WORKSHOPS On Campus and Around the World
February 20 - March 2
PORTUGAL - 2026 INTERNATIONAL CLAY RETREAT
$4950 | $3950 | $6450
Joined by American potters Sam Taylor and Mark Shapiro, we are hosting a very special program in Portugal; at a ceramic retreat center for lovers of clay, wood firing, and hands-on ceramic education overlooking the stunning landscape of Ribeira da Azenha in Southwest Portugal.
This 10-day program is about clay; but it is also about place: people, food, culture, and the exchange of skills and ideas in a beautiful location with a rich history. We’ll watch and learn from master potters, we’ll make good work, but we’ll also experience the art of living + building community in a whole new way.
Stay Tuned for our 2027 International Retreat
May 7 - 11
WOOD KILN FIRING WEEKEND
$30 | $400 | $800
Join us for a long weekend of wood firing in the Adirondacks and gain hands-on experience with the exciting process of a wood/salt firing.
This weekend is intended for ceramic artists who have some experience with atmospheric firing. Participants will spend a long weekend at the beautiful Craigardan campus, glazing, loading and firing our wood/salt kiln as a group. Everyone must reserve space in the kiln in advance for the amount of work you will bring, and all participants must sign up for at least two work shifts for loading, firing, and clean up. Advance registration is required. Program fees range from firing fees only to full weekend accommodations.
August 31 - September 7
WOOD KILN FIRING WORKSHOP with Kyle Brumsted
$850 | $1300 | $1850
Join us for a week-long workshop to gain hands-on experience learning about the exciting process of ring with potter Kyle Brumsted.
This workshop is intended for ceramic artists of all levels who are interested in learning more about atmospheric firing. Participants will spend the week at the beautiful Craigardan campus, glazing, loading and firing our wood/salt kiln as a group, with instruction and feedback from Kyle at each step along the way. While the kiln cools, there will be time for group outings to hike and swim, and demonstrations in the ceramic studio. Everyone will be required to bring 2-3 cubic feet of high fire bisqueware, but no prior wood firing knowledge is necessary. The workshop will focus on learning the foundational techniques and theories of atmospheric firing through a full firing cycle of the Craigardan wood and salt kiln. After an in-depth explanation of how the atmosphere affects different surfaces, participants will prepare their own work to fire with provided slips, glazes and, wadding. Next, a full day will be spent loading the kiln; understanding the best practices for an even firing and successful surfaces. The third day is the firing itself — everyone will be taking shifts to stoke the kiln and bring it up to temperature before the excitement of salting. While the kiln cools, there will be demonstrations in the studio and excursions into nature. After we unload the kiln together and assess the results as a group, there will be opportunity for individual feedback from Kyle.
Program Fees include a range of accommodation options, food, materials + firing, and the program + instruction. Advance registration is required.
September 24-27
EXPLORING THE SCIENCE & ART OF BAKING WITH SOURDOUGH + ALTERNATIVE GRAINS
$600 | $825 | $1200
Join us for a few days in the Adirondacks to gain hands-on experience diving into the world of baking and grains. Skilled instructors will share knowledge on sourdough baking tips and tricks, baking with a variety of grains (such as rye, einkorn, and buckwheat), and wood-fired pizza baking. This workshop combines a blend of educational learning from experts, getting your hands deep in dough, and a field trip to a local grain mill and farm. Bakers of all levels are welcome to register; however those with existing experience of at-home baking may gain the most from the retreat offerings. Advance registration is required.
November 9-16
BAJA with Kate Moses
$3500 | $4000 | $4500
Join Craigardan and writing mentor Kate Moses in Baja, California! This 7-day program is an incubator for writing; but it is also about place: people, food, culture, and the exchange of skills and ideas in a beautiful location with a rich history. We’ll learn from a master of the craft and nourish our creative spirits, and we’ll experience the art of living and building community in a whole new way. Through both writing and living, we will tap into memory, imagination, and observation, filling your cup with new expressions and outlooks for daily life.
We’ll be staying at our own private resort known for hosting retreats, all within a short walk to the beach. The 2-acre property includes a main house and casita, large heated saltwater pool, jacuzzi, outdoor shower, outdoor pavilion with living and dining areas, outdoor fireplace, poolside grill, high speed Wi-Fi, and more.
The writer’s retreat will offer sanctuary and time in which to write, make room for the imaginative wandering that leads to writing, and provide guidance and mentorship as desired and appropriate for each writer. This opportunity is designed for writers committed to their craft, at whatever stage of publication or project they may be. It's important to note that in addition to being a restorative retreat it will also be a focused environment where serious writers can intensively immerse themselves in process and develop their work.
A significant benefit of a group program is the constellation of experiences, voices, and perspectives that unite in a community of like-minded writers and thinkers. Every evening, after gathering around the dinner table, the group will be invited to share work aloud together in a supportive, non-obligatory, nourishing environment. Each participant will also receive an optional 60-minute individual conference with Kate about their writing, and may submit 15 pages of writing for discussion.
The curriculum of the daily group seminar-style sessions will be finalized based on the needs of the group, but will include daily generative workshops designed to provoke experimentation and open up the possibilities of each writer’s project, wherever they are in their process.
The program fee is all-inclusive except for transportation with a range of accommodation options. A limited number of scholarship funds are available.
Bring your partner! There is a reduced-fee option for non-writer participants to join the trip and stay with partners who are participating in the writing program. Advance registration is required.
SERIES
FRIDAY APPLEBARN TALKS with
Craigardan’s
2026 Artists-In-Residence
Every Friday: May 29 - August 28
5 - 6pm // FREE
Join us throughout the residency season for this free public series of informal artist talks, readings, and presentations. We’ll learn about works-in-progress from our artists and scholars-in-residence, as well as special local guests, with informative and inspiring presentations across disciplines.
The following weekly schedule includes bios* from the presenting artists for a sneak peek at who you’ll meet. Each artist presents for only 15 minutes, adding up to an alternative Friday “happy” hour. This is a wonderful way to kick off your weekend! Bring a friend, all are welcome.
These presentations take place in the Applebarn on Craigardan’s main campus. The main campus entrance is located two driveways west of the farm store on Rt 9N, look for the “main campus” sign. The Applebarn is the first building on your left as you come up to campus, before the parking areas.
*Please note: the artist bios may have been shortened for publication, and not all presenters may be included at the time of printing. Unabridged bios and current speaker lists can be found on our website at craigardan.org/events.
Uncertainty Academy In collaboration with artist Tal Beery and scholar Joshua Moses, Uncertainty Academy: Adirondacks is a unique residency program and roundtable discussion series at Craigardan exploring responses to the uncertainties—both material and psychic— arising from the climate crisis and other cascading crises.
Six residency participants, each representing a diverse spectrum of perspectives on uncertainty, purposefulness, fear, friendship, and transformational responses to the climate crisis, will immerse themselves in unstructured reflection, project development, and evening discussions throughout the week.
Throughout this exchange, we will identify unifying commonalities amidst seemingly radical differences. We will address various scales and their interrelationships, from the individual, community, organizational, and nonhuman realms. Our hope is to cultivate unlikely juxtapositions of perspectives, creating a riotous garden rather than a uniform lawn.
The participants will jointly present a roundtable discussion on their work for this first Friday Applebarn Talk of the summer.
JUNE 12
Jackie McKenna is an outdoor educator who works with youth development programs. At university, he studied Environmental Science and Social Work while working with local organizations and community farms to increase the accessibility of produce in low-income areas. Through these organizations’ youth programs and community workshops, Jackie realized his passion for educating, empowering others, and expanding access to natural areas. This led to him working for outdoor youth development programs where he instructs various outdoor activities such as skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, sea kayaking, snorkeling, and others. Through experiential learning, Jackie teaches students of all ages about terrestrial and marine ecology, team building and leadership, and fostering connections to themselves, their community, and nature.
Rose Robinson is an artist working in ceramics and illustration. She investigates play as a path towards story, and story as a path towards meaning. Rose’s work has been included in exhibitions at Gallery 263 in Cambridge, MA; Charlie Cummings Gallery in Gainesville, FL; and the University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art, among others. She has participated in residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Edgecomb, Maine, and Fish Factory Creative Center in Stöðvarfjörður, Iceland. Rose was raised among the marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and now lives and works in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. Rose is a 2026 Craigardan Teaching Fellow.
JUNE 19
Tiago Genoveze For the past 16 years, Tiago has worked in education across the United States, Brazil, and Nicaragua in a wide range of capacities. He joins the Craigardan community while on leave from his role as Brazil Studies Program Director at Harvard University— seeking to learn, contribute, connect, and dream within the Adirondack landscape. A photographer and writer, he published Miradas de Solentiname: fotografías y reflexiones (2014), a collaborative photo book featuring images made by over 100 Nicaraguan youth and Tiago's own personal writings. His current creative focus is the development of a tabletop game centered on Indigenous agency and inter-generational resistance to colonization.
Julia Chai is a Northern California-based artist, maker of objects, and an architect of experiences. After receiving her MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2025, she has explored working within the intersections of design, creative consulting, and community building. Julia is driven by the process of making - not just of objects, but of experiences that spark connection and a sense of place. She enjoys the quiet labor of meaning-making and finds excitement in connecting the dots between disparate ideas. Julia's life and work are an intertwined pursuit; she values the structure of a refined process but leaves room for the unexpected.
JUNE
26
Steven Engelhart is a musician and historian living in Essex, NY. At this talk, Steven will sing a variety of songs that were collected across the region in the 1940s and 50s by Marjorie Lansing Porter (1891-1973) and tell the story of how this remarkable woman came to embrace and record the traditional songs sung by dozens of people – farmers, woodsmen, homemakers, and others – all learned through an age-old oral tradition. Wrote Porter, “songs sung in European countries several hundred years ago are still sung here today.”
Porter’s family roots in the Champlain Valley go back to the 1790s. Her grandfather was newspaperman and abolitionist Wendall Lansing, and she was an editor, journalist, author, historian, and co-founder of the Adirondack History Center Museum in Elizabethtown. By the time Porter died in 1973, her collection of folk songs and other interviews, originally recorded on a SoundScriber machine, consisted of 456 recordings and more than 300 songs. One of her most important contributors was Lily Delorme of Saranac, who shared more than 100 songs with her.
In 1960, Folkways Records released “Champlain Valley Songs: From the Marjorie L. Porter Collection of North Country Folklore,” sung by Pete Seeger, and which included eighteen songs from the Porter collection. For the next 50 years, interest in her collection waned but in 2013 a collaboration between SUNY Plattsburgh, Mountain Lake PBS, the North Country’s public television station and Canton-based Traditional Arts of Upstate New York (TAUNY) resulted in “Songs to Keep: Treasures of an Adirondack Folk Collector,” an Emmy award-winning documentary, a song book, a series of concerts, and a traveling exhibition.
JULY 3
The following artists received Craigardan’s 2026 First People’s Fellowship for a group residency: “Reconnecting to the Land and Language Through the Arts"
Kononwa'tshén:ri ión:kia'ts Onkwehonwehnéha. (Kononwa'tshén:ri is my indigenous name.) Sue Ellen Herne ión:kia'ts
Kiohrhénsha. (Sue Ellen Herne is my English name.) Wakhskaré:wake, Ahkwesáhsne nitewaké:non. (I'm Bear Clan from Akwesasne.)
Sue has over forty years of experience in creating thought-provoking paintings and installations with a focus on Haudenosaunee (specifically Mohawk) culture and language. Images of her work may be found in: Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art - a collection of Essays edited by J.C.H. King and Christian F. Feest, 2007; and Iroquois Art, Power and History by Neal Keating, 2012.
Sue spent 23 years working at the Akwesasne Museum as the program coordinator. A lifelong learner of culture and language, Sue has shared what she learned in classrooms, through art, and in her work as museum program coordinator. In 2018, she left her job to study in two full-time Kanién’keha (Mohawk) language programs. She continues to study in an Advanced Fluency Program.
Sue participated in a one-week artist's residency at Craigardan in 2024, following her graduation from the Ratiwennahní:rats language program in Kahnawake. She wanted to explore how to best manage her time in order to do all of the things she wants to do: create art, support language and cultural revitalization, and make traditional items for her family, with the overall goal of incorporating all of this into her life in a meaningful way.
About this week-long program for Kanien'kehá:ka artists, Sue says, “The residency helped to clarify things for me, and now that two years have passed, I would love to be able to experience a week at Craigardan with other Mohawk people who have like-minded pursuits.”
Kaiahtenhtas Thompson (she/her) is an Akwesasne, Wolf Clan-based beadwork artist whose intricate pieces tell stories rooted in Kanien'kehá:ka culture and the natural world. Born in Cornwall, Ontario, Thompson creates complex, image-rich works using beads, porcupine quills, white birch bark, black ash splint, cedar, sweetgrass, crystals, shells, and wool. Her signature "basket weave" technique— developed self-taught while working beside master basket maker Carrie Hill and drawing
on childhood memories of her grandmother weaving—transforms beads into threedimensional surfaces that echo woven splint, bridging beadwork and basketry traditions.
Thompson began beading at age six, taught by her mother, artist Marlana Thompson. At twenty-one, she expanded into quillwork through study with Akwesasne artists Keira Pyke and Justin Lazore. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Education in 2023.
Her beadwork has been recognized with ribbons at the Mohawk and Abenaki Art Market and Competition (2022, 2023), the Akwesasne Art Market and Juried Show (2023, 2024, 2025), the honor of beading the 2024 New York State Fair Indian Village Princess sash, and recieving a ribbon in 2025.
Currently, Thompson is a full-time Mohawk language teacher with the Massena School District, where she began as a My Brother's Keeper Mentor in 2024. As an educator, she cultivates skill, voice, and agency while honoring cultural protocols. She has led community workshops for learners ages 8 to 70, teaching everything from keychains to beaded purses.
Thompson is developing beaded-image children's books celebrating Kanien'kehá:ka language and art, and expanding her 2024 beaded vest, Fragments of Creation, into a full garment collection. During the residency, she will create her first children's Mohawk language book with fully beaded illustrations while deepening her connection to place and building community with fellow artists.
Crystal T. Henry is a contemporary Haudenosaunee/Anishinaabe artist based in Akwesasne on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation. Her artistic practice is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, where observation, repetition, and relationship to the natural world function as forms of knowledge carried across generations. She works primarily in two distinct forms—illustration and beadwork —each guided by its own process, purpose, and way of holding meaning.
Animals serve as both subject and structure in Henry’s work. Their forms become vessels for layered line, rhythm, and symbolism. Her visual
language draws upon Eastern Woodland floral motifs alongside design influences from Southwest pottery and Northwest Coast art. Working by hand with a mechanical pencil and Sakura Micron pens, she creates detailed illustrations that are later digitally refined and combined with photographs of her beadwork using Adobe Photoshop. This blending of hand-drawn imagery and digital process reflects a dialogue between tradition and contemporary practice.
Her beadwork employs traditional techniques using size 11, 13, and 15 seed and Delica beads, most often in the creation of earrings that translate cultural design into wearable form. Across both illustration and beadwork, Henry’s work reflects the ways Indigenous knowledge is carried—through pattern, repetition, land-based imagery, and creative practice as an act of remembering.
In addition to her visual art, Henry has dedicated more than a decade to Kanien’kehá:ka language learning and revitalization. She has participated in the Á:se Tsi Tewá:ton Adult Immersion Program, online Mohawk language courses, the SRMT Mohawk Language Teaching Certificate Program (interrupted by COVID-19), and community programs through AEDA and SRMT. She currently serves as a Digital Resource Developer with the Akwesasne Mohawk Board of Education’s Mohawk Language and Culture Department. Her ongoing language study informs her artistic practice, reinforcing the inseparable relationship between language, culture, and visual expression.
Henry holds an Associate of Fine Arts degree in 2-D Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design, and a Master of Arts in Teaching in Art Education from SUNY Oswego. She also pursued graduate studies in Native American Studies with an emphasis in Contemporary Native American Art at the University of California, Davis. Her artistic training includes photography, pottery, printmaking, weaving, silversmithing, and graphic design.
She has held museum and curatorial roles, including internships at the National Museum of the American Indian, and has worked with the R.C. Gorman Museum and the Native North
American Travelling College. Alongside her husband, artist Richard “Terry” Chrisjohn, she co-founded Chrisjohn Arts LLC, producing prints, jewelry, sculpture, and other works that bridge traditional knowledge with contemporary forms.
Kaia’tihtakhe (also referred to as Jackie Hall) is a Kanien’kehá:ka woman, and mother of seven children, whose focus is to make sure that our future generations can sustain themselves on ancestral territory. Jackie is an independent journalist and writer and her work has been published on sodalitenews.com, sharing-ourstories.com, and in Craigardan’s Gardan Journal. As an activist and educator, Jackie created a land-based language camp to steward and cultivate the land while reclaiming the Mohawk language and traditional practices. She leads by example in fighting the ongoing systemic oppression and environmental genocide which generations of Akwesasronon continue to face on tribal land.
JULY 17
Karla Greenleaf-MacEwan is a high school English teacher who writes, dances, plays percussion, and goes to protests. Inspired by jazz dance teacher Mickey Davidson at Wesleyan University, she danced and choreographed in New York City throughout her twenties. When her first child was two, she began the MFA program in fiction writing at Brooklyn College, and after having her second child, completed her degree. While raising her children, she has taught composition and fiction writing at Brooklyn College, Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Montclair State University; class, race, and gender studies at SUNY Empire State College; and GED/adult education in Newark, New Jersey. Her stories have been published in the Brooklyn Review, WomenArts Quarterly, and Local Knowledge, and have won honorable mentions from the Minnetonka Review and the Ledge Poetry and Fiction Magazine. Her novel Nineteen was a finalist for the 2018 Permafrost Book Prize in fiction.
Aminata A. Gueye is an honors graduate of Lehman College, where she double majored in Journalism and Africana Studies with a minor in English. Her writing explores the intersectionality of the Senegalese-American
identity, self-worth, and history. She has been published in Brittle Paper for her poem “Lessons from Thiaroye (after ‘Move’ by Lucille Clifton)” and has been published in the United Nations’ Africa Renewal magazine. As part of the Cave Canem NYC Regional workshop, she performed her poetry at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Aminata is a two-time recipient of the 2024 and 2025 Lehman Writing Prize for Poetry. Aminata is Craigardan’s 2026 JBL! Fellow.
Lucy Gibson is a chef based in Brooklyn and Southampton. She cooks relaxed, convivial meals inspired by European home-cooking, the Long Island coastline, and her family's southern heritage. Formerly, Lucy was the Executive Chef at Rockefeller Center's Jupiter, and the Sous Chef at King, considered one of New York's best restaurants by the NYTimes. A graduate of Brown University and the Culinary Institute of America, she has cooked at Chez Panisse and the American Academy in Rome.
JULY 24
Meaghan Lynch lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family. She is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. She spends her time between Brooklyn, the Adirondacks, and Ireland. Her career spans design, teaching and illustration. She has been a founding partner in a design firm, studio prospect for over a decade. Professionally, she has collaborated on award winning projects. As an illustrator, plants are the subject of her art. She taught undergraduate and graduate courses at various universities in the US and abroad. While establishing her design practice and teaching, she became interested in the natural world-and plants specifically- not only as her material palette, but as worthy of individual consideration in their own right. This led her to study Botanical Illustration at New York Botanical Gardens. Her cross-disciplinary career focuses on our connection to the natural world through careful examination and illustration of plants.
Erynn Richardson is a drawing-based artist working in Southern California. Her work explores memory, nature, and loss. Through drawing, she records the world as she experiences it; the shifting climate reshapes
the land, the slow erosion of time, and the way memory fades until it becomes a ghost.
Richardson earned her BA and MA in Painting from CSU Northridge and completed her MFA in Printmaking at CSU Long Beach. She is a professor of drawing, printmaking, and design at the College of the Desert.
JULY 31
Samantha McLelland is a Massachusettsbased visual artist and educator, whose current focus is primarily ceramics. She has a Master’s degree in Art Education and has taught public school at the elementary and middle school level, and currently teaches pottery to adults. Her ceramics have been published in Pottery Making Illustrated magazine; she has participated in several New England-area art shows; and she sells her work privately. In addition, she is an accomplished illustrator, and published Rosie’s Garden, written by Olivia Coates, in 2025 with EK Kids Publishing.
Her current body of work is inspired by Abstract Expressionism. Her pieces explore the expressive and emotive potential within ceramics by decentralizing form as the focus and instead showcasing color, texture, and balance, inviting the viewer to look deeply and find an emotional resonance within the work. The final result is fully abstract, yet warm and grounded.
AUGUST 7
Kimberly Divad is a first-generation HaitianAmerican writer/director and actress from Queens, New York, splitting her time between LA and NY.
Raised on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and R.L. Stine, Kimberly found early solace in worlds that embraced the macabre, the melancholic, and the beautifully strange.
Drawn to horror, very dark comedy (ok, not-sodark is fine too!) and surrealist storytelling, Kimberly is committed to creating space for Black and underrepresented voices within these genres where BIPOC characters exist beyond stereotype and shine in their complexity. Kimberly is Craigardan’s 2026 Trillium Fellow.
Her short films have screened at Oscars qualifying VC Fest, Outfest, Women of the Lens, and Newark International, and her scripts Thank Mother and A GAME earned Killer Shorts quarterfinalist and top 10 finalist honors. Her dystopian short W(HOLE), was a finalist for the 2024 Storytelling with Care grant sponsored by Caring across America and her feature Man of Her Dreams was a Top 25 finalist for Almanack Screenwriters 2025 October Colony. She is a 2026 Prelude Fellow, and a 2026 JFMS BIPOC Sci-Lab Fellow. She has directed music videos for “Iluka” and “Moxxy” and serves as a Sundance Collab community leader.
Carolyn M. Bardos is an artist based in Troy, New York, whose work over many years has embraced ceramics, writing, painting, acting, and book publishing. Currently, Bardos is preparing a new chapbook of poetry for publication. Many of the poems reflect the daily sights and sounds in the artist’s small urban neighborhood, the joy and humor as well as the cruelty and despair. While Bardos’s poet self sometimes disappears for months at a time, the painter will always show up for the ecstasy of pushing paint around on a canvas or a slab of wood, guided by intuition and the same ancient impulse that led a human ancestor some 70,000 years ago to start drawing on a cave wall. The resulting paintings are often raw, intense, rich in vibrant color, and occasionally vaguely figurative.
Cat Rigdon is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Dallas, Texas. She grew up on the island of Cyprus during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rigdon and her siblings sneak into ancient archeological sites such as Tomb of the Kings in Paphos and rummage through abandoned monasteries and hotels, sometimes under their parents’ supervision. These strong memories, along with the island’s strong folk art, naturalism, and archeological relevance is reflected in Rigdon’s work through her depictions of ancient funerary goods. Rigdon graduated from Texas State University in 2014 with a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art-Painting. After graduation, she moved to Dallas as a Decorative Arts Junior Specialist and Cataloger for Heritage Auctions. During her tenure with the auction house, Rigdon honed her understanding of object and material culture.
Rigdon received the inaugural Dorothy Antoinette LeSelle Travel Fellowship, the DeGolyer Award from the Dallas Museum of Art, the Award of Excellence from the LaughlinBeers Foundation, and was the Fair Director’s Pick for the 2021 edition of The Other Art FairDallas. She has shown work with Erin Cluley Gallery & Galleri Urbane in Dallas, MASS Gallery, and ICOSA in Austin, and has participated in New York Jewelry Week at Jewelry Arts Inc.
AUGUST 14
Liz Van Verth began her animation career creating network graphics at NBC Studios in NYC. Starting as a still graphic artist for Nightly News, she worked her way up to 3D animator for Dateline. Her first independent short and master's thesis, Par Avion, won awards and has been accepted into many film and animation festivals. Over the years, Liz has taught, worked as an Executive Director for a small non-profit arts organization, and developed animation programming at other higher education institutions. Alice, her most recent animation, has also been successful in the festival circuit. Liz is currently teaching at Kutztown University and working on a new short based on her grandfather that integrates 2D and 3D techniques.
Sarah K Williams is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of food, sculpture, and performance. She is the founder of the sculptural snack service Aesthetically Complex Pies, and director of Sprechgesang Institute, a research-based multi-genre artist collective. Recent collaborations and commissions include works for The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Museum of Food and Drink, The Ford Foundation, The ADAR Festival in Spain, Goethe-Institut, and Judson Church. Raised in Virginia and based in Brooklyn, she received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied experimental music at the Universität der Künste in Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has held residencies with NARS, Wave Hill, Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and the SharpeWalentas Studio Program. She is currently working on series of food-based orchestral compositions, as well as part two in a culinary series originally begun in at Ox-bow School of
Art called "Ruin your Dinner”. Sarah is a 2026 Craigardan Teaching Fellow.
Melissa Dickey is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Ordinary Entanglement, which received honors from the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2024. Originally from New Orleans, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at an independent high school in New England.
AUGUST 21
Ari Cordovero is a writer whose work traces intimate thresholds of transformation: girlhood and motherhood, inheritance and rupture, devotion and leaving. Across lyric essays and narrative nonfiction, she explores lineage, memory, and the body as both archive and instrument of survival. She grew up in the Rocky Mountain Southwest, in a landscape shaped by sagebrush, long silences, and a sense of distance that sharpened attention inward. Though geographically suburban, the terrain carried something older and elemental — a place where imagination thrived in the absence of noise.
She is currently at work on a memoir-in-essays that examines pregnancy, romantic disillusionment, and childhood through the lens of lineage: how patterns repeat, how cycles fracture, and how tenderness can be learned where it was once absent. The project resists spectacle and simple redemption arcs, instead holding moral ambiguity, intimacy, and the quiet mechanics of survival. Motherhood has clarified rather than softened her artistic commitment. Much of her work is written with her daughter in mind — not as audience, but as future witness. She writes toward a different inheritance: emotional fluency, honesty without performance, and a refusal to shrink complexity into something more comfortable. Her work appears in Pictura Journal, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Colorado mountains with her daughter, Goose.
Grace Fossett. Through clay and illustration Grace seeks to actively blur the historical boundaries between fine art and craft. By using traditional hand-building and surface design techniques they give their pots and sculptures depth and breadth by world building narratives through a trans non-binary lens.
Dealing in dreams and histories, real and imagined, Grace’s visual lexicon acts as a narrator, spiraling storyteller, and subject. Grace’s work is a playful yet emotionally charged exploration of gender, fantasy, and relationship with self— familial, platonic, and romantic. It conjures up a dream-like sense in their audience, blending fantasy and humor with poignant resonance.
Isabel Arévalo is a potter and printmaker based in Western Massachusetts. She holds a BA from Carleton College and has taught printmaking to youth, teens, and adults. She is currently an apprentice at Stonepool Pottery with Mark Shapiro. Her work seeks to make visible the hidden connections between the physical body, the natural world, and identity. She uses layering, transparency, the press, and the wheel to express concepts of multiplicity, simultaneity, and interconnectivity.
AUGUST 28
Claire Cohen is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor interested in classic literary themes such as death, love, grief, and childhood, as well as the ways in which these themes are evolving with the modern day. Her current work aims to elevate "romantasy" literature by exploring the sexual power dynamics inherent to it, while embracing the sense of creativity and play that has drawn readers to the genre. She is inspired by the outdoors, cooking, video games, and anime.
Viviana Jeon is a London-based Korean artist working primarily with hand-built clay and place-responsive processes. She completed her MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2025 and holds a BA in Ceramic Art & Design with a minor in Visual Communication Design at the Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Her practice explores clay as a relational material shaped through touch, repetition, and care-based making. She has participated in multiple group exhibitions across London, was a finalist for the London Sculpture Prize (2025), and took part in London Craft Week 2025. She has delivered an artist talk at the Korean Cultural Centre UK and has led abstract ceramics and performance-based workshops for university students at UCA Farnham, UK.
Mei Fung Chan is a Hong Kong born artist who often uses self-portraits to create complex narratives relating to contemporary Hong Kong culture. A printmaker by training, Mei studied at Bridgewater State University in 2012. She later graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in printmaking in 2017. She is a mother of two children and currently resides in New York State. Although she is living in New York, she often travels back to Hong Kong to visit her family and also to Beijing, Shanghai, to experience Chinese culture. She has been to South Africa, France, Italy (Rome and Venice), and Canada for artist residency programs.
CRAIGARDAN (krā gärden) is a RESIDENCY PROGRAM that supports artists and scholars from around the region and around the world. We bring people together for place-based and interdisciplinary learning; providing:
CREATIVE RESIDENCIES
PUBLIC COURSES
COMMUNITY FARM PROGRAMS that span diverse artistic and knowledge disciplines in order to foster:
CURIOSITY
INQUIRY
COLLABORATION
which generates positive social change through collective creativity.
CONTACT
CRAIGARDAN
www.craigardan.org info@craigardan.org 518.242.6535 9216 NYS Route 9N Elizabethtown, NY 12932
