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 January-April 2026.
Apply for the Summer (May-August) 2026 term here.
Laura Bernstein
Bernstein’s interdisciplinary practice incorporates pageantry, sculpture, stop-motion animation and installation to build theatrical characters and worlds that draw from the past–folktales, natural histories, and medieval illuminated manuscripts—to probe the present and imagine alternative futures. Her work aims to question how systems of classification shape behavior, how the observer and the observed, human and animal, are defined and redefined within the context of a rapidly changing climate.
During the residency, Laura will develop a script for a performance-lecture and animation that weaves together medieval fables about women and power. She will use speculative fiction to expand the inner lives of the characters featured within art historical objects such as ivory boxes, chalices, aquamanilia, and etchings. The project will also explore how these various reproductions of objects and works of art functioned like early memes, proliferating fantastical and entertaining narratives while revealing the fears, anxieties and beliefs of the time.
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Phyllis riding Aristotle, 2024, papier-mâché, paperclay, cardboard, acrylic paint, alcohol ink, fabric, ribbon, aluminum wire, wire mesh, steel pipes, wood, shards of mirrored glass, Selfie stick, iphone with stop-motion animation 3:10 (color, sound) 70 x 30 x 75 ins.
Tali Keren
is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker working across experimental documentary, performance, and installation. Her practice examines invisible mechanisms of empire, tracing how ideology materializes through law, infrastructure, and theology. Working with video, sound, archival research, and alternative mapping, she translates these systems into visual and narrative forms grounded in lived experience across human and more-than-human worlds alike. Rooted in collaboration, pedagogy, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, her work aims to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries.
During the residency, Tali will develop the script and narrative arc for Delta/Desal: A Border Ecology, a multi-channel video installation that traces the entangled histories of the Ciénega de Santa Clara and the Yuma Desalting Plant. Moving between archival sources, observational documentary, and non-human and inanimate characters, the work follows the emergence of the Ciénega as an unintended wetland formed from saline agricultural drainage in the wake of a 1970s cross-border salinity crisis. By linking these sites, the project stages the delta as a contested ecology shaped by settler-colonial mythmaking, geoengineering, and the techno-utopian futurism of 1970s infrastructure.