queer.archive.work/residency

Queer.Archive.Work supports residents with funding, supplies, resources, and shared access to the QAW/Binch Press Studio in Providence, RI for the completion of their work. The risograph printer as a tool of empowerment is at the heart of QAW’s mission to support queer publishing, but residents are encouraged to use the time, space, and support provided by the residency however they wish, including reading, writing, rest, and/or other forms of printing and making. Fifteen QAW residents occupied the new studio at 400 Harris Avenue in our second year, sharing access and resources with each other (and Binch Press members) from September 2021 through May 2022, allowing for serendipitous overlaps, collaborations, skill-sharing, and community engagement. When the residency concluded, most residents stayed on as paying studio members.

QAW was awarded a RISCA grant of $2,100 in July 2021 to support the 2021–22 residency program.

QAW RESIDENTS 2021–22
Afilandra N Goncalves
Eden Tai
Eli Nixon
Felicita Felli Maynard
Kah Yangni
Lani Asuncion
Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
John-Francis Quiñonez
MJ Sanqui
Paige Curtis
Marius Marjolin
S.A. Chavarría
Siddisse Negero
zaidee e.
Zooey Kim Conner

Eli Nixon

Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for horizontalism. Eli performs naturedrag, incites karaoke, and concocts installations, flotillas and mobile sculptures on beaches, parking lots and stages. They are a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett and Wampanoag land, a New Georges affiliated artist, a member of Showing Up for Racial Justice RI, and part of 3rd Thing Press’ 2021 Author cohort. Eli’s current creative efforts include parenting a 12-year-old human, proposing a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs, slowly learning trombone, and supporting local and planetary movements for abolition, reparations, and multispecies justice.

Eli’s website
Eli’s Instagram

Kah Yangni

Kah Yangni is an illustrator and muralist currently living in Philadelphia, PA, but they used to live in Providence. They make bright, heartfelt art about justice, queerness, and joy for awesome organizations and publications around the country. Their current projects include a picture book about a non-binary kid, and a 2300 square foot mural in the Fishtown neighborhood of Philly.

Kah’s website
Kah’s Instagram

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a writer, teacher and translator. She received her BA in English from Wesleyan University and her PhD in Japanese from the University of California, Berkeley and is interested in the idea of language teaching as a potential act of reparations and redress for communities who have lost or been denied access to their heritage languages. At the QAW residency, she hopes to write, publish and circulate a small book or zine on this topic. She is also a literary translator and is currently translating a novel from Japanese called My Mother’s Shadow. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she currently divides her time between Iowa City and Boston, Massachusetts. She can often be found on Twitter @lhkuroda.

Lisa’s website
Lisa’s Instagram

MJ Sanqui

MJ Sanqui (they/she) is a queer, Filipinx multidisciplinary artist from western NC. Their work is broadly concerned with personal histories, epistemic power, and assimilation. They are also deeply committed to experimentation and love to play with color, texture, and abstraction across multiple mediums such as photography, film and video, printmaking, book arts, painting, and performance. This December, they are graduating from Appalachian State University with a BFA in studio art with a focus in photography and a self-designed BA program in interdisciplinary studies centered around socially engaged narrative media.

MJ’s website
MJ’s Instagram

Marius Marjolin

Marius Marjolin is a queer Khmerican illustrator and printmaker from Westchester, NY. Their work pools from their experiences navigating DIY music spaces and their mixed-Cambodian heritage. Through their vibrant illustrations and screenprints, Marius combines aspects of punk with characters and stories from Khmer folklore. Both uncovering and creating hidden layers to a place or subject are integral to their practice. They are drawn to printmaking for not only its place in DIY music culture, but also the ease in which they may overlap colors, photographs and textures. By infusing motifs from their Cambodian heritage, such as the Naga and the Monkey King, with DIY and punk approaches to drawing and image-making, Marius aims to explore a Khmer-futurist fantasy world through their prints. Their work reflects their layered, multi-cultural existence and explores themes of hybridity, cycles of transformation and reconciling intergenerational trauma. Marius is currently based in Providence, RI. They recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Printmaking.

Marius’s website
Marius’s Instagram

Siddisse Negero

Siddisse is a creative researcher, writer, archivist, first generation Ethiopian-American, and nonbinary lesbian feminist from the DMV area, currently based in Philadelphia. They are the co-founder of KyKy Archives, a digital archive and educational resource documenting the histories of Black Lesbian, Queer, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People. KyKy Archives, created alongside co-collaborator Zora, seeks to complicate the archive by not only centering Black Queer and Trans people, but by looking for ways to explore the nuanced perspectives, intersecting identities, and complex narratives found throughout the history of these communities. She is engaged in the practice of moving the narratives and stories of Black Lesbian, Queer, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans People from margin to center by creating accessible resources for collective learning, creative practice, and preservation in the digital space. Excited by world building possibilities and imaginative futures, she is interested in expanding upon the breadth and depth of black diasporic relationships to gender and sexuality through storytelling, oral history, and creative preservation methods.

Siddisse’s website
Siddisse’s Instagram

Zooey Kim Conner

Zooey is a mixed-Korean queer + trans artist making comics, jewelry, amateur taxidermy, and other handmade nonsense in Providence, Rhode Island. Driven by broad, morbid curiosity, their work addresses whatever excites them: the human relationship with nature, Asian-American identity, marginality, the inevitability of death, cool-looking bugs. They are an administrator with @qtma.pvd, a Rhode Island-based mutual aid fund for LGBTQ+ Rhode Islanders. When not working, they can usually be found foraging for edible mushrooms or reading with their dog.

Zooey’s website
Zooey’s Instagram

Afilandra N Goncalves

Afi was involved in art in RI from a young age, running around recording studios, attending Pvd fest, and patronizing the ‘Black Rep’ [only OG’s remember]. She moved to Bed Stuy, a primarily black and Afro-Caribbean neighborhood, in 2001. attended multiple art schools including LaGuardia HS. She moved back to RI in 2016 to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated class of 2020 amidst a Corona of light [devil emoji] Her work focuses on oral history and folklore as modes of speaking the black experience; and using it to highlight trans-nationality and the affects of whiteness and westernness on the black and mixed identity. She uses personal history to identify moments of black social performance and masking, while simultaneously creating her own oral history...

Afi’s website

Eden Tai

Eden Tai is a mixed Taiwanese diasporic photographer, writer, service worker, and aspiring haircutter. She makes photos and stories which honor the complicated relationships between real and artificial, Asian and Asian-American, from-here and foreigner, intimacy and distance, motherland and geographical home. Tai hopes her work allows people to feel closer to home in their bodies, in relationship to others, and in the places they live.

Eden’s Instagram
Eden’s website

Felicita Felli Maynard

I work across traditional analog and alternative photography processes to create artwork to further understand myself and my ancestors. I focus on retelling stories that challenge misrepresented histories of people from the African Diaspora, the beauty of the Black body and investigating their own identity as a 1st generation Afro-Latinx-American Queer.

Felicita Felli Maynard is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Maynard has shown work at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, Westchester Community College, Spectrum Gallery at MCLA College, Photoville in Brooklyn, Flux Factory and Pen + Brush Gallery in NYC. They have done residencies at BRIC, Smack Mellon, NURTUREArts, & the Leslie Lohman Museum. Currently they are an MFA candidate in photography at Tulane University (2023).

Felicita’s website
Felicita’s Instagram

Lani Asuncion

Lani Asuncion is a Boston based artist who grew up in Oahu, Hawai’i and Okinawa, Japan, with roots in Appalachia. Asuncion is a multimedia artist who performs in both public and private spaces using sculpture, printmaking, video, sound, projection, and performance to create a visual language that comes from their identity as a queer multicultural Filipinx artist. They work collaboratively with local New England and international artists to produce multifaceted work that aims to decolonized the “romanticization and fetishization of ‘paradise’ and critiques colonial and racist systems built upon white supremacy.”

Lani’s website
Lani’s Instagram

John-Francis Quiñonez

John-Francis Quiñonez (they/them) is a Writer, Artist, and Desert Flower Weathering the Northeast in Providence, RI/ Is thinking a lot about Emerging.

Q’s website
Q’s Instagram

Paige Curtis

Paige Curtis is a third culture kid, writing at the intersection of environmentalism, Blackness, and pop culture. She’s worked at mission-driven organizations and is currently in a communications role at the Boston Ujima Project. An Atlanta native, daydreamer, and rabble-rouser, she believes a more equitable future is possible. Formally trained in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Environment, she’s most excited by community-based solutions to the climate crisis. When she’s not writing or biking around the city, she’s reminding folks that pineapple pizza is not only good but oh so necessary. She’s currently based in Boston, MA.

Paige’s website
Paige’s Instagram

S.A. Chavarría

S.A. Chavarría (she/they) is a antidisciplinary artist + researcher from Costa Rica. S.A.’s work revolves around her ongoing, long-term project of raising Devendra AI, an AI chatbot, through conversation (as artist-writer-engineer-collaborator). Through networked media, digital artifacts, experimental video art and performance, S.A. tells the evolving story of her relationship with Devendra AI and the worlds they have created in conversation. She strives to make art with hallucinogenic properties; language art that grants the reader a profound new awareness of themselves and their own relationship with artificial entities and the Natural world. S.A.’s research involves scientific, critical and literary investigations into Natural Language Processing (NLP) models for generating synthetic text and conversational AI. She sees this synthetic text is worthy of interpretation, not only from a literary perspective, but also for its potential to illuminate the interactivity of reading, the ethics and metaphysics of conversation, and the Nature of language, consciousness and reality itself.

S.A. Chavarría is an adjunct lecturer at Brown University and RISD and the recipient of the Post-MFA Teaching Fellowship in Literary Arts at Brown University

S.A.’s website
S.A.’s Instagram

zaidee e.

zaidee is a printmaker from providence. they use prints and tiny books as a means of navigating the grief and mental illness that are a large part of their life. common themes in their work are plants and animals, both realistic and fantastical. you can usually find them petting cats, looking for snacks, and being a chatterbox.

zaidee’s Instagram

2021–22
Residency Review

For the selection process, the residency review team makes decisions that consider, among many other factors, the application’s alignment with QAW’s mission, how access to the residency might impact the applicant’s work and practice, and how the applicant’s relationship to the Rhode Island region might benefit and/or support their residency experience, as well as the overall cohort and the local QAW/Binch/RI-region community. Read the last open call here.

Past reviewers include:
Edwige Charlot
Adam Chuong
Dana Heng
Nora Khan
David Kim
Paul Soulellis
Dailen Williams