Runner Up Artists
Each time we select an official Artist in Residence, we sift through many many (many) applications! And the amount of talent and determination we see is truly inspiring — we dearly wish we could take on more artists at a single time, but for the moment, we can only choose one primary Artist-in-Residence.
Hence, the Runner Up Artists … For each Official Resident we invite two Runner Up Artists to Cisco, based on how many votes they received from our panel and board. Each Runner Up comes to live and work in Cisco for a short stay, scheduled after the month-long stay of the primary Artist in Residence.
These are wildly talented folks who made the long journey through the applications, the voting process and video interviews — they’re so committed and we love having them!
Britany Gunderson
(Fall 2021)
Britany Gunderson received a BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her practice is often interdisciplinary, creating film and video work that uses material forms such as hand-cut paper, textile fabrics, and celluloid. Exploring ideas of personal non-fiction, her work expands on the idea of what a moving image can be. She has screened at venues internationally and received a Jury Award from the Milwaukee Film Festival.
Blythe Roberson
(Fall 2021)
Blythe Roberson is a comedy writer and the author of . Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Onion, Esquire, Kinfolk, Cosmopolitan, among others.
While in Cisco, Blythe will be working on an upcoming book about travel and public land in America, to be published by Harper Perennial in 2022.
Learn more about Blythe’s work .
Amanda Madden
(Spring 2021)
Amanda Madden is a nonbinary, queer, feminist filmmaker, artist and educator whose work explores evolutions of intimacy, identity, body, and connection. They utilize performance experimentation, and collaboration to explore these concepts and their fluidity. They are interested in using image and sound as material to manipulate time and memory, seek the unknown, gently disrupt consciousness, and in doing so, create space for new possibilities of being and connecting. Their work is about what they discover as they travel through and document inner and outer landscapes. It is rooted in their belief that video is a portal for breaking binaries, creating embodied experience, and perhaps even stepping towards collective healing – a way to see and be seen.
Learn more about Amanda’s work
Lucio Arellano
(Spring 2021)
Lucio Arellano is a filmmaker and visual artist from Rockford, Illinois who is interested in exploring the non-linear and personal relationships found between the concepts of time, tradition, memory, and family through combinations of expressive digital and analog media. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) in 2019 and during this time in the Film, Video, Animation and New Genres program, Arellano further explored the concepts of utility and illusion as they apply to non-fiction based media.
Check out more of Lucio’s work
Natasha Woods
(Spring 2021)
Natasha Woods was born in Iowa, and currently lives in Columbus, Ohio where she is in pursuit of her MFA at The Ohio State University. At the forefront of Woods' films lies an interest in the material and sensory qualities that moving image production makes possible. In her work, Woods aims to reclaim space on the screen by investigating microhistories and challenging conventions of storytelling.
Her work navigates the tension between the desire for human tenderness and the hopeful expectations of a better world. To underscore these possibilities, she explores themes that build upon landscapes, personal/familial ephemera, and found footage. Through the manipulation of appropriated artifacts and performance, Woods considers larger ideas concerned with nostalgia, trauma, and memory. To this end, she attempts to reposition canonical histories and traditions through a feminist lens, posing questions that grapple with how the subject senses comfort and belonging.
Amanda Monti
(Fall 2020)
Amanda Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet and translator currently based in Queens, New York. They use poetry, sound and divinatory practices to create spaces for connection, inter-species encounter and ecological inquiry. As a queer artist the work is particularly invested in possibilities of healing from destructive binaries and reconfigurations of kinship-models to include humans and more-than-humans.
Sadie bat Kalman
(Fall 2020)
From Sadie: “As an interdisciplinary artist I work with visual mediums, archives, and a variety of temporal actions that address somatic impulses. I also take poetic license and work with the heavy tomes of anthropological and semiotic theory. My work swirls unpredictably around contemporary and speculative questions of autism and schizophrenia, decolonialism and anticapitalism, gender and sexuality, and spirituality. My practice is as much informed by my social position as a disabled jewish trans woman advocating for self-reliance as it is a defiance to such labels.
I am an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts candidate at Goddard College, I sit quietly in the stolen Tslagi (Cherokee) mountains of what is now Western North Carolina, and I aspire to start a garden of only Jade plants.
“
Morgan Street (Spring 2020)
Morgan Street is a Los Angeles-based designer, artist, educator, project manager and fabricator.
Embracing overlapping mediums and disciplines, Morgan makes objects and experiences that reference traditional craft methods, natural landscapes and textures, personal utility, memories of escape and a reverence for the mysteries of the organic world.
Kate Laster (Spring 2020)
Kate Laster is an interdisciplinary artist. Born in Anchorage and raised all over Alaska from Utqiagvik to Juneau, a sense of place is tethered to her practice.
She has shown her work in California, Washington, New Mexico, Vermont, Alaska and Pennsylvania as well as internationally in Berlin and Osaka.
Collaboration is an essential heartbeat to Laster’s practice. She has worked with Woosh Kinaadeiyí, the SF Poster Syndicate, Palace of Trash, Resolana, and with her collaborator, Steph Kudisch as Hevra Kadisha (חֶבְרָה קַדִישָא).
Laster also currently teaches Collaborative Printmaking at the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club through City Studio, works for SFAI’s Public Education department.
Soren Hope (Fall 2019)
Soren is a New York based artist primarily working in drawing and oil painting. During her three week stay she made numerous drawings of the landscape surrounding the residency space, portraits of many locals & an in-depth study of the chickens.
Paolo Wellman (Fall 2019)
Paulo Wellman is an installation and sculpture artist based in Denver, Colorado. He brings alive the dormant properties of space to energize the interactions of the participants with the surroundings and with each other using both natural materials and fabricated objects. Magical settings, public flow and heightened reality are the hallmarks of Paulo's art.
Paulo has created work throughout the United States, New Zealand and Italy for The Museum of Outdoor Arts, Burning Man, and the Apogaea festival. He has also been the head of operations for Hanzon Studios since 2015 under the guidance of Lonnie Hanzon. Clients include Neiman Marcus, The Houston Zoo, and the City of Denver.