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 September-December 2024.
Applications for the Summer (May-August) 2025 term will open in early March.
Liat Berdugo
is an artist and writer whose work investigates embodiment, labor, and militarization in relation to capitalism, technological utopianism, and the Middle East. She is an associate professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, and lives and works in Oakland, CA.
During this residency, Liat will work on an expansion of her 2023 project and artist book titled Seeing it for the Trees, which critically examines the role of forests in the formation and maintenance of Zionism as a settler-colonial project. In this work, Liat unpacks archival photographs from the Keren Kayemet L’Israel - Jewish National Fund, alongside personal family photos, to ask what a close reading of images can untangle about land, ecology, and nationalism. Central to this project is the question of how to make creative work as a parent, and how questions of family legacy become more urgent upon having a child.
_______________________________________
Video still from Seeing it for the Trees (Part I), 2023
Erin Elder
is an artist and writer using creative research methods to understand how people and landscapes shape one another. Whether designing a locals-led bus tour, testing an experimental commune, mounting an exhibition, or publishing a book, her projects work with a broad definition of art to bring audiences into a direct experience of particular places.
During the residency, Erin will refine the manuscript for an illustrated work of creative nonfiction, preparing it for publication. The book, Into the Folding Swell, takes place in the canyon country of southeast Utah amidst coal mines, military bases, Mormon settlements, National Parks, powerful rivers, enormous rock bodies and unpredictable weather. Accompanied by Erin's field drawings, each chapter overlays a place-based encounter with unfolding current events, mounting collective grief, and the much undiscussed considerations of childless women. The story connects black bears and cottonwoods and landforms of distinct places to broader stories of drought and development, prophecy and redemption, impact and obsolescence.
________________________________________
Empty Sign, 2023, gouache on paper, 11" x 14"
Sara Greenberger Rafferty
produces image-based works in paper, plastic, glass, metal, fabric, and video. Her work is driven by an ongoing examination of contemporary and mid-20th century visual culture and considers the ever-changing implications for photographic images in the digital era. She’s also into comedy.
During the residency, she is working on a book that chronicles images and image-objects that have been used, quoted, reproduced, and represented in her decades-long art career, which spans the dawn of the twenty-first century. In many cases, the pictures conjured – and their cultural significance and meanings – are vestiges, leftovers from a previous import. It’s a book about work, and caring about the world.
________________________________________
Magnifier I, 2023, Fused and kiln-formed glass, 51 1/2” x 27 1/2” x 1/8”
Allison Yasukawa
is an interdisciplinary maker, liberatory educator, and deep language nerd. She investigates asymmetries of power in language and interaction and examines crossings of various kinds, from the personal to the global.
During her residency, Allison will be working on a book of creative nonfiction about multilingualism and creative practice in US and Canadian art and design schools. This collection of essays brings together multiple voices, references, and forms to think beyond the monolingual-multilingual binary and explore language’s liberatory potential in the art/design classroom.
________________________________________
He COLLIDES against her., laser print, acrylic paint, gouache, highlighter, graphite, 57" x 90"