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 2025.
Applications for the Winter (January-April) 2026 term will open in early October.
Dana McCormick
trained and works as a pianist and composer. Her writing, fiction and nonfiction, explores community, surveillance, forgiveness, and food. She lives in Milwaukee.
During the residency, Dana will be writing a series of essays explicating the police department's relationship to and violence upon a suburban community. Through parsing court documents, exploring local history, conducting interviews, and soliciting personal narratives, the project will compel readers to track the connections between public policy, violence, history, and the criminal justice system, and then on to steps that can be taken to repair some of the damage inflicted on communities by police violence. The project, titled Community Labyrinth, is guided by hope that individuals can not only resist but transform the system; it will be accompanied by a first-person style website through which one travels as in a labyrinth.
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Community Labyrinth concept drawing, 2025
Olive Stefanski
makes sculptures, weavings and drawings that contemplate Jewish metaphysical ideas and create strong containers of hollow space, which allow that which has not yet become to emerge. In an era where spiritual malaise is commonplace, Olive contends with spiritual concerns in their studio in a practice of devotion, humility and continual softening through acts of repetition and nurturing.
What is Jewish Art and what are the possibilities for what Jewish Art can be or do? Olive will work on an artist book that includes writing and visual art inspired by failures, contradictions and edges revealed within their study of the ineffable in their studio practice. Any glimmers of lucidity found are offered back to others who are similarly searching at this threshold in history.
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Inscriptions of the Void (No 3). Olive Stefanski. Pen Drawing. 9" x 12", 2023.