SESSION 2, 2026
We are excited to welcome our Session 2, 2026 cohort to Djerassi!
August 18 – September 15, 2026
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.
RK Fauth | Literature
RK Fauth is a poet who writes about ecological grief, awe, and the un/natural world. Her debut poetry collection, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees (2024), explores the relationship between species extinction and language. Playing with Bees won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry from Texas Tech University Press, and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry from The Publishing Triangle. Fauth’s poems are published in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Arc Poetry, The Columbia Review, The Shore, and several queer and environmental poetry anthologies. Fauth is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Program, and Georgetown University’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. Her work has been supported by residencies at Art Omi and The Volland Center, as well as The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, where she is a recurring botanical research artist. RK Fauth is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Imani Gaudin | Performing Arts
Imani Gaudin is an interdisciplinary dance and performing artist. She is the founder of gaudanse, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding accessibility, sustainability, and wellness-based arts practices for underserved communities of performing artist. As a performer, she currently is a movement artist with Shamel Pitts’s TRIBE. Her work has been commissioned by Baryshnikov Arts, Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance, and Churchtown Dairy. Additionally, her work has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, National Performance Network, and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Imani has been a resident artist at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, New Dance Alliance, Baryshnikov Arts, and BAAD! through Pepatián’s Dancing Futures Residency. As of recent, she was selected to be apart of the 2026 Cohort 2 for the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. In 2025, she was named a Gambit 40 under 40 Honoree, premiered her first self-produced evening length work nanibu (an interdisciplinary dance-based play), and made her international debut with her work mamihlapinatapai, in Paris, France.
Gabriel Miniberg | Music Composition
Yale-educated Puerto Rican saxophonist and composer Gabriel Mininberg uses world rhythms and film-inspired harmonies to create at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and multimedia performance. Gabriel is a 2025 Creative Capital Award finalist and has performed his original music at the Kennedy Center. As a composer, he has been commissioned by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) the Bruce Museum, and the Playground Ensemble, and has premiered original jazz, chamber, and multimedia works at the Bruce, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the Oklahoma Contemporary Art Center. He has been awarded artist residencies at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, the Jentel Foundation, Tongue River, and the Creative Center of Stodvarfjordur. His jazz quintet, Daruma, has toured the US several times, won the 2024 South Arts Jazz Road touring grant, and have appeared on NPR radio and PBS & CBS TV. Gabriel has served as a Teaching Artist at the Yale School of Music and is a 2025 semi-finalist for the Perelman Performing Arts Center’s prestigious Democracy Cycle commission award. Gabriel is a graduate of Yale University, where he earned a dual bachelor’s degree in Music (intensive major, with honors) and Astronomy. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the New England Conservatory, studying composition with Kati Agócs.
Jordan Nobles | Music Composition
JUNO award-winning composer Jordan Nobles is known for creating music filled with an “unearthly beauty” (Mondomagazine) that makes listeners want to “close (their) eyes and transcend into a cloud of music” (Discorder Magazine). Jordan has won numerous awards throughout his career including the distinguished Azrieli Music Prize (2024), a JUNO Award (2017), a Western Canadian Music Award (2018), the International Composition Competition of the Unbound Flute Festival (Brisbane, Australia 2016), the Sacra/Profana (San Diego 2013), Vancouver Bach Choir (Vancouver 2008), and Polyphonos (Seattle 2011) International Composition Competitions.
In 2017, Jordan was the recipient of the Jan V. Matejcek Award from SOCAN in recognition of “overall success in ‘New Classical Music”. He has released 11 albums of his compositions and has been performed around the world by orchestras, ensembles, and choirs. He lives in Deep Cove, BC with his wife Kelly, and child Julian.
Luling Osofsky | Journalism
Luling Osofsky is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Santa Cruz, CA, with roots in New York and Hong Kong. Concerned primarily with the entwinement of racialized and environmental violence, recent projects have investigated atomic tourism, seed banking, motherhood across species, mixed race bodies, and labor organizing within the neoliberal university. LuLing has been awarded residencies from Lighthouse Works, Art Omi, Vermont Studio Center, and Mesa Refuge and has presented creative and critical work at SFMoMA and the Getty. She has published essays in Paris Review Daily, High Country News, Orion, Long-Haul, and The Offing, with academic work forthcoming in multiple edited volumes. She is completing her PhD in History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz and is a curator for UC CAAN, a University of California climate action arts initiative.
Robin Prichard | Choreography
Robin Raven Prichard is an international artist/scholar who strives to present inscrutable, unruly dancing bodies in order to reveal the complexities of bodies in motion in both concert and Indigenous dance. With a record of thirty years choreographing dance, her work has been presented at renowned venues, including at the Sydney Opera house, L.A. Guggenheim and REDCAT theatres, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Judson Church, Movement Research, and ADF.
Her choreography is “noted for its wit and vulnerability” (L.A. Weekly), and she has been hailed as “a significant contemporary artist with an expressive vocabulary and an entrancingly total engagement” (Dance Australia). She has won awards and fellowships including an Australian Federation of University Women Fellowship, the Kahn Fellowship, the Harkness Award, Ohio Individual Artist Award, and Puffin Individual Artist Grant. Her commissions include Parramatta Riverside Theaters (Australia), State University of New York, Morehead State University, Dublin Arts Center, the intergenerational company The Dance Generators, and University of Western Sydney. Her unlikeliest commission was for American Idol, where she served as the choreographer and performer via motion-capture for the interactive video game. She has won two Fulbright Fellowships to research Indigenous dance in Australia and New Zealand. Her choreography shows a longstanding commitment to diversity of bodies on stage and with highlighting previously silenced voices and invisiblized bodies.
Larisa Usich | Visual Arts
Larisa Usich is a Bay Area-based sculptor and social practice artist exploring relationships between people, place, and materials. Through mixed-media installations using textiles, metals, ceramics and found materials, she creates spaces for listening, reflection, and shared inquiry. Her work emerges from the intersection of the personal and political, exploring body autonomy, gender norms, and the ways vulnerability, identity and belonging connect us across generations, genders, and cultures.
Her practice is rooted in feminist inquiry, ecological thinking, and a deep engagement with material processes. She pushes materials in new ways to explore narrative, history, and encourage collective meaning making. In Who Wears the Pants she deconstructed clothing conceptually and materially, gathering stories of hundreds of participants and creating large-scale sculptures with the recycled garments.
A third-generation Californian, she is deeply influenced by the landscapes of the American West, where researching family history has shaped an ongoing exploration of place, identity, and the complex legacies we inherit. Usich has taught ceramics and art programs at universities, public arts organizations, museums, schools, and juvenile justice settings. She has shown work nationally and internationally, and has held residencies at the Icelandic Textile Center and Imprint Costa Rica. She received an MFA in Spatial Arts from San José State University and a BA in Classics from Brown University.
Valkyrie Yao | Choreographer/Media Arts
Valkyrie Yao is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, researcher, and producer working across performance, moving image, installation, and editorial practice. Born and trained in China, her work is shaped by Daoist and Tibetan Buddhist cosmologies, ritual studies, posthuman inquiry, and performance studies. Across stage works, films, installations, and research-driven projects, she investigates the body as a site of transmission, memory, rupture, and symbolic material.
Yao’s practice asks how philosophical structures enter composition, how embodied knowledge becomes legible across contexts, and how performance can hold contradiction without resolving it. Her works have been presented in theaters, museums, festivals, and artist-centered platforms in the United States and internationally, including Ailey Citigroup Theater, Gibney Dance, Dixon Place, The Tank NYC, Abrons Arts Center, National Sawdust, the Ruth Page Center for the Arts, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the XV Florence Biennale. Her film works have received awards and selections from international dance film festivals in China, France, and the United States.
Yao is the Founder and Executive Director of ELSEHERE, an international arts nexus, and the Founding Editor of STRATUM Journal. Her recent support includes the Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the LMCC Manhattan Arts Creative Engagement Grant, The Laundromat Project Create Change Fellowship, the CIPA Emerging Producers Fellowship, and the CIPA x ISPA Congress Fellowship. She holds a BFA in Choreography from Shenyang Conservatory of Music and an MFA in Dance, Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance, with distinction, from Arizona State University.