Centrum is pleased to announce its 3rd year of the Curator and Arts Worker Residency, a program founded to support the greater arts ecosystem and build connections. The program brings together 6 curators (or curatorial teams) and arts workers for a week at Centrum’s Fort Worden campus and provides lodging, honorariums, travel stipends, and moments of connection for residents to gather and discuss ideas pertinent to their field. Most importantly, the residency serves as a critical moment for rest, recharging, and launching new ideas in a field that is usually full of hustle and deadlines.
The Curator and Arts Worker residents are nominated by previous Centrum residents and reviewers. The 2024 Curator and Arts Worker Residents are:
Amanda Donnan
Amanda Donnan is a Seattle-based curator with twenty years of experience in non-profit art organizations. She was formerly Chief Curator & Director of Exhibitions at Frye Art Museum, where she oversaw the artistic program and organized more than thirty exhibitions between 2017 and 2024. Her projects at the Frye include the solo or two-person presentations Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Wrecked and Righteous (2024), duane linklater: mymothersside (2021; traveled to MCA Chicago and Berkeley Art Museum), Dress Codes: Ellen Lesperance and Diane Simpson (2019), and Tschabalala Self (2019), as well as group exhibitions Door to the Atmosphere (2022; co-curated with Srijon Chowdhury) and Group Therapy (2018). Previously Donnan was Curator at Seattle University’s Hedreen Gallery; Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where she was also part of the 2013 Carnegie International curatorial team; and Production Coordinator at Art21 in New York. She holds an MA in art history and criticism from Stony Brook University and dual BFA and BS degrees in visual arts and art education for museums from Pennsylvania State University.
Ella Ray
Ella Ray is a sister, friend, and an auntie based in Portland, Oregon. From 9 am to 5 pm she works as an arts writer and editor, art historian, and library worker. Through a critical writing and research practice guided by black feminist frameworks and homegrown archival methodologies, Ray seeks to honor black femme communication patterns and their corresponding visual and sonic representations. Ray is currently the Associate Editor of Variable West. Their essays, reviews, and research have been featured in Cult Classic Magazine, A Year In Black Art journal, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s website, accompanying exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum, lumber room, Oregon Contemporary and more.
Reuben Roqueñi
Reuben is a nationally respected arts administrator with over 20 years in progressive program development, management, artist-centric support systems and grantmaking experience. He is currently Executive Director at Portland Institute for Contemporary’s (PICA) whose programming supports the experiments of the most vital and provocative artists of our time. Previously, he was Director of Transformative Change Programs at Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, serving Indigenous artists across the US. Formerly, Reuben was Program Officer in the Performing Arts Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area, one the nation’s largest arts and culture funders; and he served as Grants Program Director at the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona. He received his BFA from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is a multi-media artist.
Sadaf Sadri
Sadaf Sadri is an Iranian new media artist based in Seattle. The focal point of their work revolves around the concept of interruption. Their interest in disruption lies in the void that emerges in the wake of the discontinuation of the established power systems. This void, they believe, offers a space to imagine alternative narratives that might otherwise remain unexplored. To translate their imaginations to a more palpable communicative form, they employ textile, video, AI and Mechatronics. Sadaf is one of the co-organizers of SPAM New Media Festival with Anna Skutley.
Anna Skutley
Anna Skutley is an independent curator and researcher currently based in Seattle. While pursuing her postgraduate education in the UK, she facilitated various URL and AFK projects for art organizations and festivals, exploring the possibilities of gaming, servers and digital archives as community art spaces. Her PhD research proposes feminist worlding as a methodology for digital curating, with a specific interest in the Digital Commons, feminist technologies and Feminist Science-Fiction writing. Anna is one of the co-organizers of SPAM New Media Festival with Sadaf Sadri.
Jo-ey Tang
Jo-ey Tang is an artist, writer, and curator who experiments with the formats of versions, repetitions, and iterations as an ongoing engagement with time and its potential. As an artist, he has exhibited at Kunsthalle Zürich; Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne; IAC - Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne / Rhône-Alpes. His writing on art has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, Paper Monument, and artforum.com, and for exhibitions and publications at Centre Pompidou, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Baxter Street / Camera Club of New York. As a cultural worker, his roles included curator at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Digital Community Manager at Denniston Hill; arts editor at n+1; Director of Exhibitions at Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design; and currently Director at KADIST San Francisco. His curatorial project since 2015, arms ache avid aeon: Nancy Brooks Brody / Joy Episalla / Zoe Leonard / Carrie Yamaoka: fierce pussy amplified, currently spans eight chapters as exhibitions and a book in collaboration with the founding members of the art collective fierce pussy, putting in relation individual art practices and collective work in an achronological approach. He has curated exhibitions internationally, including at Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Centre Pompidou, Paris; K11, Hong Kong, and Kim?, Riga, and forthcoming at Participant Inc., New York
Meghan Trainor
Meghan Elizabeth Trainor is a Seattle-based artist, writer, lecturer, performer and curator. Trainor's practice centers her scholarship in the throughlines between computer science, technology, and esoterica. She frames this through storytelling around bogs, logic and digital witchcraft, and the use and histories of electronics and electricity. Trainor is the Curator of the M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery at Seattle Central College. She is also the founder of Moss Art Space, a home gallery and performance venue started as a response to the pandemic. The ArtsWA Board of Commissioners has appointed her to the 2022 ArtsWA Curator Roster for a four year term. Her next residency & solo exhibition is at Captive Portal, Copenhagen in September 2024.