2026 Artists-in-Residence
We are excited to invite another cohort of artists to San Juan Island for our Artist Residencies and Artists in Community program. Below is a list of our 2026 Artists-in-Residence. Working in printmaking, ceramics, photography, textiles, and mixed media, these artists will spend 4-6 weeks with us during our residency season, which runs from May-August. Scroll on to learn more about each of them.
For past AIR participants, go here.
Zoe Nielsen
2026 Artist-in-Residence, printmedia
Zoe Nicole Nielsen is a contemporary printmaker, painter, sculptor, and speculative taxidermist making work about loss of life, grief, renewal, and human/animal relationships. She received her MFA in interdisciplinary art from Purdue University where she worked as an Instructor of Record and Printmaking Studio Technician. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio arts from Wayne State College.
Learn more about Zoe here.
Katherine Finkelstein
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Photography
Katherine Finkelstein is an artist and teacher working with the medium of photography. She is interested in art as a site of collective experience that can build communities and worlds. She received her BA from the Bard College Photography program and completed her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She runs Motherbox Gallery, an exhibition space, out of her apartment in Brooklyn, NY.
Learn more about Katherine here.
Madeleine Burns
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Ceramics
Madeleine Burns isa ceramic artist who mainly focuses on wheel thrown functional vessels. She loves combining sculptural elements to her wheel thrown pieces and taking the time to hand paint surface designs.
Learn more about Madeleine here.
Adrienne Renée Weiss
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Textiles
Adrienne Renée Weiss is a research-based artist and educator based between Chicago and San Francisco. She spins yarn, weaves, felts, welds, molds clay, and performs rituals in service of radical imagination and collective palliative care. Adrienne’s work draws on pre-modern European magic histories, lesbian poetry, and textural intimacy to lure people towards liberatory desires. She holds BA’s in Art History and American Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn more about Adrienne here.
Guadalupe Najar
2026 Artist-in-Residence, mixed media
Guadalupe Najar is a multidisciplinary artist from Austin, Texas, who explores her familial legacy through crafting, collecting, and material heritage. Lupe’s intuitive practice engages with the material, geographical, and social meanings of fiber, ceramics, and found objects in mixed-media tapestries and sculptures, utilizing aesthetic languages of tackiness and making-do found in her childhood nostalgia.
Ivy Mattson
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Ceramics
Ivy Mattson is a ceramicist and art educator from Minneapolis, MN. Her wheel-thrown and altered pottery explores nostalgia, memory, and wonder. Mattson’s work integrates stained-glass–like imagery with organic, botanical forms; using repetition, carving, and layered surfaces to examine emotional dichotomies of grief and love, loss and hope.
Learn more about Ivy here.
Cora Armstrong
2025 Artist-in-Residence, Textiles
Cora May Armstrong is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. Working predominantly in knitting, their work draws on real and imagined relationships between animals, plants, and other beings to speculate on ecologies of the present and future. Cora received their BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2024.
Learn more about Cora here.
Maya Koneval
2026 Artist-in-Residence, CerAMics
Maya Koneval is a ceramicist and educator living in San Francisco. Maya creates functional and sculptural ceramics that reflect her love of the process of working with clay. She is currently excited about the process of wood-firing, and focusing on the continuing to improve as an educator of ceramic arts.
Learn more about Maya here.
Tess Aykanian
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Ceramics and painting
Tess Aykanian is a ceramic artist, painter and educator from Los Angeles and currently located in Oakland, California. Her art practice is based around material mysteries and a quest for further understanding and questioning. She has recently been making work that centers around capturing the legacy of a plant, organism, object or event as it relates to its environment. She holds a BFA in Ceramics and Visual Studies from California College of the Arts.
Learn more about Tess here.
Claire Waterman
2026 Arist-in-Residence, Mixed media
Claire Waterman is a multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Davenport, Iowa. She has resided on Lopez Island for the past four years, learning about caring for the land and working with her hands through farming and carpentry. In her creative practice, Claire explores variations of place, light and color most often through painting and ceramics. She hopes, through varied forms of art-making, to learn to wield attentiveness, empathy, and curiosity more abundantly.
Learn more about Claire here.
Emerald Vernon-Lapow
2026 Artist-in-Residence, Mixed Media
Emerald Vernon-Lapow is a singer, songwriter, and visual artist. Emerald has written and performed a full set of original songs each summer she's been at Alchemy, in addition to learning screen printing, ceramics, and continuing her work in collage and drawing. She lives in Berkeley, California and graduated from UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, where she focused in drawing. Emerald joins us for a fifth AIR season and will be helping anchor our Artists in Community program after joining us in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.