazaun graduated from California College of the Arts with a Masters in Architecture (MArch). Dazaun is an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco, a Gyrotonic Instructor, Reiki Master and Apprentice Herbalists. His mediums include dance, architecture, sculpture and interactive installations.
Kaitlin Pomerantz | Visual Arts | Philadephia, PA
Kaitlin Pomerantz (she, they) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer based in Philadelphia. Pomerantz works across mediums to pose questions about contemporary ecological relations, consumption and discard, land use, material memory, industrial histories and place futures. Pomerantz is currently focused on MATTERS, a hybrid pedagogy, writing and creative project series that makes connections between art and design materials, labor, and land; working in partnership with the artist residency RAIR Philly. Pomerantz exhibits work nationally in arts contexts as well as public spaces, with recent shows at the Tuttleman Gallery at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Fjord, Practice Gallery, and John H. Baker Gallery, and public projects through Monument Lab, Philadelphia Mural Arts, Pew Arts and Heritage. Pomerantz was a recent essay contributor to Turning Points, published by Teachers College Press in 2024. Pomerantz is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and a critic in the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.
Lydia Conklin | Literary Arts | Nashville, TN
Lydia Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and tuition scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in 2025 from Catapult in the US and Chatto in the UK.
Safia Elhillo | Poetry | Los Angeles, CA
Safia Elhillo is Sudanese by way of Washington, DC. She is the author of The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), which received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award; Girls That Never Die (One World/Random House, 2022), which was featured on the Indie Bestseller list; and the novel in verse Home Is Not a Country (Make Me a World/Random House, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and received a California Book Award and a Coretta Scott King Book Awards Author Honor. Her latest novel in verse, Bright Red Fruit, is forthcoming in 2024. With Fatimah Asghar, she is co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, 2019).
Tonya Foster | Poetry | Emeryville, CA
Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, editor, and Black feminist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Forthcoming publications include poetry collections—Thingifications (Ugly Duckling Presse); A History of the Bitch; as well as a 2-volume compendium on the Umbra Writers Workshop (Wesleyan University Press); and an anthology of experimental creative drafts (Nightboat Books). Dr. Foster’s poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day online journal, Callaloo, boundary2, Best American Experimental Writing, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, and elsewhere. As a member of the multi-disciplinary advisory committee for the exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the MOMA, NY, NY, her essay for the 2021 field guide expands her meditations on place and poetics. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute @ Harvard University, is a Creative Capital awardee, a recipient of awards from Macdowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, NYFA, SF MOAD, the Ford and Mellon Foundations, and is a 2023 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ C.D. Wright Award in Poetry. Dr. Foster holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
Yallie Kamara | Literary Arts | Cincinnati, OH
Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022–2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term) and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the author of the debut full-length collection Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024), winner of the 2022-2023 Jake Adam York Prize. Kamara is also the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration and the author of the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name and When the Living Sing. Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.
Ladee Hubbard | Literary Arts | New Orleans, LA
Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins which received the 2017 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and The Rib King, which was named one of the 100 Must-Read of 2021 by Time Magazine. The Last Suspicious Holdout, her collection of short stories, was published in 2022 and was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her short fiction and essays have been published in Arkansas International, Guernica, Oxford American and The New York Times, among other publications. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Award, a 2021 Berlin Prize and a 2021 Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and has also received fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Library in Paris, among other organizations. She earned a BA in English from Princeton University, a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in New Orleans.
Christiane Peschek & Lima Ernst | Media Artists| Krems, Austria
Since 2019 the Austrian multimedia artists Christiane Peschek and Ernst Lima collaborate on immersive experiences in an unbiased hyperreality shaped by the internet. Together they work on holistic, multi-sensory installations exploring the synergy between humans and technology, frequently drawing upon cosmic interconnections to evoke