CURRENT - SPRING 2025

CLAUDIA HAUSFELD

Reykjavík, Iceland - Photography, Printing, Writing - 2nd floor studio

Claudia Hausfeld, born in East Berlin, GDR, studied photography at the Zürich University of the Arts from 2004-2006 and visual art at the Iceland Art University from 2010-2012. She has been living in Iceland since 2010. In her work, she is primarily concerned with photography and its relationship to reality.  Claudia has been a board member of several artist run initiatives in Iceland, Denmark and Switzerland, among them the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík. She has exhibited widely in Iceland and elsewhere, and recently resigned from her 7-year position as photolab workshop manager of the Iceland Art University. During her time at LHÍ, she reconfigured and expanded the darkroom of the lab and has taught countless courses in experimental photography. She lives and works in Reykjavík. claudiahausfeld.com

SIMON PETEPIECE

Montréal, Québec, Canada - Sculpture, Drawing, Painting - 3rd floor studio

Simon Petepiece is a self-taught artist living in Montreal, QC. Working directly with construction materials and processes, his practice explores how architectural spaces reflect and manifest our cultural beliefs. Creating objects that exist between sculpture and two-dimensional media, he uses ubiquitous materials like drywall and steel studs as both symbolic elements and substrate for drawing and painting. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal (2024) and Espace Maurice, Montreal (2023). His work can be found in the City of Ottawa Art Collection and he holds a Master’s degree in architecture from Carleton University (2018). simonpetepiece.com

MISHA RAI

India / Sewanee, TN - Fiction - writing studio

Misha Rai is Contributing Editor of the Kenyon Review and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South. Her prose has been supported by the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. misharai.com

WINTER 2025

CARA DESPAIN

Miami, Florida - 2nd floor studio

Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sound, sculpture, photography and installation addressing issues of land use/ownership, climate change, visualizing the Anthropocene and the persistent problematic dimensions of frontierism and their impacts on eco- and social systems. She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and currently lives in Miami, Florida and works between the two. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). She was selected for a 2021 Harpo Foundation Award, and in 2021 she completed her first permanent public art commission for the Underline with Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. She was also a finalist for the Creative Capital award in 2021, and participated in a fieldwork mentorship program with Southeast Arts and Fieldscreen International which was supported by a grant from the Australian Government. Her work is included in the Rubell Family and Scholl Collections, as well as the New Mexico State University Art Museum, State of Utah, Salt Lake County, Miami-Dade County and Miami International Airport art collections. Recent solo exhibitions include FROM DUST at the Southern Utah Museum of Art; In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah; Specter at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and Specter New Mexico at New Mexico State University Art Museum in Las Cruces, NM. Despain’s work has been featured in numerous publications such as The Guardian, Hyperallergic.com, Thirdtext.org, The Art Newspaper, Sculpture Magazine. A short documentary about her and her work aired on Art Loft, WPBT and PBS and screened at the Miami International Film Festival (2016). caradespain.com

SOREN HOPE

New Haven, Connecticut - 3rd floor studio

Soren Hope paints the body as a site of uncertainty. Themes of swapping, probing, and the fallibility of embodiment play out between the figures and within the surface of the paint. In their ongoing body of work, costumes, pranks, double meanings, and incidental resemblances test the trustworthiness of perception. Born in Long Island, New York, Soren is currently based in New Haven, CT. Soren holds a BA in Studio Art from Carleton College and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art. They exhibited their first solo show in 2018 at Duck Creek in the Springs, NY, and have shown work with Perrotin, Yve Yang, Spurs, and in Expo Chicago with Eric Firestone Gallery. Soren has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Low Season Artist Projects. sorenhope.com

CHRIS TOWNSEND

Antwerp, Belgium - writing studio

Christopher Townsend is a writer and curator specialising in twentieth century and contemporary art. His particular project is establishing relationships between fine and art and other forms of culture, notably writing and the moving image. He examines the way in which artists corrode the boundaries between media, particularly within modernism, or use new technologies to extend the analysis of art’s languages and the boundaries of subjective experience within film, photography and performance. His books include the first ever monograph on the American photographer, Francesca Woodman and studies of the American video artist Bill Viola and the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Recently a professor in the University of London, his scholarly publications have concentrated on the activity of the European modernist avant-garde’s exploration of intermediality and simultaneity, and its relationship to history, in the 1910s and 1920s, including studies of Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, Henri-Martin Barzun and Ricciotto Canudo. He recently completed a major project with the Tate on Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound (1914). His exhibitions include Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion, (Barbican Art Gallery, 2002) and To Become Like Music (Mummery and Schnelle, 2008). Before entering academia he was a prolific freelance writer and editor on the arts, editor of the photography magazine Hotshoe, and co-producer of the BAFTA nominated Channel 4 arts documentary Vile Bodies (1998). He is now working on a book on the imagination of the Renaissance in the painting and films of the artist Derek Jarman. He is a Senior Research Fellow of the Henry Moore Institute, and recipient of the H.D. Fellowship in American Literature from the Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2019-20. royalholloway.academia.edu/ChristopherTownsend