Artists in Residency
Benedetti Teaching Artist Residency
The Benedetti Teaching Artist Residency is a semester-long fellowship offered by MOSAIC and MCLA’s arts programs. Visiting artists—across visual art, music, writing, and performance—teach courses while developing a major project. The residency culminates in a public exhibition, performance, or event, and includes workshops and community programs. Each artist mentors a student assistant, bringing new creative perspectives and supporting diversity, equity, access, and inclusion on campus and in the community.
This residency is funded by a generous bequest from the estate of Alma Benedetti ’37. A beloved North Adams art teacher and life-long advocate and friend of the College, Alma Benedetti inspired generations of children with her keen sense of color, composition, and design.
2027 Benedetti Artist in Residence
Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet, interdisciplinary practitioner, and project director. Her second collection, Painstar, Starline, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. The collection engages frequency, synesthesia, and counter-archival modes to translate legacies of pain into navigational systems of wounds and light. Her debut collection, A Stone's Throw from C R A Y (New American Press), received the New American Prize and considers modulated forms of lucidity: a generative, anguished, and unruly perception that counters an anti-Black world.
Alexander earned a Bachelor of Arts from New York University, where she received the Herbert Rubin Prize in Poetry, and a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. Other honors include the 49th Parallel Award, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and the Breakwater Peseroff Prize. Her work has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, and other literary journals.
A committed arts organizer and collaborator, Alexander is cofounder of Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine, where she served as the Founding Director of Interdisciplinary Arts. She has also served as a Poet in Residence for the Chicago Poetry Center and as a Teaching Artist and Interdisciplinary Humanities Scholar for the Poetry Foundation, Illinois Humanities, and Chicago High School for the Arts. Her interdisciplinary practice brings poetry into conversation with moving image, sound, performance, and collaborative research, using artistic experimentation to explore perception, memory, and collective experience.
Previous Artists in Residence
Ngoc-Tran Vu
Ngoc-Tran Vu is a Vietnamese-American multimedia visual artist and cultural organizer, celebrated for her deeply socially engaged practice that melds various artistic mediums with community activism. Residing in the Dorchester community of Boston where she was raised, Tran is devoted to interlacing stories of migration, displacement, and resilience into her artistic and cultural endeavors.
Her artistic repertoire spans photography, painting, sculpture, and installation—each medium selected to best resonate and engage audiences with intentionality. Tran’s creations are immersive experiences, often sparking profound discourse on diasporas, memories, and rituals within the broader contexts of social justice and healing.
Rudy Ramirez
Rudy Ramirez is a director, writer, and teaching artist focused on developing new work and emerging artists. They have collaborated with theaters and institutions nationwide and are the founding artistic director of Avante Theatre Project and associate artistic director of The VORTEX in Austin, Texas, where they were named Best Director of 2017 by the Austin Chronicle and received multiple B. Iden Payne Awards. Ramirez holds an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Sunny Allis (they/them) is a trans nonbinary multidisciplinary artist whose intuitive, embodied work celebrates transformation, play, and the expansive possibilities of the queer/trans body. Their projects emphasize community and storytelling across media, including a bilingual children’s book, Hooray, What A Day!/¡Viva, Qué Día!, and a forthcoming inclusive kids TV series, All Together Now!. Sunny holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has created interactive public art installations nationwide, and their award-winning animations have been recognized internationally.
WANG Chen (b. 1991) is an interdisciplinary artist who holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and they have received numerous fellowships and residencies, including NYFA and MacDowell. Working across drawing, animation, sculpture, performance, and video, WANG creates immersive dreamscapes that explore power, identity, and uncertainty, most recently in the solo exhibition In the Woods at the Roswell Museum.
Rudy Ramirez is a director, writer and teaching artist specializing in the development of new work and new artists. They have directed and developed work for a number of organizations around the country, including Colby College, Contemporary American Theater Festival, The Lark, Latino Theater Company, Lexington Children’s Theater, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, National Queer Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, New York University, Octopus Theatricals, The Playwrights’ Center, Red Bull Theatre, The San Antonio Public, Shrewd Productions, Sky Candy Aerial Arts, Southwestern University, Teatro Audaz, Teatro Vivo, Signature Theatre, and the University of Texas at Austin. They are the founding Artistic Director of Avante Theatre Project and Associate Artistic Director of The VORTEX in Austin, TX, where they were named Best Director of 2017 in the Austin Chronicle Readers Poll and where they won 10 B. Iden Payne Awards for their work in directing, acting and music composition. They were finalists for the NNPN Director’s Fellowship and the TCG Alan Schneider Award. They have an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA in Directing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Conrad Egyir (b. 1989, Ghana; lives and works in Detroit) holds an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work, included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum, and Grand Rapids Art Museum, explores contemporary American culture, biblical parables, and Ashanti iconography. Monumental and often satirical, his paintings blend Pop Art and history painting, using diverse materials such as oil, acrylic, glitter, Plexiglas, wood, and found fabrics. Egyir’s work is in major collections including the Detroit Institute of Art, Perez Museum, and Cranbrook Art Museum.
Sherwin Rio (Brooklyn/San Francisco) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work addresses colonization, historical amnesia, and intergenerational storytelling through a Filipinx-American lens. Working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, and audio, he has exhibited internationally, with work held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Rio has received numerous awards and fellowships, completed residencies nationwide, and holds a dual MFA/MA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from the University of Florida.
Joshua Ross (b. 1992, Indianapolis, Indiana) is an artist whose research-based, multidisciplinary practice investigates how institutional, bodily, and spatial structures shape perception. He holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from the Herron School of Art, and his work has been exhibited at venues including the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Queens LA, and Human Resources Los Angeles.
Genevieve Gaignard is a Los Angeles–based artist working in photographic self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation to explore race, femininity, class, and intersectional identity. Using her own body as a site of inquiry, she examines themes of visibility, belonging, and “passing,” blending humor, persona, and popular culture influenced by music, kitsch, drag, and selfie aesthetics. Gaignard earned her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, has exhibited widely across the United States, and her work is featured in major publications and museum collections nationwide.