RESIDENCY — MURMURATION

Murmuration’s artist residency on a family farm in Wisconsin invites artists to create new work shaped by the Driftless region’s ecology and layered history.

2026 Fall Artists-in-Residence

Jonathan Lanier

Jonathan Lanier is a Chicago-based sculptor and educator working primarily with metal. His practice examines how materials behave in relation to one another through fabrication, casting, and repeated experimentation. He builds structures, channels, and systems that allow materials to move, resist, deform, accumulate, and lock into one another, often using the processes of metalworking as both a means of making and a subject of investigation. His current work focuses on acts of mating between metals, particularly steel and iron with aluminum and bronze, where fabricated structures and molten material become physically entangled.

Lanier received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023 and his BFA from the University of Alabama in 2019. He is the manager of the 280 Metal Shop at SAIC, where he also serves as a part time lecturer in the Sculpture department. Lanier’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation and Penland School of Craft, as well as the Material Works Award and the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). He continues to develop his practice through residencies, teaching, community-based metal working events, and work in his studio.

Hesam Salehbeig

Hesam Salehbeig is an Iranian artist, writer and educator based in Chicago working across performance, film, sound, and installation. Their practice is focused on transformation, embodiment, and displacement, with particular attention to how perception shapes experiences of selfhood and belonging. Moving through territories of queerness, diaspora, spirituality, desire, and memory, they bring ritual, repetition, and participation into dialogue with live and mediated technologies, using cameras, sound, and projection to alter the relationship between body, image, and audience. They create encounters that unsettle familiar ways of seeing and being where identity becomes less fixed and other possibilities of presence and becoming can emerge.

Their work and artistic collaborations have been presented in Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, Austria, France, and Bangladesh. Salehbeig received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rob Croll

Rob Croll (b. 1993; Asheville, NC) is a multimedia artist, writer, and educator living in Chicago. His recent work moves between photography, installation, and performance to examine the politics of space and the unstable relationships between landscape, body, architecture, and image. Drawing from a background in improvised music, he applies the idea of extended technique to the camera, often purposefully misusing the technologies and materials of photography in search of concrete ways to represent abstract ideas. Croll has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally and attended residencies in Italy, Germany, and the United States. He holds a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship for photography.

Alongside his artistic practice, Croll has worked extensively as a translator and editor, with a focus on contemporary Latin American literature. His translations have been featured in such places as Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, The Paris Review, Circumference Magazine, Literary Hub, and Granta, among others.

Camille Casemier

Camille Casemier is an artist based in Chicago whose work engages the performativity of images, objects, and everyday situations. Working across video, image, text, and live and virtual performance, she develops projects that emerge from the contexts she inhabits, often attending to performances already underway. For the past several years, her practice has been shaped in dialogue with her employment in a resale shop, where objects circulate through shifting systems of value and attention. Informed by studies in postmodern dance and puppetry, her work emphasizes liveness and the social indexicality of ordinary gestures and materials, frequently constructing situations in which perception becomes reciprocal or unstable and images appear to look back.

Casemier studied dance at The New School, holds a joint BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan, and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of Jelly Troupe, a cross-continental expanded cinema and experimental theater collective working in partnership with the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China. Since 2024, she has taught in the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her work has been presented internationally through lecture-performances, screenings, and exhibitions at the Hong Museum and Wenzhou-Kean University Library in Wenzhou, China; the Performative Drawing Forum in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and the Performance Art Studies/Streifen Festival between Görlitz, Germany, and Zgorzelec, Poland. Additional performances and projects have taken place at Foreign & Domestic in New York, Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in collaboration with Selena Kearney at the Field Museum in Chicago. camille-casemier.com

2026 Summer Artists-in-Residence

Sofía Fernández Díaz

Sofia is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Mexico City, working between Chicago and Mexico. Her practice explores the relationships between materiality, memory, and environment. Through an intuitive approach that blends traditional and contemporary craft techniques, she investigates the hidden connections between processes, working with fibers, natural dyes, beeswax, and found materials to create tactile narratives of transformation and decay.

Sofia's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Oaxaca (MACCO), Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and Sean Kelly Gallery. She has been presented at international art fairs including VOLTA Basel, Zona MACO, and EXPO Chicago. She is a recipient of the Newcity Breakthrough Artist Award (2025) and the Re/Match Artist Award, and received both an honorable mention and first place at the Rufino Tamayo Biennial. She was also a resident at the Hyde Park Art Center, Proyecto ACE in Buenos Aires Argentina and Casa Wabi in Oaxaca.

Sofia holds an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a postgraduate degree in Visual Anthropology from CIESAS in Mexico City. She is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. sofiafernandezdiaz.com

Sofía Gabriel

Sofía Gabriel is a Mexican artist, dancer, and arts administrator based in Chicago. Her work explores the relationships between movement, language, and politics. Grounded in the liminal space of performance, she approaches improvisation as a method for experimentation, play, and embodied knowledge. Trained in classical and contemporary dance, Sofía expanded her practice beyond technique-driven frameworks to engage in somatic exploration and interdisciplinary dialogue, questioning structures of power and creating new forms of expression and relation.

She performs with the Space Movement Project and has been an artist-in-residence and fellow at High Concept Labs in Chicago and Proyecto Ace in Buenos Aires. Her work has been presented at venues including High Concept Labs, Experimental Station, Dovetail Dance Studios, Comfort Station, Elastic Arts, and the Chicago Cultural Center.

Her ongoing collaborative project ciclos, with multidisciplinary artist Sofía Fernández Díaz, has been presented at High Concept Labs, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and Compound Yellow in Chicago; Proyecto Ace in Buenos Aires; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, Mexico.