"As artists we are not singular, we are constantly engaging in dialogues with other art, maybe it be of the past, or of our peers and mentors. Thanks to the Djerassi Program, lasting friendships have formed throughout this month, and I am absolutely certain that the art of these new friends will in some way or another inform my own practice in the future." Monika Zobel (2018)
Current Artists in Residence
Session 2 Artists | April 2 – 30, 2024
Learn more about the current residents below!
Allyson Morgan | Drama | New York
Allyson Morgan is a New York based writer, producer, performer, and the founder and Executive Director of the award-winning film and theatre collective F*It Club. Her first short film Need For Speed (Dating) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, while her next short, Sitting, made its world premiere at SCAD Savannah Film Festival and won “Outstanding Narrative Short” at Tallgrass Film Festival. First Date, her newest short film produced by 20th Digital Studio, is currently airing on Hulu in their “Bite Size Halloween” series. Allyson adapted First Date into a feature film for Hulu, titled Jagged Mind, which the LA Times called “edgy” and “powerful.” She has also been selected for the New York Stage and Film Filmmakers’ Workshop, been awarded “Best Teleplay” at Omaha Film Festival, twice been a top ten Finalist for Cinequest, a Finalist at Stowe Story Labs, and a Semi-Finalist at Austin Film Festival. Additionally, she has been awarded an Ensemble Studio Theatre/Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Commission, an NG Art Creative Residency in France, a Monson Arts Residency in Maine, a Wassaic Project “Haunted Mill” residency, and multiple Juno Leadership Residencies through the Omega Institute. Allyson was a part of the Webby Award-winning producing team for Dave Holstein and Alan Schmuckler’s musical podcast “Wait, Wait, Don’t Kill Me,” and she also co-created and produced “Ghosted,” an AR experience which was awarded “Most Innovative Immersive Experience” at North Bend Film Festival. She has written two original novels for Tapas media, DON’T WANT TO REMEMBER YOU and THE PERFECT PLACE, reaching almost 400K views online.
https://www.allysonm.com/
Amanda Rizkalla | Fiction| Chicago, Illinois
Amanda Rizkalla is a 2023-24 Steinbeck Fellow at San José State University. Last year, she was the 2022-23 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appears in Boston Review, No Tokens Journal, The Fabulist, and elsewhere. A graduate of Stanford University, she has been awarded a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, Monson Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the Kemper K. Knapp Graduate Fellowship.
Blanca Bercial | Poetry | San Francisco
Blanca Bercial uses language and sound to investigate and observe the individual and collective experience of common public spaces. Originally from Madrid and based in San Francisco since 2018, she works in the field of Contemporary Art practices and Sound Studies. Blanca graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Master of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art, 2020. She has presented her research work on Sound Studies at the 2021 ReVIEWING Black Mountain College International Conference; the 2nd International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS) of the Grupo de Estudos em Imagens, Sonoridades e Tecnologias of Brazil, 2021; and at the Leonardo Art and Science Rendezvous (LASER Talks) Stanford, 2020. Blanca writes poetry, short story, and essay for different publications and has recently published a collection of poetry Trash Poems (La Granja Editorial, 2020). She is also an art practitioner, in her work, she researches the idiosyncrasy of silence to investigate its ambiguity, its uncertainty and inhabit its contradictions. She was an artist in residence at Tsonami Arte Sonoro in Valparaíso (Chile) in 2022. She has exhibited work in San Francisco, New York, Aguascalientes (Mexico), and Lisbon (Portugal). She has been awarded the 2020 Outstanding Thesis Award from the San Francisco Art Institute, the Anne Bremer Memorial Library’s 36th and 37th Annual Artists’ Book Contest Award.
Erin Bregman | Play Wright | San Francisco
Erin Bregman is a San Francisco based playwright and librettist whose work has been described as making “an impossible story come to life” (DC Theater Scene). Her work has been produced and developed around the country, including at Washington National Opera, The Hot Air Music Festival, Just Theater, Rorschach Theater, 6NewPlays, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, The Brick, Inkwell, Profile Theater, American Conservatory Theater, The Lark, The Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Impact Theater, and PlayGround. Awards and residencies include Zoo Labs, the Playwrights Foundation, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and PlayGround. She currently lives, works, and writes in Sebastopol, California.
Giada Palmisano | Choreography | Firenze, Italy
Giada started her dance formation at a young age in the south of Italy focusing on Horton, Graham, ballet, hip hop, and house dance. She started working with Eleina D.dance company at 20 years old. She then started her dance journey in Berlin, London, Israel, China, Rome, and Paris attending professional dance formations and workshops with several teachers and dance companies, among which: Hofesh, Batsheva, Rambert, Tavaziva,Kibbutz, Vocab, Protocol. In Berlin, she met the choreographer Alessio Trevisani who asked her to join his dance theater company in Leipzig and so she did. She then attended the dance journey program with the Kibbutz dance company in Israel where she had the opportunity to work with the dancers of the company among which was Olga Stetsyu. There is where she started creating and dancing new experimental choreographies. She then moved to China to study martial arts, kung fu shaolin with Shifu Shi Yan Jun, and then she won a scholarship to attend the international program at Vivo Ballet in Rome with Enzo Celli; the same year she danced with his company bringing “Fragile” at Quinzena de dança de Almada in Portugal. She danced on a music video for DJ Theo Parrish from Detroit and then for Garrett Shider from Pfunkadelic and for drag Queen Tia Kofi. She collaborated on dance films with Domenico Maffei, Benjamin Brooklain Sanou, and Michelangelo Visconti. She trained in Paris and Florence, working in dance residencies and choreographing for a pole dance company, training in pole dance, jam, and freestyle sessions focused on experimental creations, new ways of expressing herself and collaborating with other artists. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Dance Practice and Performance from Roehampton University, London and she has many working experiences with several companies and choreographers among which Maxine Flasher-Duzgunez for which she just got invited for Djerassi residency in the Redwoods in California, Enzo Celli, Elisabetta Minutoli, Alessio Trevisani, Georgia Tegou, just to name a few.
Jin Zhu | Visual Arts | Richmond, VA
Jin Zhu is an Oakland-based multi-disciplinary artist who works with video and text to examine local housing and environmental justice issues. Her practice often involves interviews with impacted communities, public document queries, collaboration with activists and collectives, attending meetings with regulatory agencies, direct action documentation, and visits to sites of contamination, displacement or colonization. Her toolkit consists of cameras, conversation and, increasingly, code. She has presented or exhibited work at SFMOMA, BAM/PFA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Southern Exposure, SF Arts Commission Galleries, and the Cantor Arts Center, among others. She holds an MFA from UC Berkeley. Currently, she is particularly interested in conversing about archives, storytelling games, knots, and diving birds.
Maxine Flasher-Düzgünes | Dancer | Mill Valley, CA
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is a poet, educator, dance artist, and former US-UK Fulbright candidate from Mill Valley, CA, holding recent artistic residencies at Djerassi, Stapleton, andSafehouse Arts. Maxine received a B.F.A. in Dance (magna cum laude) from NYU Tisch School of the Arts where she danced in the works of Sidra Bell, Lar Lubovitch, Wayne McGregor, and Trisha Brown. While in New York, she guest performed with Isadora Duncan Dance Company, Heidi Latsky Dance, Logos Dance Collective, and NUUM Collective. She supplemented her training at San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, performing the works of Ohad Naharin, Christian Burns, Amy Seiwert, Eléonore Valère Lachky, and Vittoria De Ferrari Sapetto. In the Bay Area, she guest performed with the NETWORK project, Monsoon Dance Company, Eclipse Dance Theatre, CALI & Co Dance, and Hamilton’s David Diggs. Maxine also holds an M.A. in Dance Philosophy & History (with distinction) from University of Roehampton London, where she joined the team of Dance Art Journal, a magazine covering the global independent dance sector, and began her latest commission as a choreographer for a feature-length dance film exhibited at World Stage Design 2022 in Alberta, Canada. Her dance films have screened worldwide with 92NY’s Future Dance Festival (New York), kNOwBOX Dance Film Festival (Texas, South Korea & Mexico), Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (Colorado), and SzólóDuó International Dance Festival (Hungary). Her ongoing project, strikethrough-score.org, described by choreographer Kyle Abraham as a “beautiful blend of poetry and dance” is a digital platform where poets can generate choreographic scores for dancers, and has been presented nationwide at Noori/TWIG Media Lab (Salt Lake City), Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (New York), and Mark Foehringer Dance Project (San Francisco). Her latest publications are heart-shaped box, a poetry chapbook from Ghost City Press (2022), and through Eileen, a young-adult novella from VerbalEyze Press (2020). She currently teaches with CalPoets in the Schools and Poetry Out Loud and mentors youth writers at Marin Poetry Center and FastForward Magazine.
https://www.poeticabythebay.com/
Mobina Nouri | Media Arts | San Francisco, CA
Mobina Nouri is an Iranian-American Multi-disciplinary artist based in San Francisco whose practice reflects her personal history as a female immigrant. Nouri received her BA in Performance art and MA in Art and Design from Tehran Art University, and her PhD in Creativity from City University London, UK. Working across a variety of media, the artist mines her country’s tradition of storytelling, often turning to Persia’s philosophies and mysticism to contemplate and reconsider the complexities which she bears witness to in the contemporary moment. Explorations of the body, the self, gender, unity and collective approaches are central to her practice which she approaches through a reimagining of linguistic and social schemas.
Mobina has exhibited internationally across a range of group exhibitions in Iran, United Kingdom and the United States. Her work is included in private collections and exhibited in de Young Museum San Francisco, and has been featured in local and international publications. Nouri received the 2020 MOZAIK Future art award, 2020 Juror’s Choice in “Art Saves Humanity” Competition Including Jerry Saltz, Marine Tanguy, Christine Cuan and Poppy Simpson and 2019 Juror’s choice, San Francisco Women Artists Gallery. She is the selected Jury of “Re-Imagining Democracy” exhibition in 2021 MOZAIK Future Art Award, and is recently focusing on the “Women Life Freedom” movement in her art practice including performance of “ The wind in my hair” at the Legion of Honour museum, San Francisco.
Wayne Vitale | Composer | El Sobrante, CA
Wayne Vitale has spent most of his life immersed in the music of Bali, Indonesia – researching, documenting, performing, composing. He is past director of the fifty-member California-based group Gamelan Sekar Jaya and has composed for the Lightbulb Ensemble, working at the interface of Balinese and Western music traditions. His label Vital Records releases recordings of new and traditional music from Bali. He is also a member of Insitu Recordings, supporting their work to commission, document, and promote new music in Bali. Recently his obsessions with the idiosyncrasies of bronze gamelan tunings have led to explorations of non-human-designed, non-equal-tempered, metallic sound worlds.
https://www.vitalrecords.ws/about