Summer - Fall 2026 Artists-in-Residence

Philip Gresham is a printmaker living and working in Rocheport, MO. He completed his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Missouri Columbia. He is an active member of the printmaking community and currently serves as exhibitions committee chair for the Southern Graphics Council International.

Ali Santana is a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn, NY, who draws inspiration from community, nature, ritual, ancient technology and Hip Hop culture. His work combines time-based media, rhythmic storytelling and emerging technology to create immersive experiences that explore history, identity and Black abstract improvisational traditions. Santana currently works across video, sound, sculpture, live performance and installation.

Ali has exhibited at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (IDFA) DocLab, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) and Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. Santana has performed at Brooklyn Museum, Mana Contemporary and Roulette Intermedium.

Ali is faculty at NYU Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program/Interactive Media Arts Program and recognized for educational collaborations with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Apple Inc. He’s a member of Onassis ONX Studio and The Santana Project, a family of artists spanning generations and disciplines.

Mehdi Darvishi is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans from traditional printmaking and wooden sculptures to interactive paintings and site-specific installations. He was born in the summer of 1988, coinciding with the Iran – Iraq peace resolution. In his war-stricken hometown, Mehdi grew up unexposed to art galleries and museums. In 2007 he left home to earn a BFA in Painting at the University of Tehran. After receiving his degree in 2011, his interest in printmaking grew into a life’s pursuit. He has since exhibited in over 30 countries and has participated in more than three hundred global exhibitions, competitions, residencies, and as a visiting artist. His works have been widely collected by museums such as the China Printmaking Museum, the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Art, Jyvaskyla
Museum of Fine Arts, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and the US Library of Congress.

He has served as a visiting artist at several renowned art institutions worldwide, including the New York Academy of Art, the University of British Columbia, the Katowice Academy of Art, and the University of Belgrade. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York–College of Staten Island. His accolades include the Grand Prix of the 9th BIECTR, Second Place at the Premio Jesús Núñez, Special Award at the Premio Leonardo Sciascia, the Southern Graphics Conference Fellowship, and the Pritzker Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago among other honors. He was also nominated for the prestigious Prix Mario Avati from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2023. He currently lives and works in New York City, where he serves as a Master Printer at MGC Community Print Studio at Powerhouse Arts.

Ranger Liu (they/them; b. 2000) is an interdisciplinary artist and astrophysicist interested in cross-applying the truth-making methodologies of science and art to bridge the gap between “objective” and “subjective” knowledge. Their creative practice repurposes abstract theory, such as math, physics, astronomy, and linguistics, to explore and communicate the lived experiences of human and posthuman subjects.

Ranger holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design and BA degrees in Astrophysics and Computer Science from Columbia University. They currently live and work in Seattle, Washington, where they moonlight as an astronomer searching for extraterrestrial communications. Their work has been exhibited and published nationally, including at CURRENTS New Media Festival, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, and the Ammerman Center Symposium on Arts and Technology. They have been awarded residencies from I-Park Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Peter Bullough Foundation.

Esmé Saccuccimorano (she/her, b. 1997) integrates multi-material approaches to explore the relationships between human perception, death and loss, sense of place, and how humans’ understanding of ‘function’ and ‘meaning’ has impacted the hierarchies into which we sort the natural world. In her work, abstracted characters from a personal visual lexicon teeter on the line between meaningful and decorative before coalescing into atmospheric narratives.

Saccuccimorano received her BFA and NYS K-12 Visual Art Teaching Certification from the Alfred University School of Art and Design in 2020, and has since shown domestically and internationally in numerous shows, including the 2nd International Printmaking Triennial in Hangzhou, China, and SPRING/BREAK 2023. She was the 2020 recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Patricia Kerr Ross Award, and the State University of New York’s Thayer Fellowship. Saccuccimorano currently resides in Ithaca, NY, where she bakes bread at Wide Awake Bakery, co-owns and curates for Show Pony Studio, and teaches at West End Ceramics.

Ryan Michael Shaw(all pronouns) is a nonbinary, Emmy Award-winning, audio focused, multimedia artist living in the Twin Cities. Ryan has been a musician for over 10 years specializing in electronic and rock, crafting songs that engage with retro-futurism, nostalgia, and the intoxicating effect of emotion. They graduated valedictorian from the Institute of Production and Recording in 2018.