Meet Our Residents
Meet Our Residents
2025
Johanna Pfau
German Costume & Set Designer
Graduating with a master’s in Set Design in 1996, Johanna Pfau has since worked throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as a costume and set designer for State-Theatres and Opera-Houses. Returning for a second time to Studio Faire, Johanna embraced the opportunity to continue the development and, in fact, completion, of her illustrated memoir over her four-week residency. Born in East Germany in 1971, Johanna’s family moved west in 1982, never to return. Her story blends real memories with fiction to tell this tale through a child’s eyes.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Pamela Lahaud
Brazilian Artist & Photographer
Pamela Lahaud is a visual artist and photographer based in São Paulo, Brazil. She studied Film Direction at the International Cinema Academy before earning a Photography degree from the University Center of Fine Arts in 2021. Shortly after graduating, she turned to painting and now works from her studio at Edifício Vera. Usually working with oil paint, Pamela was keen to explore new media and forms of expression during her residency, expanding her surrealist practice.
www.instagram.com/pamelalahaud
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Kyra Whitehead
American Writer
Since 2017, Dr. Kyra Whitehead has been teaching English and Design at Wenzhou-Kean University in China, helping Graphic Design students improve their English while exploring creativity and storytelling. She has taught courses such as English Composition and Global Design and Visual Culture, and chairs programs like Common Reads, which brings students together around a shared text to discuss timely and relevant topics. During her residency, she focused on this program, gathering research to spark discussions on race, identity, stereotypes, and other challenging subjects.
www.linkedin.com/in/kyra-whitehead-d-litt
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Ellen Skilton
American Writer
Ellen Skilton is a poet, educator, and professor at Arcadia University in the School of Education, where she also directs the Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring. Summers allow her time to get away for intensive creative focus and, whilst in residence, Ellen succeeded in her personal challenge to write a poem a day. Her creative writing explores themes of addiction, domestic abuse, infertility, transracial adoption, and immigrant experiences, often infused with humour and inspired by nature.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Klemens Kuhn
German Illustrator & Exhibition & Set Designer
Klemens Kühn has worked extensively as an exhibition designer for the Alice Children’s Museum in Berlin, the Hygiene Museum in Dresden, and the Historical Museum in Hannover. During a four-week residency, he began developing a graphic novel that explores childhood memories of growing up first in Moscow and later in the unusual world of the DEFA Film-Studios in Babelsberg, East Berlin, where his parents worked in the 1960s and 70s. Blending memory, politics, and family life, the novel offers a child’s unique perspective on that era.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
David Doligalski
American Web Developer
Now semi-retired, David Doligalski spent his career in technology and marketing, most recently consulting for non-profits on technology strategy and websites. It was his website design skills that he aimed to enhance during his residency, in order to build a boutique consultancy to create websites for small organisations. A key milestone for his residency was refreshing his wife, poet Ellen Skilton’s website, combining technical expertise with creative collaboration.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Megan Currie
Canadian Photographer & Filmmaker
A former photographer turned filmmaker, Megan Currie’s work explores family, relationships, internal conflict, and overthrowing societal standards, often drawing inspiration from French New Wave cinema’s experimental storytelling. Usually photographing local bands and working as a 3rd Lighting Electric in Halifax, NS, Canada, her residency offered her time away to develop a short film using analog techniques. A visual poem depicting the beauty in slowing down, against our current society’s pressure to overwork.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Jaclyn Piudik
American Writer & Photographer
New York-born poet, translator, editor, and educator, Jaclyn Piudik, now makes her home in Toronto, Canada. Her written work blends medieval scholarship, contemporary experimentation, and multilingual influences, translating between English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She has recently also returned to photography, a discipline in which she was trained as an undergraduate, and has begun creating hybrid works that combine image and poetry. During her residency, she continued to develop a manuscript, selecting a photograph and writing a poem that both came into dialogue with the image and became part of its composition.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Holiday Dmitri
Taiwanese/Canadian/American Writer
In 2024, we awarded Brooklyn-based writer Holiday Dmitri a Studio Faire Residency Fellowship, offering her two weeks of accommodation and practical support. With a background in journalism and international affairs, Holiday has worked in the media and non-profit sectors in the USA, Taiwan, and Kosovo. She travelled to France to step away from her daily demands of being a mother and small-business owner to spend time on her novel in progress. Her writing explores themes of science and technology, identity and isolation, and finding meaning and connection in our modern digital age.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Brianna Roberto
American Artist
Brianna Roberto is a painter who recently completed a B.A. in Child Studies and Studio Art at Santa Clara University, and is now pursuing a Master’s in Elementary Education at SCU. Whilst in residence, Brianna spent time writing and developing new still life paintings, using objects from the local farmer’s market and observations of the region to inspire the compositions, often incorporating old 1960s wallpaper removed from the property to add a patterned background.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Jane Tolerton
New Zealand Writer
Fourth time resident at Studio Faire, Jane Tolerton, continues to be a welcome guest! This celebrated New Zealand writer, journalist, and historian has penned such books as An Awfully Big Adventure, Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout, Convent Girls, and But I Changed All That: ‘First’ New Zealand Women. Her historical research continued during this residency, with a deep dive into the life of Mary Taylor and her best friends, Ellen Nussey and Charlotte Brontë, bringing new light to these relationships, arguing that all three women have been misread by history.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Ann Forbush
American Artist
Ann Forbush is a mixed media artist and educator who works in New England and on the Gulf Coast. She holds a BFA in photography and an MFA in printmaking from MassArt. After 25 years as a printmaker and printmaking instructor, she is currently a full-time painter. Layering trompe l’oeil effects with tonal landscapes, her work aims to evoke nature’s fragility. At her residency, Ann created paintings inspired by her travels here and the dialogue between built and natural environments. Her work can be found in the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and others.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Marnie Ritchie
American Writer
Marnie Ritchie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media, and Design Arts at Pacific Lutheran University and affiliate faculty with Gender, Sexuality, & Race Studies. However, for 2024-2025, she is enjoying a sabbatical from this work to focus fully on her creative work, and for her residency, she continued to develop the first draft of a poetry book manuscript, while also taking photos on her Diana mini F+ 35mm film camera.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Gustave Carlson
American Painter and Architect
Gustave Carlson is the founder and principal of Gustave Carlson Design (GCD), an award-winning San Francisco Bay Area design firm specialising in custom home renovation, new house construction, and sustainable home design. His creative process as an architect is influenced by his original vocation as an artist and now, vice versa, with his current inspiration for paintings being the agricultural landscape, particularly barns and farm-like agrarian architecture, cottages, and landscaped fields. He spent his time in residence exploring and creating several paintings that represented the surroundings and interior furnishings of Studio Faire.
www.gustavecarlsonpaintings.com
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
American Writer
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is an author, investigative journalist, journalism professor, and founder of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism. A Fulbright Scholar and award-winning reporter, his work has appeared in outlets including The New Yorker and USA TODAY. He has held teaching posts at Columbia University and Grand Valley State University, and authored or edited seven books, most recently Comrade King. At Studio Faire, he continued to develop his book, Imperfect Custodian of Memory: The Journey to Understand My Father’s Holocaust Past.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Yvonne Cavanagh
American Artist
Yvonne Cavanagh, a Kern County native, is an accomplished ceramic artist and educator and currently teaches ceramics at Bakersfield High School and Bakersfield College. During her residency, Yvonne explored ‘Time’ by setting up plant shadows in the garden, tracing their movement across the paper as the sun moved across the sky to create sundial-like drawings. These will be used as starting points for coloured works she will scale up using a projector, to create a new body of work for an exhibition at RAM gallery in Bakersfield, Ca in the Spring of 2026.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Matthew Daddona
American Writer
Matthew Daddona is a nonfiction ghostwriter, poet, fiction writer, journalist, and volunteer firefighter. His work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Tin House, and more. His poetry collection House of Sound was published in 2020 (Trail to Table Press) and his debut novel, The Longitude of Grief, was published in 2024 (Wandering Aengus Press). During his residency, he cherished the time to work on his second novel, as well as a collection of short stories, whilst also enjoying discussions with other residents, a trade-off that he feels is vital to his writing practice.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Richie Jones
British Writer
Studio Faire partnered with Desperate Literature last year (an international bookshop in Madrid, Spain, and the joint project of Charlotte Delattre and Terry Craven) to offer a residency award. We were unanimous in our decision to offer Richie Jones the award for his hilarious short story ‘Nuggy Spins the Lemons’. Since studying English at Cambridge, he has been writing fiction, including both novels and short stories, from his base in North London, mixing irony, satire, and comedy to explore our society at a macro and micro level.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Erica Trabold
American Writer & Artist
In 2020, Studio Faire partnered with Ghost Proposal, an American literary journal and chapbook press, to offer a Residency Award as part of their Chapbook Competition. Erica Trabold, the winner, is the author of Five Plots (2018), a winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and a 2019 Nebraska Book Award. After a global pandemic and the birth of her baby, Erica accepted the award. Her creative pursuits have shifted over that time, with collage currently being her major passion, and it is that which was her focus during her residency.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Esmé Clutterbuck
British Artist
Esmé Clutterbuck studied Fine Art at Portsmouth Polytechnic, Painting at the Royal Academy Schools, and Printmaking at Central St Martins. Recently, she’s been creating drawings using earth pigments which she dug up in North Devon and Bristol. She came to the residency to continue this development into three-dimensional drawings, creating dresses from their paper patterns. She worked with distemper and Bideford Black, incorporating local architectural details to create surface pattern, while letting some details of the paper patterns show through, creating optical space and a sense of depth.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Gaylord Brewer
American Writer
Gaylord Brewer, a professor at Middle Tennessee State University and the founder and longtime editor of Poems & Plays, has authored 16 books across poetry, fiction, criticism, and cookery. His recent poetry collections include The Feral Condition (2018) and Worship the Pig (2020), and flash nonfiction work, Before the Storm Takes It Away (2024). With a deadline of October 2025 for a new poetry collection for Red Hen Press (to be published in 2027), his four-week residency at Studio Faire was ideal timing for dedicated immersion in the manuscript.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Deborah Whitney
American Artist
Returning resident, Deborah Whitney’s recent works combine embroidery, print and photo-transfers on vintage linens to create ‘drawings’ that explore themes such as ‘the female gaze’ and confronting traditional gender roles throughout history to bring the power back to the woman in the focus. Balancing her fine art practice with her curatorial experience, Deborah is founder and co-owner of Whitney Art Works, a former contemporary gallery in Portland, Maine. She currently works with her husband, Peter, to offer art transportation, storage and installation.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Rhianwen Williams
British Artist
Rhianwen Williams is a Welsh mixed media artist based in Manchester. Her practice explores grief, memory, and nostalgia through abstract painting and concrete poetry. With a background in Fine Art and Art History, her work is particularly inspired by the abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction movements of the mid-late 20th century. Aware of how different environments impact her practice and shape its path, she came to Nérac for fresh inspiration in a new environment, and found it in droves!
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Rachel B. Jansen
Canadian Writer
Whether it be through poetry, essays, or prose, Rachel B. Jansen repeatedly finds herself pondering the age-old question of free will versus fate in our lives. Currently revising a novel, Rachel used her residency as a focused period to finalise the manuscript, ready for submission to agents. Since completing a BFA and MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Rachel has worked as a freelance writer and journalist, publishing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in a variety of outlets across North America.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Julia Kooi Talen
American Writer
Julia Kooi Talen is a Midwest-based essayist and poet who teaches creative writing and composition. Currently a PhD Candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, their work spans poetry, lyric essay, and hybrid forms, often experimental and thematically focused on queerness, nature, identity, ancestry, the body, and mental health. At Studio Faire, Julia worked diligently on her dissertation project, a book length hybrid lyric essay, exploring trauma, eco-violence, and gender violence in the Western world.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Bala Pichumani
American Writer
Though she has a background in tech and finance, creative writing has always been a key passion for Bala Pichumani. Taking advantage of some time and space between jobs, Bala chose to schedule a residency to focus on completing a book she’s been working on for some time. Her works often explore themes of transience, belonging, and the way people shape and are shaped by the places they inhabit.
www.linkedin.com/in/balaapichumani
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Mary St. George
American Artist
With a background in architecture as well as in fine art, Mary St. George is continuously inspired by abandoned buildings, and she sought out several ruins in the Nérac region to stimulate new ideas during her residency. Combining collage with photo transfer over painted surfaces, she created works that explored the idea of renewal and the tension between the built environment and nature. She returned to Portugal (where she has been based since 1980) with completed works, but also, with multiple images to continue to inspire new works.
www.instagram.com/maryst.george
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Mark Sarvas
American Writer
Mark Sarvas is an award-winning American author of the novels Memento Park (FSG) and Harry, Revised (Bloomsbury). His work has earned praise from major critics and won multiple literary honors. Also a reviewer and teacher, Mark contributes widely to literary journals and teaches at UCLA. He holds an MFA from Bennington College. With the imminent launch of his third novel, @UGMan (ITNA), Mark was able to use his time at the residency to dive into working on a fourth novel, a work of autofiction.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Jennifer Carson
American Writer
Jennifer Carson is a writer, whose work appears in The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Science. Her debut novel, The Savage Path, is currently on submission, represented by Stephanie Cabot at Susanna Lea Associates. Before turning to literature, Jennifer trained as a scientist and earned a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA. She currently serves as STEM Director at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Corrie Nance
American Writer
When, at the age of 30, Corrie Nance took the risk of quitting her job in Washington, D.C. to move to NYC and write a comedy web series with her friend, she soon realised that this was her calling. Writing that series was pivotal in her desire to see how her writing could impact others in a relatable way. Though she now has a full time job at Apple in Los Angeles, she still has the drive and desire for her personal creative work, so came to Studio Faire to work on a book of poems and develop a pilot script for a dramedy series.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Heather Corbally Bryant
American Writer
Heather Corbally Bryant came to us from Massachusetts, where she is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. Her aim being to spend time deep in the revision of her memoir, exploring the discovery that the man who raised her was not her biological father. Following her graduation from Harvard, Heather received a PhD from the University of Michigan. Now primarily a poet, she aims to weave some of her poetry into the memoir as a way of deepening the prose.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Marlieke Bosman
Dutch Artist
Marlieke Bosman was originally trained as an art historian at Utrecht University. Later, she also studied law at the University of Amsterdam and now, in addition to her activities as a visual artist, she works part-time as a lawyer in the Netherlands. Working as a visual artist, under the name Marliek, her current investigation is into crowds, creating drawings, paintings and dioramas that explore how it feels to be in a crowd. What are people thinking of you when they stare at you as you step onto that metro?
Image ‘Hurrying Home’ (detail) by Marlieke.
Amorina Valerie Ahlsell
Swedish Writer
Having studied creative writing, film and journalism, Amorina Ahlsell now writes short stories, poetry, and screenplays. In 2024 she was awarded the WIFT director’s award, by Frame Film Festival, for her dystopian sci-fi Dansrum för en (Dancing on My Own), a heartbreaking story about loneliness in our thoroughly digitalized time. Travelling to France from Gothenberg, Amorina’s main aim of her residency was to write a new screenplay for her next animated short film, a poetic monologue about the loss of a child through miscarriage.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Bernadette Mertens-McAllister
Canadian Artist
Originally from Belgium, Bernadette Mertens-McAllister now lives and works in British Columbia. One of her proudest achievements was helping the Raincoast Conservation Society to establish the Great Bear Rainforest Protected and Managed area in the 90s. Environment and nature were her focus then, and are still, inspiring much of her fine art work. During her residency she developed a series that explored her relationship with the Studio Faire environment and memories of her own childhood in Europe.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Cameron Brent Johnson
American Writer
Though his first love is books, Cameron Brent Johnson has developed the skill to translate what he loves most about novels into screenplays. Now a full-time Screenwriter based in LA, he has written scripts for Netflix, Showtime and more, including Series 1 Episode 8 of Yellowjackets (Showtime) which he co-wrote with Liz Phang. Cameron’s family lineage goes back to a region near here, in Tarbes. Though his mother’s ancestors emigrated from France to southern Louisiana in the early 1800s, the script he focused on during his time at Studio Faire takes place in South West France and is inspired by that lineage.
cameronbrentjohnson.squarespace.com
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Sarah Bartnicka
Canadian Writer
Toronto-based writer and editor Sarah Bartnicka came to Studio Faire during a career transition to focus on a collection of creative essays about the economic and societal challenges facing young adults today. Back at home, Sarah is the editor of Milk Bag, a newsletter covering business and culture in Canada. Before that, she was the founding editor of The Peak, which is Canada’s most-ready daily business newsletter. On the side, she also writes Airplane Mode, a travel newsletter.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Anne Carter
Canadian Writer
Anne Carter is the author of over twenty published books, mostly for young readers, and her writing has twice earned the CLA Best Book of the Year for Children Award, the Jane Addam’s Honor Award for peace as well as numerous nominations for reading programs across Canada. She’s currently in the process of revising her new novel about a fictional flooding, inspired by the current climate crisis facing all of us but especially young people today.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Roya Amirsoleymani
American Writer
Roya Amirsoleymani is an independent curator, writer, producer, and project manager in contemporary art and performance, based on the unceded lands of the Twana people on the Olympic Peninsula in rural Washington. She came to Studio Faire to continue her development of ‘Touch’, an experimental narrative and archival project about her best friend, Ernie, who was denied cancer treatment by insurance and died at just 36 years old.
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.
Natasha Davies
British Writer
Searching for the perfect balance of solitude and community, and a break from her work as a copywriter, Tasha Davies travelled to Nérac from Cheshire to focus on her writing in our ‘Usher Hall’, as well as to soak up the setting in the local coffee shops and bars. This opportunity gave her the time to advance her novel about the lives and complex relationships of a set of triplets, which will mark her debut as a writer.
daviesnatasha22201.wixsite.com/tashascribbles
Photo by Colin Usher at Studio Faire.