On Saturday, November 8, 2025 Elizabeth Castaldo (@ecastaldo_artandbooks) completed her two-week Print+New Media residency with us!

Elizabeth Castaldo is a New York based artist, printmaker, and bookbinder. Working with collage, drawing, and printmaking she creates visually abundant works on paper and artist’s books. Her works reflecting on femininity, sexuality, and nature explore pattern as abundance, and the body as a site of action. She was a 2024 Art-in-Ed Workspace Resident at Women’s Studio Workshop and has completed residencies at Proyecto ‘Ace in Buenos Aires Argentina, Arquetopia in Oaxaca Mexico, the Center for Book Arts, NYC and Printmaker’s Open Forum, Oxford PA. In 2023, her work was included in an illustrated edition of The Awakening by Kate Chopin published by Kasini House and Kolaj. Her work has been exhibited internationally including with Peep Space, Proyecto ‘Ace, Saint-Paul de Mausole at Saint-Rémy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Empty Set Gallery, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Center for Book Arts, and Saint Joseph’s College. She teaches printmaking and book arts at Parsons School of Design and the Center for Book Arts. Castaldo received her MFA from SCAD Atlanta where she was a Dean’s Fellow in Printmaking and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Her work is held in many private and institutional collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, SCAD, The University of Alberta, Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University and others.

During the first week of her residency, Elizabeth designed floral photo collages which she printed using digital and screen printing methods. Then, she explored the capabilities of the laser cutter, removing the background and cutting away hand-written text.

“During the second week I began working on an artist book, something I initially thought was unrealistic to accomplish in the amount of time I had. Being open to using digital printing made it possible. The book has dozens of combinations of layered photos, printed patterns and cut paper made on a variety of different papers. The limited amount of time meant I had to make decisions relatively quickly about how to pair and combine the many different components, intuitively pairing the pieces I thought worked together, to create overlapping layers of photo, silkscreen printed patterns and cut paper that reveals small glimpses of the pages/layers before and after each page. Created during a whirlwind of a residency, mostly in the middle of the night, rather than sleeping, but imagining relationships between blossoming florals, the body, and repetition of pattern overlapping pattern and the cutting through as ways to turn them inside out and create through lines of connection between images, the resulting book is called Dream Palace… This project was very generative for me, helping me envision combinations and possibilities that I had not considered before. This will become an edition of 10 books in itself, but I also see this as seeds for other future book projects as well as the installation work I had originally planned to make.

My experience at the iea residency has been very meaningful to me. The whole vibe and atmosphere of print/expanded media and the school of art in general is wonderful. It feels like this is a place where art is being made all the time and experimentation and interdisciplinary work is encouraged. It felt energizing to spend time in this type of learning and making environment. Residencies like this, that provide funding, space, materials and housing, are incredibly valuable for artists, allowing us to freely focus and experiment in ways that are essential for moving our work forward. I’m so grateful for the time and space to work through these ideas, try new approaches and techniques in my work, and the supportive iea staff, their guidance and expertise.”

If you missed Elizabeth’s artist talk, make sure you check it out and others on the iea YouTube channel here!

Dream Palace, 2025

Dream Palace detail.

Elizabeth cutting screen printed floral collages using Expanded Media’s Epilog Laser.

Cutting paper before using the Sterling Digibinder to perfect bind Dream Palace.