We are pleased to announce the Self As Universe: Mending Our Collective Ecosystem Residents for 2025-2026.

Self As Universe: Mending Our Collective Ecosystem invites artists to explore the connections within our collective ecosystems and use the power of imagination to heal the wounds in the relationship between ourselves and our communities.

Cory Diane (New Orleans, LA) is a performer, composer and sound artist whose work often looks at sound and vibration as means of knowing and relating. While in The Woods, they aim to synthesize years of research and relationship building around Gravitational Wave Astronomy with their ongoing creative work related to climate justice, and their lived experience as a person with a physical disability and navigating chronic pain. Central to this project would be continued collaboration with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) physicists (based in Louisiana and across the globe), and the prototyping of a new instrument—a “harp” sounded not by the strumming of strings, but by sunlight.

Ching-In Chen (Lake Forest Park, WA) is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of recombinant (2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry), The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems; and the forthcoming Shiny City as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Leslie Scalapino Finalist). They currently teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell and serve as the poet laureate of Redmond, Washington. While in Residency, they will continue working on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a community-based performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. The project aims to tell an interactive story that highlights individual and collective responses to disaster and disrupts mainstream narratives of our changing climate in favor of witnessing creative strategies of survival used by everyday people.

Sarah Fouts (Baltimore, MD) is an Assistant Professor in American Studies and co-director of the Orser Center for Public Humanities at UMBC. Fouts’s research spans food and labor studies, political economy, disasters, and community engagement, with a focus on New Orleans and Honduras. Fouts’s book, Rebuilding New Orleans (UNC Press, 2025), explores immigrant labor, multiracial solidarities, and resistance in post-Katrina New Orleans.

During the residency, Fouts will be working on a three-part documentary series with Fernando Lopez-Sanchez. Fruit for Thought: Journeys Between New Orleans and Honduras, exploring the connections between Honduras and New Orleans through three key food commodities: bananas, palm oil, and coffee. This documentary is rooted in local contexts and place-based histories, with themes that offer critical insights into some of the most pressing historical and contemporary issues of the twenty-first century.  

Sultana Harris (New Orleans, LA) is a social practice artist and the Interim Executive Director of The Descendants Project’s Woodland Plantation Museum. She has curated and produced projects of large scale public art, horticulture, and film Her background in anthropology, psychotherapy, and cultural resource management allows her to articulate and navigate the precarious relationship of equity, solidarity, and collaboration while exploring Black creative processes in the visual and performing arts. Sultana has worked with organizations such as Holistic Resistance, Grief to Action, Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, Xavier University of New Orleans’ Department of Psychology, the Gulf Coast Fellowship for Community Transformation and the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. 

While in the Woods, Harris will be working on the somatics phase of an ethnographic art project nuancing the effects of land discrimination and the erasure of home and community while also exploring the tensions and negotiated intimacies that accompany it. 

Carl Harrison Jr. (New Orleans, LA) is an innovative interdisciplinary filmmaker and artist whose work explores the intersections of cultural memory, land, and Black and Indigenous traditions. Through a mix of documentary, animation, installation, and community-centered storytelling, Carl creates immersive experiences that honor ancestral knowledge and imagine liberatory futures. Grounded in both art and activism, Carl’s work is rooted in the soil of the Gulf South and grows from a desire to preserve heritage while nourishing collective transformation.

During his residency at A Studio in the Woods, he will be continuing work on Eve’s Garden: Seasons of the Soul, a hybrid personal documentary that explores the intersection of family, land, and memory in the Saint Roch neighborhood of New Orleans. Rooted in the story of his great-grandmother Eve and the food forest created in her honor, the project weaves oral history, filmmaking, and land-based practices into a living archive of Black and Indigenous resilience. 

Yrécha Gay Jheneall (New Orleans, LA) is a transdisciplinary fluid artist born and raised in Jamaica. Between childhood and adolescence, their life oscillated between Kingston and Portmore. Now living in New Orleans, Louisiana, their creative practice considers Afro-Caribbean people’s movement, memories, and homemaking rituals as practice toward a liberatory consciousness. Trécha earned their MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Arts at the University of New Orleans and is currently employed as the Artist-Centered Program Associate at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. 

During their residency, Trécha will work on their multidisciplinary project Gen)d(re, which integrates performance, community workshops, and engagement culminating into an immersive installation and collective participation. Centering themes of fluidity in gender and sonic expressions, the project explores sound and movement as transformative elements of identity and cultural memory. 

Fernando López (New Orleans, LA) is a multidisciplinary artist and documentarian. Working across photography, video, and writing, his practice reflects a Mexican and Indigenous worldview while centering people of color, immigrants, and diasporic communities in the U.S. Through portraiture, street photography, and layered visual storytelling, Fernando explores the beauty, complexity, and resilience of everyday life—while also engaging themes of cultural celebration, displacement, and social justice. His work offers both intimate glimpses and critical reflections shaped by his experience as a Mexican artist living and creating in the U.S. During his residency, Lopez-Sanchez will be working on a three-part documentary series with Sarah Fouts. Fruit for Thought: Journeys Between New Orleans and Honduras explores the connections between Honduras and New Orleans through three key food commodities: bananas, palm oil, and coffee. This documentary is rooted in local contexts and place-based histories, with themes that offer critical insights into some of the most pressing historical and contemporary issues of the twenty-first century.  

Gary L. White (Nashville, TN) is a Native of Nashville and received his Bachelors of Fine Arts at Watkins College of Art and Design in 2011. He obtained a Masters Degree in Ceramics from University Tennessee Knoxville. Since then, his works have been included in solo shows and group exhibitions throughout the country. White conducts a cross-cultural visual investigation, which explores folkways, identity, and the experiences of the “Southern Other” White currently teaches Ceramics at Belmont University in Nashville Tennessee, while maintaining his studio practice. 

His residency project will utilize clay from both the banks of the Mississippi River to create a series of ceramic pots. The pieces will be built on site and fired in the traditional method of pitfiring, which has ties not only to his region, but also to southern Louisiana.