Check out our 2025 Post-Grad Residents
Located in Studio 9
This competitive juried residency provides meaningful support to emerging artists who have recently completed formal academic training in the visual arts. It is an opportunity to address the critical post-graduation juncture in an emerging artist’s career.
Residents have three months of exclusive access to a studio in the Art Center. They can create and sell work, interact with the public, and connect with other arts professionals. It’s an opportunity for professional development, networking, and a chance to define a practice outside of the academic context.
Sookkyung Park (she/her)
January – April
Website:sookkyungart.com
@sookkyung_arts
Artist Bio
Sookkyung Park, originally from South Korea and now based in Maryland, U.S., is a celebrated artist with a rich history in arts and crafts. In 1982, she founded an Arts & Crafts studio in South Korea, which she successfully operated for 25 years. After moving to the U.S. in her 50s, she pursued a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts at the University of Maryland, College Park, graduating in 2016.
Park’s artistic journey has been marked by participation in both regional and international juried exhibitions, along with features in prominent publications such as The Washington Post, The Korea Times, East City Art, and Bmore Art. With decades of expertise in paper-based artworks, her signature medium, she furthered her education at Towson University, earning an MFA in 2023.
Her achievements include prestigious accolades such as the Contemporary Art Gallery Online (CAGO) Best Award in the 3-D Category in both 2020 and 2021, as well as First Prize in the 2023 “Paper Made” international competition by Fiber Art Now. Park continues to inspire with her innovative and masterful works in paper art.
Artist Statement
“In my artistic journey, I explore the intricate tapestry of human experience, drawing deeply from nature’s raw beauty, the subtle emotions of life’s fleeting moments, and cherished memories embedded in my heart. Growing up in a divided Korea, I developed a philosophy that embraces diversity and honors individual dignity. My art reflects this, intertwining similarity and difference, harmony and complexity through form, color, and texture. It’s not just visual; it’s a philosophical exploration of a world where diversity flourishes, peace transcends division, and every person’s story enriches the collective human narrative.
I use paper as my primary medium, a delicate yet powerful material that symbolizes human connection. Each piece I create consists of countless small paper fragments, folded and bound together with thread, representing the threads of human bonds. These threads weave individual stories into a cohesive whole, celebrating both vulnerability and resilience.
Through my meticulous selection of diverse papers, I strive to express unity amidst diversity. My work is a metaphor for community, where individualities coexist in harmony. Paper, with its dual nature of softness and strength, becomes a tool to explore human fragility, endurance, and the invisible connections that unite us all.”
— Sookkyung Park
Jill McCarthy Stauffer (they/them)
May – July
Website:jillmstauffer.com
@jillstauffer.art
Artist Bio
Jill Stauffer is an installation artist from Pembroke Pines, FL, currently living in College Park, MD. They are an MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2019, Jill received a BA from Middlebury College with majors in Studio Art and Architectural Studies. Jill has participated in artist residencies with NE Sculpture, Josephine Sculpture Park and Snow Farm. Notable exhibitions include the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Juried Exhibition at TF Green Airport, Currents at NE Sculpture Gallery, and LevelUp at the Brentwood Arts Exchange, where they received the Juror’s Award. Jill’s research at the intersection of art and technology has been recognized by their reception of the ArtsAmp Interdisciplinary Grant and the Clarvit Research Fellowship from the University of Maryland. In addition to their art practice, they have worked in support of community arts organizations as an arts administrator and teaching artist.
Artist Statement
“Jill McCarthy Stauffer’s work explores the transmutation of natural spaces through memory, metaphor, and digital manipulation. In local and coastal ecologies, they see metaphors for transformation, growth, cycles of death, and the hope for restoration. Mixed media installations combine personal experiences of light, sound, and shape in nature with scanning and natural samples in order to unify both qualitative and quantitative experiences of natural places. Stauffer negotiates the increasingly interconnected relationship between technology, memory, and nature — the quality of the representation of natural landscapes in digital interfaces, built with materials mined from the earth, increases as the natural environment is further degraded. At the core of the work is a sense of anticipatory grief – of fear for a future where natural spaces are primarily experienced through digital media in the absence of the original, and how this shapes our relationship with the natural world.”
— Jill McCarthy Stauffer
Micah Meyers (they/them)
August – October
Artist Bio
Micah Meyers (they/them) is a conceptual artist working across the disciplines of sculpture, installation, mark-making, and performance. Meyers is completing their BFA in Studio Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. They are currently enrolled in the prestigious Honors program, where they receive a private studio, share in group critiques with a cohort and UMD professors, and present work in several exhibitions as they develop and create their undergraduate thesis. In 2023-24, their work will be shown in two exhibitions in the Maril Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park. They also work as a curatorial and exhibition assistant for the Maril Gallery. Post-graduation, they will pursue their visual arts practice across the DMV and apply for MFA programs. Micah’s extensive artistic training includes figure drawing, acrylic painting, screen printing, performance, sculpture, and conceptual art. Their research interests include maintenance art, gender, labor, and understanding art as evidence.
Artist Statement
I am inspired by the spaces I inhabit and the people I am connected to who shape these spaces. In my art, I devote myself to attending to overlooked details from these people and places to celebrate and honor them. My natural disposition towards caretaking and maintenance fuels a hands-on process of research-by-doing: I am an artistic investigator. Once we can name something in our environment, we are more likely to see it. My art is a practice of naming and noticing: I highlight things in our everyday environment that we fail to see. I explore the traces of human impact often neglected by a preoccupied world. My art reveals the subtle signs of presence and interaction that history has been undervalued or ignored. My work is grounded in archival and archeological processes, capturing human mark-making embedded in architecture and artifacts. These remnants open pathways for me to explore connections between past and present. By collecting, transferring, and transforming these impressions, I create artworks that partially preserve the essence of these human traces, prompting viewers to consider their own bonds with place and memory.
— Micah Meyers
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy (she/they)
November – January
Website:themeowingbird.com/
@themeowingbird
Artist Bio
Adele Yiseol Kenworthy (she/they) is a 1.5 generation Korean American artist-organizer based in the Washington, D.C. area. Her work centers the AANHPI femme experience through embodied gestures of care and community in participatory performance, sculpture, and family archives to reimagine a heritage in the diaspora.
They’ve exhibited in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of Asian Art, Transformer, Rhizome, DC Arts Commission; Brentwood Arts Exchange in Maryland; and Art Basel Miami (The Fearless Artist). In 2022, she was invited to the Washington Project for the Arts’ Artist Organizer Residency and Transformer’s Exercises for Emerging Artists program. Their past community organizing collaborators include Empower DC, Chinatown Arts Studio, 411 Collective, and Rising Organizers.
Kenworthy holds her MFA in Social Practice Art with a focus in public policy as part of the inaugural cohort at the Corcoran School of Art and Design, receiving the 2022 Outstanding MFA Award.
Artist Statement
“As a 1.5 generation American with immigrant parents – in all the language and cultural divides – the only connection I have to my Korean heritage lives in embodied gestures and rituals of care that filled the silences between us. It was the way my parents found me, and the way I find community.
My work centers the AANHPI femme experience, reclaiming Korea’s entangled history of occupation and war while reimagining a heritage we carry in the diaspora. Lisa Lowe in Immigrant Acts wrote “the making of Asian American culture…[includes] practices that are partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly invented.”
In honoring this place of inheritance and invention, I use cocoji floral arranging; bongseonhwa (impatiens balsamina) floral nail dye; and the ritual of cutting fruit as vessels of visible hope–weaving participatory performance, sculpture, and family archives to retrace these fragmented memories as artifacts in our intergenerational, transnational struggle to remember.
My work is rooted in how flowers and fruit have dyed, draped, and nourished movements of resilience and belonging with a world held together that asks “what can spatializing love look like for generations to come?”
— Adele Yiseol Kenworthy