Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture (PMRCAA) will host its eighth annual residency program this year, which brings accomplished artists to Sisters from March through November. Twenty-eight writers, culture bearers and artists from around the US were selected by an outside committee.
The residency program is hosted on a working ranch where artists can immerse themselves in their work and research through access to studios, open spaces and a natural setting. As part of the open call process, applicants were invited to focus on the theme of Adaptation. All living things must respond to changing environments whether in milliseconds or millennia. What catalysts spark change in humankind and the world?
“I am so excited to welcome the next season of artists to The Ranch,” says PMRCAA’s Art Program Manager Esther Nooner, who started with The Ranch in August. “As an artist myself, I know firsthand the importance of a residency program that provides space and time to think and experiment.”
All participants selected for 2026 will develop work around this year’s central idea and will engage with the broader local region through different events. Events PMRCAA hosts throughout the year include workshops, lectures and open studios.The first event of the season will be the ever-popular Studio Tour, previously called ‘Open Studio’, on March 19 from 5-6:30pm. Event information and registration is available at roundhousefoundation.org/events.
2026 Residents
Visual Artists
Christine Adame (She/Her) – Lake Dallas, Texas
Christine Adame is an intermedia artist from Laredo, Texas. Her artwork is about heritage, informed by her mestiza identity. Her work resembles artifacts built from layered processes—including drawing, fibers, digital fabrication, book arts and printmaking.
Jessica Aquino (She/They) – Brooklyn, New York
Jessica Elena Aquino is a multidisciplinary artist exploring migration, relationship to land, memory and ancestral knowledge through weaving, printmaking, sculpture and installation. A first-generation Mexican American, they transform found materials into abstract narratives of memory, identity and belonging. Aquino is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Han Cao (She/Her) – Dallas, Texas
Han Cao is a self-taught fiber artist based in Dallas, Texas. Using hand embroidery on vintage photographs and postcards, she reimagines lost narratives through thread. Influenced by her Vietnamese upbringing, her art explores memory, identity and belonging.
Chidinma Dureke (She/Her) – Laurel, Maryland
Chidinma Dureke’s cross-cultural perspective characterizes her large-scale oil on canvas paintings and sculptural installations, which examine the liminal moments between two worlds and psychological spaces. Dureke was born in the United States and earned her MFA from The LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.
Nina Elder (She/Her) – Gardner, Colorado
Nina Elder is a visual artist, writer and educator. Inspired by geologic disturbance and resilience, Nina interprets planetary dynamics in constellation with social issues and personal narratives. She travels extensively and lives off the grid in Colorado.
Vanessa Freije (She/Her) – Burien, Washington
Vanessa Freije is a writer and an award-winning historian working across multiple genres. She is an associate professor of International Studies and History at the University of Washington and lives between Mexico City and Seattle. She’s currently working on her first novel.
K Ho (They/Them) – Minneapolis, Minnesota
K Ho is a writer and photographer from Vancouver, BC, unceded Coast Salish Territory. Their work has appeared in The Margins: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Canadian National Arts Centre and elsewhere. A graduate of the U of Minnesota’s MFA, K has received support from MacDowell, Tin House and others. They live in Minneapolis.
Artemis Herber (She/Her) – Owings Mills, Maryland
American-German artist, Artemis Herber has exhibited in the US, Germany, Greece, Italy, England, Portugal and Spain. Enriched with incorporated geological materials that are rooted in ancient natural myths, her hybrid configurations transform deep time narratives into the volatile conditions of our shared world through human impact.
Lynette K. Henderson (She/Her) – Chatsworth, California
Lynette K. Henderson is a multi-media artist exploring nature and the environment through painting, drawing, photography and mixed-media sculpture. Rooted in a passion for the natural world, her experiences in the upper Midwest fostered a lasting fascination with wildlife. Now in Los Angeles, she works with multiple related themes on aesthetic and conceptual levels.
Perri Lynch Howard (She/Her) – Twisp, Washington
Perri Lynch Howard is a multi-disciplinary artist investigating sense of place in a changing climate. Her installations transform scientific data and field recordings into immersive soundscapes that stir both intellect and emotion. As a Fulbright scholar and avid adventurer, Art + Science collaborations are a key tenet of her creative practice.
Christie Lower (She/Her) – Halfway, Oregon
Christie Lower is a self-taught fiber artist and educator based in Eastern Oregon where landscape and wildlife guide her creative practice. Using needle-felted wool, she creates sculptural wildlife pieces that explore memory, place and our emotional connection to the natural world. Her work balances realism with quiet storytelling, inviting viewers to slow down and look more closely. Christie is also the founder of Rustic Fiber Academy, where she teaches needle felting to students worldwide.
Mita Mahato (She/Her) – Seattle, Washington
Mita Mahato is an artist and poet whose work joins fragments of used and discarded materials in poetic experiments that dramatize ecosystemic survival against capitalism. Her books are Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing 2024) and In Between (Pleiades 2017) and her poetry comics can be found in PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah and other publications.
Simone Martin-Newberry (She/Her) – Los Angeles, California
Simone Martin-Newberry is an illustrator and essayist who centers black and bodies of color within color-rich environments and histories. Her work has been commissioned and featured by The New York Times, Emergence Magazine, Chronicle Books, Waxwing Journal and many others. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently works and lives on the road.
Liz Obert (She/Her) – Santa Fe, New Mexico
Liz Obert is a lens-based artist with a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Washington State University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Recently, she won the 1839 Award for Photographer of the Year in Still Life and received an honorable mention for Foto Slovo.
Julia Oldham (She/Her) – Eugene, Oregon
In her multi-channel video installations, Julia Oldham visualizes the uneasy collision of nature and technology in a fragile world. She creates immersive portraits of complex ecological systems through long-term, research-based examinations of natural landscapes and the human interventions that have shaped them.
Jessica Reisch (She/Her) – Brooklyn, New York
Jessica Reisch is a new media artist, designer and educator from New York. Emphasizing rhizomatic networked connections, her soundscapes and immersive installations draw on the use of highly sensitive microphones and microscopes in conjunction with transducer speakers and projections to engage with the surrounding environment.
Emily Robison (She/Her) – Swannanoa, North Carolina
Emily Robison is an award-winning spinner, knitter and weaver living in Asheville, North Carolina. Her research and writing has been published in Ply and Spin Off” magazines. Emily’s craft is shaped by place and cultural memory, grounded in the belief that we cannot move forward without fully understanding where we have been.
li rothrock (She/Her) – Phoenix, Arizona
li rothrock investigates inheritance across diaspora and the generative capacities of invasive species using photo, video and sculpture. Solo shows include long violence dreamt me west, Northlight Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona (2025) and the shape of an absence, Eric Fischl Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona (2024). She received her MFA at Arizona State University.
Vic Spindler-Fox (They/Them) – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Vic Spindler-Fox is a technologist and textile artist from East Tennessee, now making a home in the Rust Belt. They focus professionally on environmental field work, open-source software and documentation. In their artistic life, they make reclaimed and mended textiles rooted in place, exploring mourning and memory, queerness, ghosts and failure.
Raty Syka (They/She) – Santa Cruz, California
Raty Syka (UCSC Environmental Art & Social Practice MFA ‘24) is an interdisciplinary researcher, visual artist and educator interested in the interface between human and more-than-human worlds. Using comics, illustration and print media, Raty’s work engages broad public audiences around issues of climate change, agriculture and sustainability.
Forest Woodward (He/Him) –Missoula, Mondana
My practice is rooted in the immersion and movement of body and mind through landscape. Using the book form, analog photographic practices, written word and land-based installations, I work to explore questions around ideas of permanence, control and human relationship to the ecosystems we inhabit.
Jingyi Yang (She/Her) – Jersey City, New Jersey
Jingyi Yang is a textile artist and fashion designer from Inner Mongolia, now based in New York. Her practice explores how threads can hold emotion, distance and time, carrying traces of memory through material. She reimagines textiles as quiet spaces where material listens and remembers.
Writers
Dina Abdulhadi (She/They) – Brooklyn, New York
Dina Abdulhadi is a Palestinian writer and ex-scientist from the U.S. South. A 2024-2025 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow at The Poetry Project and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been published by Room, Reckoning, Breakwater Review, The Worcester Review, Brooklyn Poets, Mizna and Haymarket Books.
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion (He/Him) — Staten Island, New York
River 瑩瑩 Dandelion is a visionary writer, healing practitioner and facilitator. He writes to connect with the unseen and unspoken so we can feel and heal. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers, River is at work on his debut full-length poetry collection. The title poem won an AWP Kurt Brown Prize.
Donna Kaz (She/Her) – Blue Point, New York
Donna Kaz is a multi-genre writer, also known as the Guerrilla Girl, “Aphra Behn.” She is the author of UN/MASKED, Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour; and PUSH/PUSHBACK, 9 Steps to Make a Difference with Activism and Art. Kaz has received the Venus Theatre’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Yoko Ono Courage Award for the Arts.
Maxim Loskutoff (He/Him) – Missoula, Montana
Maxim Loskutoff is the award-winning author of Old King, Ruthie Fear and Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares and GQ. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.
Beth Piatote (She/Her) – Berkeley, California
Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce writer, playwright and scholar. She is author of The Beadworkers: Stories (2019); distant water: poems (2026); and the play, Antíkoni, as well as a scholarly monograph and many other works. She is enrolled with Colville Confederated Tribes and she loves her Native language and homelands, her kids, her dog and horses.
Jana Richman (She/Her) – Escalante, Utah
Jana Richman is the author of a collection of personal essays, a memoir and two novels, but she would really like to be a poet. Born and raised in Utah’s west desert, Jana currently lives in the irascible small town of Escalante, Utah, surrounded by the magnificent Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.