STUDIO FAIRE RESIDENCY FELLOWSHIPS 2024
The Studio Faire Residency Fellowships provide accommodation and practical support to two separate creative practitioners for a 2-week period in 2025.
The fellowships were funded by generous donations from supporters of Studio Faire.
We received 113 applications for the fellowships, which were each reviewed independently, providing us with a shortlist of 20 applicants we agreed were highly talented, had a great proposal and seemed deserving of this opportunity.
We then had the tricky task of whittling this fantastic list down to just 2 finalists.
And here they are…
Holiday Dmitri
Taiwanese, Canadian, American Writer
Holiday Dmitri has a background in journalism and international affairs and has worked in the media and non-profit sectors in the USA, Taiwan and Kosovo. She makes her home in Brooklyn, with her husband, twins, and a senior schnoodle named Ramses II.
A graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, the University of Chicago, the New School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, her writing has appeared in The Taipei Times, The Chicago Criterion, Rolling Stone, Radar, and Reason Magazine, among other places. She is an alum of the 2020 Tin House Winter Novels Workshop and inaugural recipient of Essere Residency’s Special Fellowship for Emerging Voices. Holiday has also worked as an obituary writer, cigarette girl, radio disc jockey, and international flight attendant based out of Chicago’s O’Hare.
It was not until her forties that Holiday began writing fiction. As a caregiver and a small-business owner hit hard by the pandemic, she struggled to find the time, energy, and money to invest in her literary education and work.
The Studio Faire Residency Fellowship will support her to step away from her busy life for a moment, to polish a draft of her exciting and ambitious debut novel.
Photo: Omer Kaplan
Jenna Butler
Écrivain canadien
An ecological poet, essayist, editor, and retired professor, Jenna Butler is the author of six award-winning books.
Her latest collection was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Nonfiction and a contender in the CBC Canada Reads competition. Her other books have won, or been finalists for, the High Plains Book Awards (USA), the Banff Mountain Book Awards (Canada), and the Alberta Literary Awards (Canada). She’s a three-time winner of the Canadian Authors’ Association’s Exporting Alberta Award.
Jenna holds four degrees in creative writing and education, and had a twenty-five-year teaching career and tenure at Red Deer College in Canada. In 2022, she was forced to leave her teaching job when the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a diagnosis of aggressive cancer. She is now in recovery and works as a freelance editor and mentor, as well as running an off-grid organic farm with her partner in northern Alberta.
The Studio Faire Residency Fellowship will offer a period to focus wholeheartedly on a new manuscript, which will be published by Wolsak & Wynn. The collection of essays focus on six Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) women across the north and west of Canada who are active on the land within their communities, and it includes her own story as one of only a handful of BIPOC farmers in her county.
Whilst in residence, she will also be delving into this region in South West France, and its connections to local food and seed-saving.
