Allie Hankins

Congratulations to the ten selected artist and writers for the 2022 Emerging Artist and Writers Residency! This year marks the first Emerging Writers component to the annual Emerging Artist Residency, and all residents will receive a month of lodging and stipends in October 2022. We can’t wait to have them at Fort Worden and learn more about their work. Stay tuned for podcasts and updates in the Fall. A huge thank you to all the applicants and jurors for their hard work throughout this process. Read more about the finalists and jurors below.

Emerging Artist Residents

Hexe Fey

An interdisciplinary indigenous transgender digital storyteller, movement and contemporary dance student, and community harm reduction worker; Hexe Fey uses interactive fiction and nonlinear narrative along with glitch art to communicate vignettes of queer experience, migration, human, nonhuman and technology relations, and ancestral teachings. Hexe is the author of ‘Cursed Task’, an interactive fiction game about the struggle of writing artist bios.

Spencer Garland

Spencer Garland is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher operating in Portland, Oregon. His practice encompasses filmmaking, video game development, and social work-all of which Garland brings his unique vision of new Black narratives to life. His greatest accomplishment is the creation of BRENDA ARTS. Named after his late mother, BRENDA is a media company that integrates the ideas of BIPOC youth into every project via their after-school programming.  BRENDA ARTS’ goal is to create an outlet for a new Black artistic expression and boost the voices of marginalized groups. BRENDA ARTS has expanded into the new media space with BRENDA LAB, an interactive web series about Black art and culture made in collaboration with the Portland Art Museum, and Quantum Phantom Basketball, a basketball adventure video game currently in development for Panic Inc.’s Playdate console.

Allie Hankins

Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and maker who recently performed in a dream wherein she announced “Today I am Truit” before jumping into a pool. The next day in waking life she learned that ‘truit’ is a word used by the lucid dreaming community to mean ‘trout’. In waking life, Allie is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt, and in 2013 she co-founded Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com.

Josephine Lee

Informed by a lifetime of movement through the United States, Canada, and South Korea, Josephine Lee’s interdisciplinary practice addresses the psychic violence of cultural assimilation and naturalization through migration, alongside issues of ecological and racial justice within technology. Lee received an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons, and is currently receiving a practice-based PhD in Contemporary Arts from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Lee has exhibited in Canada and the United States, and is a recipient of funding and awards from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Vera G. Sculpture Award, Oscar Kolin MFA Fellowship, American Craft Council, and College of Arts Association. Lee resides and works on the unceded and occupied ancestral and traditional lands of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

maximiliano

mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist exploring a Black reclamation rococo multimedia mythos of themes & concepts of multiplicity & fluidity & race, blackness, pleasure, desirability, innocence, & imagination; digitally, physically, & communally. A generative practice of ideation & visualization; multimedia, embodied mythos & narratives – as changing the past, present, future. Expressed as self portrait, performance, installation, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, sound, movement, fabrique trapresties, collaboration, publications, body, objects, & choreography; to transform space; echoing frequencies into & through the viewer experiencing the ineffable, chthonic, profane & pleasurable. A varied & research based practice straddling mythologies, eschaton, cosmology, internet creations, Glitch Feminism, & Black nihilistic futures. ritual.

 Christian Vistan

Christian Vistan is an artist and curator originally from the peninsula now known as Bataan, Philippines, currently living and working in Vancouver and Delta, British Columbia on xwməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Sc̓əwaθn Məsteyəxʷ, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ territories. In their artworks, they translate embodied experiences of distance and diaspora into hybrid forms that fold together elements and processes that involve memory, place, poetry, and abstraction. They are particularly interested in working with water as a material in painting and in personal, familial, and migrant histories. They make paintings, texts, and exhibitions, and often collaborate with other artists, writers, and curators. Their artwork and curatorial projects have been presented in galleries in Canada, US and the Philippines. They received their BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017. With Aubin Kwon, they run dreams comma delta, a room for artist projects and exhibitions located inside Vistan’s family home in Delta, BC.

Emerging Artist Residency Jurors

Kristan Kennedy

Emerging Writers Residents

Frank Abe

Frank Abe has worked to reframe the public’s understanding of the WW2 incarceration of Japanese Americans ever since helping create the first Day of Remembrance for the camps in the campaign for redress and reparations. He is co-author of a new graphic novel, “WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” (Chin Music Press, 2021) and wrote and directed the award-winning documentary “Conscience and the Constitution” (PBS, 2000) on the largest organized resistance to the camps. He won an American Book Award as co-editor of “JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy” (University of Washington Press, 2018) and is currently co-editing a new anthology of camp literature for Penguin Classics. For his Centrum residency he will be working on a project to to bring those stories to the stage. He’s contributed to Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, The Bloomsbury Review, and others, and is a past attendee of the Port Townsend Writers Conference. He blogs at Resisters.com.

Alyssa Graybeal

Alyssa Graybeal (she/her) is a queer writer and cartoonist whose work explores chronic illness and disability. In particular, she is fascinated by questions of creativity and entrepreneurship, and how navigating the world in a disabled body increases creative capacity. Her first memoir, Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World, explores the emotional landscape of connective tissue disorders Ehlers-Danlos and Marfan syndromes. This book won the 2020 Red Hen Press Nonfiction Book Award and will be released in spring 2023. She lives in Astoria, Oregon.

Christi Krug

Christi Krug (she/her) experienced invisibility as a child in foster care, and today helps writers of all ages to feel seen. In poetry, memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction, she honors the inner human experience. She blends modalities as a poet, presenter, visual artist, outdoor enthusiast, and yoga teacher, and is the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough. A Pushcart nominee for poetry, she has performed in vineyards, libraries, ballrooms, Portland’s Alberta Rose Theater, Waterstone Gallery, and Yosemite National Park. She served as Creative Resident for North Cascades Institute in 2019. Recent writing has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Kosmos Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Nightingale & Sparrow, Nat. Brut, Griffel, The Good Life Review, and The Sun. For 25 years, she has been teaching writers at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington and continues to do so virtually after a recent move to the Oregon Coast.

Ari L Mokdad

Ari L Mokdad is a Detroit-born poet, choreographer, dancer, and performance artist. She is a first-generation American and daughter of Lebanese immigrants. Ari graduated from Grand Valley State University with a BA in Dance, English, and Writing. She received an MA in English from Wayne State University and is currently completing her MFA at Warren Wilson College. Ari’s creative work coalesces around nature, identity, place, and embodiment. She is an active naturalist and maintains an apiary, greenhouse, and heirloom garden. Ari lives with her partner in Northern Michigan on the ancestral and unceded land of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Pottawatomie people, The People of the Three Fires.

Emerging Writers Residency Jurors

Gary Copeland Lilley (Artistic Curator, Writers Conference) is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman’s Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He earned his MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Creative Writers. Lilley is a veteran of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear submarine force. He is originally from North Carolina and now lives, writes, performs, and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. A founding member of The Black Rooster poetry collective, he is published in numerous anthologies and journals. He is a Cave Canem fellow. He can usually be found with a guitar strapped around him.

George Marie (Program Manager for Writing) joined Centrum in 2017. She has a background in fundraising and managing literary programs for small-press publishers and nonprofits. She holds bachelor degrees in both English Literature and Cultural Studies from Marylhurst University. She is a Ford Opportunity Scholar and the recipient of the Jackie Mosier Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, Dismember, was published by Bedouin Books in 2012. She currently runs Westering Press with her partner in Port Townsend, WA.