Session 3
October 27 – November 24, 2026

We are excited to welcome our Session 3, 2026 cohort to Djerassi!

For the next four weeks, this interdisciplinary group of artists will live and work across Djerassi’s 583 acres, with dedicated time and space to focus on their creative practices. Through exploration, exchange, and shared experience, we look forward to seeing the ideas, connections, and new work that emerge during their time in residence.

Magdalena Zurawski // Poetry // Athens, GA
Magdalena Zurawski was a 2022-23 Fulbright Scholar in Poland, where she traced family war histories for her current creative nonfiction project. In Poland she also began translating poet Miron Bialoszewski’s prose work, Heart Attack and the poetry of Leon Zdzisław Stroiński, whose work was initially published by the Polish underground press during the Nazi occupation. A selection of her Białoszewski translation was published in the Fall 2024 Issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the author of two collections of poetry, a novel, and several chapbooks. Her most recent poetry collection is The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.

Jennifer Natalya Fink // Experimental Nonfiction // Gaithersburg, MD
Jennifer Natalya Fink is a professor of English and Disability Studies at Georgetown University. Fink is the author of eight wildly queer and queerly wild books, including All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship and her most recent novel, A Mischief from Bunny Presse. Fink is the winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction and the Dana Award for the Novel. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times and elsewhere. She performs around the world with ecofeminist legend Julie Laffin.

ankita sharma // Experimental Dance Theater // New York, NY
ankita sharma is an experimental movement-based artist and writer invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectations. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is a character-based, grungy, cheeky work of primal spirit, with physical practices rooted in Contemporary Dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora.

ankita is currently based in Brooklyn and holds degrees in both Dance and Anthropology. They have had performance work performed and presented (inter)nationally including at: Denver Art Museum, Abrons Art Center, The Barn at Lee, Dixon Place, BASE, JACK, Movement Research, and University Settlement, amongst others. ankita has received residencies and support from Djerassi, Chulitna Lodge, Art Omi, NYSCA, FCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, GALLIM, Performance Project, and more. They were also a 2026 recipient of Harker’s Life in the Arts Award.

To round out their artistic practice, ankita is also a published author who dabbles in arts criticism, including at the BIPOC Critics Lab at The Public and at thINKing DANCE. They also moonlight as an administrator for nationally-recognized arts organizations such as Sleep No More, Queer|Art, Nava Dance Theatre, and more. Across all of their work, ankita pairs artistic rigor with systems-oriented care for underrepresented artists, challenging mainstream ideologies by building networks of reciprocity between those who need it most.

Kirsten Stolle // Visual Art // Asheville, NC
Kirsten Stolle is an Asheville, North Carolina-based multidisciplinary artist working in collage, text-based images, and installation. Her research-driven practice, at the intersection of art, science, and culture, examines the global influence of agrichemical companies. Delving into propaganda and greenwashing, Stolle appropriates corporate advertising strategies and aesthetics, exposing the gap between public narratives and historical realities. Stolle’s recent projects have looked into the transition of wartime chemicals into present-day pesticides, Vietnam War-era herbicide military campaigns, and the historical ties between Bayer-Monsanto and the U.S. Government.

She is the 2026 Ekard Artist-in-Residence at Bucknell University, the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, as well as grants from the North Carolina Arts Commission, South Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Puffin Foundation. Her work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Solo exhibitions include NOME (Berlin), Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winthrop University, and the Turchin Center for Visual Arts. Group exhibitions include the Central Museum of Textiles (Poland), Balzer Projects (Switzerland), Mint Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Gregg Museum of Art & Design. Her work has been published in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Poetry Magazine, LEONARDO, and Photograph.

Kate Rhoades // Media Art // Oakland, CA
Kate Rhoades is an Oakland based artist who makes videos, paintings, and publications that employ humor to probe systems of power.

Whitney Vangrin // Performance Art // Emeryville, CA
Whitney Vangrin is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, sculpture, installation, and fermentation. Her work brings together synthetic and natural materials, including blown glass, dough, wax, latex tubing, and microbial life to explore transformation, preservation, vulnerability, and the body as a site of continual change.

Drawing from folklore, cinema, and ritual, Vangrin creates immersive works that blur the boundaries between reality and simulation, sincerity and melodrama. Through performance and sculptural interventions she fragments and reconfigures the body, isolating limbs, organs, and fluids to reveal both vulnerability and malleability. Her work seeks to move viewers from passive observation into heightened sensory engagement, creating an energetic exchange between audience, performer, and environment.

Fermentation functions throughout her practice as both process and metaphor: a means of examining preservation, interspecies symbiosis, and survival. Her work embraces cycles of dismemberment, incubation, and renewal. Emotional and atmospheric, she offers an alluring entry point into difficult subject matter, holding together both fatalism and hope.

Vangrin received her MFA from the University of California, Davis, where she was awarded the Provost’s Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She has presented performance work at MoMA PS1, the Swiss Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and ICA Philadelphia, and has exhibited and performed internationally in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Taiwan. She co-founded 1:1 in NYC and founded Night Tea, fostering relationship-centered events with fermentation-inspired menus, non-alcoholic traditions, and communal engagement.

Kaitlin McSweeney // Music Composition // Oakland, CA
Kaitlin McSweeney is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer currently living and working in Oakland. Her mom introduced her to classical singing at a young age, and her dad introduced her to synthesizers. After a couple of decades studying and performing classical repertoire, she began to focus more on her own compositions, approaching them with curiosity and improvisational sensitivity. She’s currently interested in feedback as a collaborative element, as part of an ongoing exploration of what an embodied (sensory/sensual) approach to working with electronic instruments and media can look and feel like. She is also working with Meyer Sound to learn how to compose multi-channel (6 or more) pieces, which she hopes to develop into interactive sound environments that invite audience members to participate in a tangible experience of electronic media. Embodiment and working with the body and senses have always been a central theme in her work, yet she feels it’s increasingly important with the current saturation of artificial intelligence in previously ‘hand-crafted’ realms such as writing, painting and music. While she does not want to reject the exploration of new technologies, she asks “how can we welcome them without losing touch, literally, with ourselves? How can we ally with technology so that our physicality is nourished, rather than left to atrophy?” 

Christy Chan // Visual Arts // Richmond, CA
Christy Chan works across video, installation,narrative film, object design, community engagement and public art. Informed by her early years in the rural South, her work uses both minimalism and tragic-comic approaches to question the social codes and everyday power structures that normalize racialized violence in the United States. A recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2024 Creative Capital Award, and a 2025 Kenneth Rainin Foundation Fellowship, Chan’s work has been presented throughout the U.S. and Europe, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Mills Art Museum and ICA SF in the Bay Area; Film Independent and New Filmmakers in Los Angeles; Interfilm-Kuki and Dresden International Film Festivals in Germany; New York Arts Foundation and Asia Art Archive of America in New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Utah; and other institutions. She has participated in residencies at Yaddo, Montalvo Art Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, SFFILM House, the Hermitage Artist Retreat and others. Her independent narrative film “Somewhere To Be” is screening theatrically in 30 cities across the U.S. and Europe in 2026. She is based in Richmond, California