Trillium Arts is delighted to welcome a roster of six individual artists from the U.S., Haiti and Canada in April, May and June. The awarded artists are working in a variety of disciplines and will each have a solo week in the Firefly Creek apartment to rejuvenate and further their creative endeavors. They were selected from an application pool based on their artistic merit and the quality of the exciting projects they will further while here at Trillium. We can’t wait to see what grows out of these residencies this spring!
MEET THE SPRING 2022 ARTISTS
STACEY CAMPBELL
Greenville, SC
Stacey Isom Campbell’s plays include The Loophole, Buffalo Creek, When Mountains Move, Memory of Ice, On the 8s, and Laundry at the Coin & Spin. Her work has been seen at the Barter Theatre, The Collective: NY, Great Plains Theatre Conference, Pittsburgh New Works Festival, L.A. First Stage, EstroGenius Xtended, and others. Her plays have been finalists at the New Harmony Project, Rose Henley Playwriting Competition, and Plays for the 21st Century. She currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina, with her partner Chad and dog Buster.
RESIDENCY PLANS
“During the residency, I plan to complete the second draft of new play about a marriage in crisis when Bri, who has had to quit her job due to chronic illness, turns to a virtual golf game for escape. There she finds a community that gets her through a difficult season. But when she is accused of cheating at the game, she is forced to face some difficult realities. The play asks – how do you maintain your sense of self and win at the game of life when the core things that defined you are taken?”
BENJI HART
Chicago, IL
benjihart.com
Benji Hart is a Chicago-based author, educator, and artist whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. Their words have appeared in numerous anthologies, and been published at Time, Teen Vogue, The Advocate, and elsewhere. Their performances have been featured at such venues as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, USA (2021); Den Frie, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021); and Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2020). They have held fellowships with the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Arcus Center, and MacDowell.
RESIDENCY PLANS
While in residence at Trillium Arts, Benji Hart will be focusing on fine tuning their piece World After This One, a movement and poetry performance examining vogue, bomba, and gospel music. They will spend the first half of the week rehearsing the spoken elements, and the second practicing the choreography.
CHARLOTTE HENAY
Hamilton, ONT
charlottehenay.com
Charlotte Henay is an interdisciplinary Bahamian diasporic writer, scholar and artist. She works with poetics and visual essays to counter extinction myths through storywork and memorying. Her current work asks how unearthing silences in Afrodescended women’s stories and lives as archive contributes to a radical poetic moment, engendering futurities. Charlotte memories Black and Indigenous women’s voices as witness, through sitting with the bones.
RESIDENCY PLANS
Charlotte works with the voices and stories of her Bahamian matrilineal ancestry that have been absented in the official, colonial archives. She engages talking to the dead as spiritual reparations in poetic-archival journey. The Trillium Arts Residency will make space for her to sit, to read through pages of notes and extant poetic text in hopes of writing into the next book project, initially producing a chapbook. In the seclusion and connection with the land the residency offers, she will seek room to walk, talk with and listen for her dead.
BERTONY LOUIS
Delmas, Haiti
Bertony Louis is a young Haitian poet, born in Delmas on January 4, 1994. He did his secondary education at the Lycée Jacques 1er in Croix-des-Bouquets. Between 2013 and 2017, Louis studied Law at the School of Law and Economic Sciences of Gonaïves. In 2019 he published in "Mille éclats de mots et autres brillances at Lys Bleu Éditions with Niklovens Fransaint. Louis has received thirteen international poetry awards to his credit.
RESIDENCY PLANS
“During my one-week residency, I plan to work on my project "Recovering the Horizons". It is a collection of poetry in which I address themes such as peace, love, brotherhood, solidarity between peoples; I also condemn wars, violence, child abuse and I promote the protection of the planet and human rights. It is a collection of about sixty poems and I intend to compose poems especially about love, wars and the safeguard of the planet.”
DORA SOMOSI
Brooklyn, NY
dorasomosi.com
Dora Somosi is a Hungarian-American photographer living and working in Brooklyn and Old Chatham, NY. Her work has been shown with The International Center of Photography (ICP), Klompching Gallery, The Sara Shepard Gallery, Kraushaar1885 Gallery, NeueHouse, BRiC Arts, BAM Art, 3Wallsnyc, Blank Wall Gallery, Praise Shadows and Photoplace Gallery. Her photographs have been printed with The Atlantic, Taschen, Cultured Magazine, The New York Times, T Magazine and InteriorDesign. Her works reside with notable New York and Los Angeles collectors including Trustees of the Brooklyn Museum, BRiC Arts, and the Brooklyn International Studio and Curatorial Program.
Somosi has been the Director of Photography at Conde Nast, Vice President of The Society of Publications Designers, Visuals Director for Tatter, and Secretary of the Board of Directors for the W. Eugene Smith Fund for the advancement of humanistic photography. She consults buyers on emerging artists, and has curated benefit shows to raise money for various political and non profit causes.
RESIDENCY PLANS
“I am continuing a body of work I began in 2021, titled “She Was a Little Bit Blue” - creating a cast of blue embedded in photographs of trees: the blue of moodiness, the blue of reverie, the blue of midnight, the blue of remembering, the blue of singing the blues, the blue of veins... In this limited color space, I see the temperature of what makes us alive and connects us. I am using digital negatives with the historic Cyanotype process as this technique combines the excitement of early invention with current digital trends. The process is slow and labor intensive, drawing on the slowing-down of time that we have experienced this pandemic. I am excited to explore the grounds at Trillium, and also continue to reflect on and shape this body of work through the residency.”
Photo by Todd Rosenberg
Lauren Warnecke
Normal, IL
artintercepts.org
Lauren Warnecke is a freelance culture reporter appearing regularly in the Chicago Tribune and on WGLT Radio. She reviews dance for the Tribune and previously wrote for See Chicago Dance, serving as editor from 2018-2021. During that time, Lauren co-facilitated dance writing intensives with the JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience in Durban, South Africa. She has been a resident writer at JOMBA!, the Bates Dance Festival and the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. Lauren holds degrees in dance and kinesiology. She lives in central Illinois and enjoys cooking, cycling and attempting to grow things in her backyard.
RESIDENCY PLANS
“I will be spending my time at Trillium sifting through Mordine & Company Dance Theatre's archives as part of a larger project identifying and cataloguing 50 years of artifacts, photographs and print and digital media. As a Chicago dance critic, I watched and wrote about Mordine and her company for 10 of those 50 years. I plan to simultaneously conduct research and get down some scribbles for what I hope will be a future biography about Shirley’s life and career.”