2025 Artists in Residence
Awarded Artists:
Henrik Soederstroem
Henrik Soederstroem is a multidisciplinary artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He works with computer graphics, interactive and generative video, sound, spatial installation and sculptural objects. His work explores the limits and critical points of aesthetic, technological, social and linguistic systems. In recent years his focus has been on virtual worlds, their methods of meaning-making and their paradoxical relation to physical reality, often viewed through metaphors drawn from horror, the supernatural and folkloric.
Associated project: No One is There
Itziar Barrio
Itziar Barrio is an interdisciplinary artist producing long-term research-based projects that involve different agents and collaborators. By rewriting the dominant narratives through which our societies, identities, and realities are constructed, her work opens up new futures. Barrio has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellowship. Her survey exhibition was curated by Johanna Burton in 2018, and her monograph was published by SKIRA in 2023. Barrio’s work has been presented internationally at CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, ONX Onassis Foundation, e-flux, PARTICIPANT INC, MACRO, MACBA, Museo del Banco de la República, Belgrade’s Contemporary Art Museum, and Havana Biennial.
She has received awards from Brooklyn Arts Council, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Foundation for the Arts and Ministry of Culture of Spain. Barrio is a New Museum’s NEW INC alumni and she was a recipient of the Spanish Academy in Rome Fellowship (2018-19). She has participated in residencies including Harvestworks, Skowhegan and ISCP. Barrio’s work has been written about in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, ART PAPERS and BOMB. She has lectured internationally at Whitney’s ISP Program, New Museum, Yale, Hunter College and the New School. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Sarah Lawrence College in NY. She is a critic at NYU Steinhardt and Rhode Island School of Design, RISD (2025 – 2026).
Associated project: Particle Matter
Shawn Decker
Shawn Decker is a composer, artist, and teacher who creates sound and electronic media installations and writes music for live performance, film, and video. His is positioned at the intersection of music composition, the visual arts, and performance, using physical and electronic media to investigate, simulate and praise the natural (and unnatural) worlds. He frequently collaborates with other artists, including most recently Jan Erik-Andersson, Anne Wilson, and Jan Tichy. As an artist whose work spans multiple disciplines, from making use of technology and technological processes on the one hand and incorporating the study of birdsong and ornithology, and traditional elements such as Irish and American folk fiddle-traditions on the other – merging physical elements and techniques from sculpture with environmental sound and music performance, Decker sees art and art-making within a very broad context. As a senior faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, education is another element within his broad-based practice, with teaching supporting artistic production, and vice-versa.
His work has been frequently performed, seen, and heard in the US, Europe, and Asia at a wide variety of venues. He frequently collaborates with other artists, including most recently Jan Erik-Andersson and Anne Wilson. Recent exhibitions of both solo and collaborative work have shown at venues such as: the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pritzker Pavillion in Chicago’s Millenium Park, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, CAM Houston, the 2003 Biennial of Electronic Art in Australia, Art Basel Miami, the Klosterruine in Berlin, ISEA2002 in Nagoya, the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, CAM Houston, ISEA2000 Paris, the Waino Aalto museum in Turku, Finland and numerous others. Decker is a Professor in the Art and Technology and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Associated project: Grass
Floy Krouchi & James Brandon Lewis
The meeting between James Brandon Lewis and Floy Krouchi unfolds in an unknown territory at the frontiers of electroacoustic music, jazz/free jazz, and contemporary music. Both passionate improvisers, they have collaboratively explored a singular sonic identity, drawing on principles from Molecular Systematic Music—a system developed by Lewis based on molecular biology—and Space/Time/Vibrations from the FKBass, a hybrid bass instrument augmented with sensors designed by Krouchi.
Together, Lewis and Krouchi have recorded a musical work composed as a collage of several movements that is currently in production and will be mixed by Mark Bingham. The release is scheduled for the spring 2026, followed by a European tour. Harvestworks hosted the duo in their studios for a ten-day residency as part of their annual artist-in-residence program.
Associated project: FKBass Meets Molecular Systematic Music
Zorica Čolić
Zorica Čolić is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Serbia and based in New York City. She uses video, sound, found materials, text, and installation, to explore the issues around the human body as a cultural symptom, examining how health and well-being intersect with politics, gender, sexuality, ideology, and the economy. Čolić was a resident artist at Harvestworks, Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, SOMA Summer (Mexico City), and Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY), to name a few. She is a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts.
Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally, including institutions in New York such as Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, Microscope Gallery, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Mama Projects, WhiteBox, and in Europe: Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig (Germany), The Energy Museum of Santralistanbul (Turkey), Museum of Yugoslav History (Serbia), and more. In addition to her studio practice, she is engaged in research, teaching, and curating screenings. Recent projects include curating the screening program (Un)invited Collaborators at Anthology Film Archives and a presentation at the international conference Odorous Object: On the Materiality of Scent at Brown University.
Associated project: A Voice and Nothing More
Janene Higgins
Janene Higgins is an American media artist whose work focuses on print, motion design, and video art. Her videos and digital media have been described as “abstract narratives: undefinable journeys filled with sudden layerings and allurings.” Her videoart began as a direct offshoot of her work in motion design, incorporating collage, text, and image-layering into a time-based artform. Her work in video includes single channel pieces, installation, live video performance, and projection design for theater.
Associated project: Substance
Artists-in-residence Janene Higgins and Elliott Sharp will collaborate on Substance, an opera inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and its impact on modern Western thought. Rather than a historical pastiche, the work will focus on Spinoza’s exploration of the infinite across all dimensions. His vocation as a lensmaker informs both the sound design—using acoustic “lenses” for processing—and the staging, where digital video processing creates a visual sense of looking deeply inward or outward into the universe.
Elliott Sharp
Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.
Associated project: Substance
Artists-in-residence Janene Higgins and Elliott Sharp will collaborate on Substance, an opera inspired by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and its impact on modern Western thought. Rather than a historical pastiche, the work will focus on Spinoza’s exploration of the infinite across all dimensions. His vocation as a lensmaker informs both the sound design—using acoustic “lenses” for processing—and the staging, where digital video processing creates a visual sense of looking deeply inward or outward into the universe.
Sylvain Souklaye
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker and author. His craft and mission go beyond and deeper than the question of identity. Following the idea of the rhizome, Souklaye digs in the sensitivity and history laying in the interiority of broken bodies, environmental urgencies and political retribution.
Associated project: Invisible Straitjacket
Artist-in-residence Sylvain Souklaye will work on Invisible Straitjacket, a live performance project that explores the intimacy of sound, poetry, movement, and architectural space. Investigating the friction between social, cultural, and spiritual conditions, the work examines how sound, language, and spatial design shape audience experiences and memories. In a world where technology functions as both a collective language and ideological framework, Invisible Straitjacket seeks to create a “sonic linguistics in motion,” bridging human emotion and machine intelligence.
Sara Stern
Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. Stern has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore). Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. In recent years, Stern has participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY), the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (West Rutland, VT), the Harvestworks New Works Residency (New York, NY), and The Watermill Center Artist Residency Program (Water Mill, NY). Stern is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program on Governors Island.
