Marco Lawrence - 2022

Marco is a British-born illustrator and printmaker living and working in New York City. His passion for the natural world, for its vibrance and vulnerability, is expressed through his drawings and prints. Marco loves to explore and seeks out opportunities to be immersed in natural environments where he can study varied habitats and produce work from direct observation. He has worked with an internationally renowned selection of institutions, museums and artists. In addition to his own illustration practice he has taught printmaking in a number of colleges and studios in the UK and US. He currently lives in Chinatown, Manhattan with his wife, daughter and their grey cat.  IG @moleydraws

Daniela Naomi Molnar - 2022

Daniela is an artist, poet, and writer working with the mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. Her work was the subject of a recent “Oregon Art Beat” profile and a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times. Her book CHORUS won Omnidawn’s 1st/2nd book award, chosen by Kazim Ali; it will be published in October 2022. Her work has been shown nationally, is in private and public collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Inner Forest Service, Fugue, Moss, Tripwire, Bomb Cyclone, Capitalism Nature Socialism, petrichor, Cirque, and elsewhere. She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is a guide and founding Board member of Signal Fire. She can be found in Portland, Oregon, exploring public wildlands, or at www.danielamolnar.com / Instagram: @daniela_naomi_molnar

Kassandra Mirosh - 2022

Kassandra is a long time Alaskan resident who currently teaches Art, English, History, and Spanish in the small town of Healy, Alaska in the Denali Borough. Her art reflects a deep appreciation for the natural beauty of Alaska, and is inspired not only by landscapes, but also by the amazing adaptations that allow animals and plants to live in harsh environments. Her art allows her to observe and express nature in a variety of mediums, including glass mosaics, drawings, watercolor paintings, acrylic paintings, collage and recycled cardboard and paper sculptures. Each of her pieces contain something that was destined for the landfill. In renewing and transforming these items, she hopes to honor conservation efforts and show appreciation for the work being done to preserve the natural habitats of these amazing creatures.

Anne Haven McDonnell - 2022

Anne lives in Santa Fe, NM where the high desert meets the southern-most Rocky Mountains, the Sangre de Cristo range. She teaches as associate professor in English and Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her poetry has been published in Orion Magazine, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod Journal, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Living with Wolves was published with Split Rock Press in fall 2020, and her full-length collection Breath on a Coal won the Halycon Poetry Prize and will be published in fall 2022. Anne Haven holds an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage and has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She helps edit poetry for the journal Terrain.org.

Dr. Elizabeth "Betsy" Fisher - 2021

Betsy has performed and presented her choreography throughout the US, Europe and Asia. She joined the University of Hawaii faculty in 1994 where she is now a Professor of Dance. Betsy has toured extensively, performed Off-Broadway, and in television and film productions internationally. Betsy visited the Kennicott-McCarthy area nearly three decades ago and was excited to return and share dance with the McCarthy/Kennicott community.

Alexandra Williamson - 2021

Alexandra is a dancer, choreographer and teacher. She completed a BFA in dance at Montclair State University. At age 9 she began dancing and has studied traditional Irish Step Dancing. Alexandra has performed on TV including the TODAY Show and Good Morning America. She is currently teaching Pilates and Dance and is on faculty at Hofstra University, Kean University, and Union County College. Alexandra's brother, Spencer, introduced her to McCarthy and Kennicott.

Paul Scannell - 2019

Paul had a life-changing summer in McCarthy in 2016 - enjoying time as a WMC volunteer gardener and the Golden Saloon artist in residence. Proudly crowned the season’s Prom Queen, he has since hung up his high heels to concentrate on photography and writing. Inspired by moody northern landscapes and forgotten residential spaces, his Alaskan work has been exhibited in both London and Dublin. Having recently spent a winter residency in rural Iceland, he is looking forward to immersing himself in McCarthy’s magic and the warmth of the folk that make it so unique.

Helene Fischman - 2019

Helene’s work is about the creation of contexts for teaching history through narrative. She captures both ancient and contemporary aspects of places, weaving in text and language to expand the message. Helene looks for the quiet evidence of history which falls uniquely at its own designated time, often in secret places. She began to incorporate text into her work when collaborating with American poet Jehanne Dubrow at the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Poland in 2004. During her artist residency there, they created a paired series of paintings, photographs and sonnets-telling the story of the 500-year old Jewish community from the region. Helene found using both words and images provided a richer opportunity to tell a story immediately accessible to various types of learners. Narrative and image enable telling stories of an experiential nature, fostering links between past and present. She has since been selected as artist in residence at ten national and state parks throughout the country. Helene believes it is her job to tell the story of our landscape through these disciplines.

Kelsey McDonough - 2019

Kelsey McDonough is a visual artist interested in the exploration of the natural world and our human connection to environments. Her paintings are colorful fragmented glimpses of the landscapes that refuse to be just memories. Kelsey’s process involves many solo road trips, hikes, and meanderings, observing the world with no particular destination in mind, capturing what sticks. After graduating with a BFA in painting from the University of Montana, her time has been split between the deserts of southern Utah and Northwest Montana. In 2016, She was selected for a month long residency in Finland at the Arteles creative center, where she focused on solitude and simplicity. Kelsey’s most recent works are of the places she has wandered to in the past year and the spots of her dreams. Her pieces are not traditional landscapes, but fractured visions of how the mind picks a part the land and the correlation between what these places give us and our human impact towards them.

Karl Becker - 2019

Since childhood, art has been a meaningful part of Karl’s life and a way to connect with the world. Primarily a watercolor painter Karl creates realist landscapes and architecture. In spring and fall his work is augmented with sketches and watercolors of birds to use later in paintings. Drawing is where Karl began the process of making images and each piece of his work is an act of renewal. Karl has field sketched and painted watercolors in the Cordova and Prince William Sound region for over 30 years and in his travels elsewhere - Nepal, Mexico, Interior Alaska, Chile, the Middle East, and the Northwest U.S. – he always carry a sketchbook and watercolors. Karl hopes that the viewer will feel the emotional impact of his subjects as he did when he sketched and painted them.

Meredith Leich - 2018

Meredith Leich is a videomaker, painter, and writer, who works with video installation, 3D animation, watercolor, music, and text.  Inspired by a desire to observe, preserve, and craft narratives about our changing world, she weaves together stories of history, geography, psychology, and the climate. She is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation, 2017) and also has degrees from Swarthmore College and the San Francisco Art Institute.  Her climate change-based collaboration with glaciologist Andrew Malone was awarded a 2015-16 Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Graduate Collaboration Grant from the University of Chicago and has been featured in conferences at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ann Mansolino - 2018

Ann Mansolino is a visual artist whose work explores the relationship between the internal self and external ideas of place through photography, writing, and handmade books. She is interested in the ways in which landscape can help us understand ourselves – as metaphors for our internal experience, as well as expressions of our more literal relationship to nature and the larger world we inhabit.  

Marianne Monson - 2018

Marianne Monson is the author of ten books for children and adults. She is deeply interested in the connection between literature and history, with a focus on the frontier era. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has two children and writes from a 100 year old house in the town of Astoria, Oregon. She has taught Creative Writing and English for a number of colleges, and currently teaches at Clatsop Community College. Her forthcoming book, Women of the Blue and Gray: Civil War Mothers, Medics, Soldiers, and Spies will be released in fall 2018.

Jowita Wyszomirska - 2017

Jowita Wyszomirska was born in Poland and immigrated with her family to Chicago in the early 90s. With an interdisciplinary approach to drawing, and projects ranging from site-specific installations to video experimentations, she expands beyond the two-dimensional surface to explore edges of tangible and intangible of what cannot be seen with a naked eye. Her work has been shown in exhibitions including Gallery Neptune and Brown, Washington DC, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD, the VisArts, Rockville, MD, Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO, among others. Wyszomirska received her BFA from the Illinois State University and her MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Zoe Keller - 2017

Zoe Keller uses fine-point mechanical pencils to create large-scale, highly detailed drawings of the natural world. Her images are woven with stories meant to inspire and inform, with a special focus on imperiled species and ecosystems. Her work has been shown in galleries across the country, and is included in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Originally from Woodstock, New York, Zoe’s art practice has taken her around the country, from the rocky Maine coast, to the shores of Lake Michigan, and finally to the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Portland, Oregon.

Gabriela Halas - 2017

Gabriela Halas is an emerging writer, testing the publishing waters by submitting short stories and poetry to contests and open publication submissions. Gabriela’s work was featured in the show Arctic Perspectives: An Arctic Art and Science Event, at the University of Alaska Art Department exhibit in March, 2016.

Gabriela explores both prose and poetry, using a diversity of voices to capture the emotionality of everyday life. Her stories are character focused and place driven, engaging natural phenomena with dark, often conflicting, and always complicated human sentiments. Her poems capture fleeting moments, hoping to capture when the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ are no longer contained in separate words.

Jill Haley - 2017

Jill Haley has released 4 recordings of original music about the United States National Parks. The instrumental music is scored for oboe, English horn, piano, guitar, French horn, cello and percussion. Her 3rd recording, “Mesa Verde Soundscapes,” received the “Best Piano Album- with Instrumentation” award from ZMR in 2014. She presents concerts of National Park music with video of the images that inspired the compositions. She has done programs on Glacier, Zion and Bryce Canyon, and National Park Soundscapes.

She has been an Artist in Residence at 3 National Parks, Badlands, Glacier, and Mesa Verde. This afforded her the opportunity to live in the Park for an extended time while she was creating the music.

Sarah McColl - 2017

Sarah McColl is a winner of StoryQuarterly's 2016 Nonfiction Prize judged by Meghan Daum. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, JSTOR Daily, South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, In Context Journal, and alongside work by Ander Monson, Brenda Miller, David Shields, and Jenny Boully in the forthcoming anthology, The Shell Game, edited by Kim Adrian (University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

Her work is driven by a sense of wonder and has been supported with fellowships and scholarship awards from the MacDowell Colony, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Slice Literary Conference.

Before receiving her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, she was the founding editor in chief of Yahoo Food. Her food writing has been featured in print and online for Bon Appétit, House Beautiful, Modern Farmer, Extra Crispy and others. She writes, edits, and teaches creative writing in New York.

Keren Lowell - 2016

Keren Lowell works full-time at the Alaska State Council on the Arts, acts as a board member of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, and keeps an active studio practice. Her work moves freely between the realms of sculpture, installation, performance, and wearable art, exploring the language and metaphor intertwined with the materials and processes associated with fiber work – stitching, mending, repair, weaving, lacing, and braiding.

Shawn Skabelund - 2016

Shawn Skabelund is a visual storyteller who grew up in the small logging village of McCall, ID, in the mountains of Payette National Forest. Within the landscapes he inhabits, he observes and discovers materials he can use to create new landscapes and new forms. Shawn’s work focuses on what Wendell Berry calls the “unsettling of America”:  the effects, the marks, and the changes that humans make on the land and cultures of a given area. His installations are designed to give viewers time and space to think about the local communities, economies, and ecosystems they inhabit. Learn more about his work at www.shawnskabelund.com.

Julia Rosen - 2016

Julia Rosen is a writer, photographer, and adventurer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in publications including Orion, High Country News, and the Los Angeles Times. Trained as a geologist, she is interested in understanding the processes that shape the natural world—and our fraught relationship to it. Explore her work at https://sciencejulia.wordpress.com.

Peter Bell - 2016

Peter Bell is a San Francisco and New York based director and independent filmmaker. He is currently producing a film about McCarthy and the people of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. His previous credits include the award-winning film "High Sierra—A Journey on the John Muir Trail" and the Emmy-winning work with the PBS show "Our State" in North Carolina. He has worked for CNN in New York and shot and edited countless other productions across the web and the world. He feels a connection to light, sound, storytelling, and his wife Mimi, a fellow visual storyteller.

Nina Elder - 2016

Nina Elder is an artist, adventurer, and arts administrator. She grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico where she cultivated love for the land and curiosity about its use. Nina’s work is exhibited and collected nationally and has been featured in Art in America, VICE Magazine, and New American Paintings, as well as PBS and NPR. Nina examines historic land use and its cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Mines, bombing ranges, and junk heaps are source material for her landscape paintings and representational drawings that explore the line between land and landscape, beauty and banality. Visit her website at http://ninaelder.com.

Kevin Muente - 2015

Kevin Muente is an artist and professor who seeks out natural landscapes that inspire many. His paintings focus on the details of place and capture environments that awaken the soul. Muente gave a public lecture discussing what it's like to paint in National Parks, how he hoes about finding his subjects, and how he makes realistic paintings of man's role in nature.

Krista Langlois - 2015

Krista Langlois is an essayist and independent journalist living in Durango, Colorado. Her work has been published in Slate, Orion, High Country News, Adventure Journal and elsewhere. After spending two months  traveling around Alaska, working on a series of magazine articles, she came to the WMC and shared her work in a public reading. 

www.krisaleelanglois.com

J. Jason Lazarus - 2015

J. Jason Lazarus is an Alaskan photographer and university educator who specializes in capturing little-known narratives of the world around him, rendering them as one-of-a-kind, handmade artworks. His work represents a fusion of both digital and analog techniques, including cyanotype, gel medium transfers, van dyke brown, and albumen. He is interested in exploring and capturing stories about historic mines in Alaska. 

www.obscura-works.com

Erika Hanson - 2015

Erika's work explores the intersection of nature and how we continually try to represent and reproduce it. She creates weavings, videos, and installations, and in each project proposes potential connections amongst material, history, and place. Erika lead a community workshop where people could weave found objects and fibers on rustic warp weighted looms. 

www.elhanson.com