Writer-in-Residence
Writing Space’s Writer-in-Residence program offers artists and designers dedicated time to develop and receive feedback on a writing project.
The project may take any form, including creative, critical, or history.
Residencies typically last four months.
The current term runs May-August 2026.
Applications for the Autumn (September-December) 2026 term will open in June.
Alden Burke
is a Chicago-based writer and artist working between poetic prose, creative research, and sculptural experiments. Plumbing bodily knowledge and family archive, Alden is prone to fixate on the shape of their mouth, to write about what the mouth is capable of, to cast their mouth in metal, discovering their set of teeth fits square in the palm of their hand.
During this residency, they are working on their first full-length manuscript, Mouth Piece, a revisionist history of their maternal lineage, using braided essays of speculative fiction, oral family histories, and theoretical research to reclaim language from the silence and terror of systemic abuse.
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Unhinged, cast pewter, 2024
Sara Duell
uses rehearsal as a design method for making printed matter, garments, and projections to stage and practice radical political imaginations for a more just future.
She's currently working on Exit Strategies, a series of collaborative workshops that practice ways of getting out of our heads and into action. During the residency, she will be writing up a publication that presents the collected findings from these workshops.
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Exit Strategies Workshop One: Experiencing Garments for and in Movement with Curious Orange. Photo: Jeanette Spicer jspicerphoto.com
Lauren Edwards
is a photographer looking at the ways bodies and psychologies interact with and move through photographs.
During this residency, she will be working on a book project that uses writing and photography to better understand the physical, logical, and unpredictable relationships to legacy and reenacting in the pursuit of a familiar unknown.
Rachel Foullon
is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. For two decades she maintained a studio practice making and exhibiting sculpture. Since 2020, that skillset has transferred over into fiction writing in rewarding and unexpected ways that carry into and enliven the reader’s experience. Professionally, she helps lead Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions.
During the residency, Rachel will refine her debut novel, Cafe So Weird, a literary fiction and front row seat to Gen ‘Xennial’'s skeptical coming-of-age at the turn of the millennium as culture shifted from analog to digital. The story is told through the eyes of an undergraduate sculpture student who is holding tightly to the richness of the material world, while leaping through the young Internet's portal into the enchanted unknown.
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Photo: Erika Carlson / 1999
Make it stand out
is a researcher, visual artist and writer whose work bridges photography, Black studies, and theological reflection, with particular attention to aesthetics and Black sacred thought. His practice treats slow attention and calibrated image-making as methods for understanding how sacred form unfolds over time.
During the residency, Wilson will advance a manuscript on the ethics of form. The project reframes the characterstic of plasticity as a sacred and ethical modality that reframes modernist theories around the history and perceptions of form. Alongside the writing, he will continue a correlated photographic study of Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, producing calibrated film images across visibile and invisible spectra that will culminate in large-format prints.
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Kala, 2025, Lightjet on silver gelatin, 60” x 100”