KFW is excited to announce the recipients of the summer/fall 2023 Loretto Artist Residency Program, a partnership between Sisters of Loretto and KFW. Residencies span one to three weeks at the Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky. Residents are provided with housing, a food stipend, and the option of studio space. 

Residencies are for artists who have demonstrated achievement in creating work high in artistic merit that is based on social justice issues/concerns. KFW partnered with the Sisters of Loretto, whose mission centers on working for justice and acting for peace.  

The Loretto Residency program is open to feminist social change artists and writers who reside in Kentucky. Artists with varied backgrounds, worldviews, cultural heritages, and sexual orientations were encouraged to apply. KFW is committed to making the residency program accessible to a wide range of women, trans and nonbinary people regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, educational level, economic condition, or geographic origin. 

“The Artist Residency program offers a chance for feminist artists to create, contemplate, and build community in a peaceful setting. The Sisters of Loretto share our vision of a more just world. Residents will share ideas, make connections and gain inspiration that will offer a new path toward a better world,” said Sharon LaRue, executive director of the Kentucky Foundation for Women.  

Participants include:  

Charley Allen-Dunn (she/her) of Murray, writes poems that capture moments and memories and connects them to larger issues. Her work focuses on the experiences of women and the LGBTQ community and addresses themes of addiction, generational trauma, abuse, toxic masculinity, growing up gay in the South, and love in the LGBTQ+ community. She says, “it is important for us to be represented: as a celebration and to normalize our relationships in the broader world.” Her main goal for the residency is to complete a new collection of poetry.  

Lucy Azubuike (she/her) of Frankfort, a visual artist and photographer, plans to continue her tree arts exploration project with the trees at the Loretto campus. Her photography digitally enhances “found” art in trees and explores similarities between humans and nature, particularly the devaluation of both women and nature in a patriarchal society. She says, “while women try to conceal the violence inflicted on them, trees reflect these inhuman treatments without reservations.” Her work is intended to uplift, inspire and strengthen viewers.  

Sarah Baird (she/her), of Lexington, is a journalist and author whose work primarily focuses on the intersection of food, culture, and community. During this residency, she plans to work on the nonfiction manuscript for her next book, “Shelf Stable: The Future of Rural Grocers in America,” which explores how small town grocers across the nation are at the very center of the health and wellness of the communities they serve and how we can better celebrate and respect them as critical voices and deeply informed sources about rural food, dining, and cooking.  

Melissa Mann Bean (she/her), of Louisville, is a mixed media artist who intends for her work to be informational and to evoke hope and joy, while encouraging the viewer to become more aware of art in their lives and be engaged in the world around them. During the residency, she plans to create large visual pieces about the current events surrounding gun violence in our schools. The pieces are intended to open conversation about what is happening in our schools, and to shed some light on how we can work together to help prevent more of this violence. 

Betty Beshoar (she/her) of Frankfort is an artist, painter and environmental activist. Her work addresses social justice by showing the beauty of the local landscape while raising awareness of the degradation occurring at the same time. She plans to use the residency to prepare pieces for an upcoming exhibit. 

Megan M. Bickel (she/they) of Louisville is a visual artist and writer. She plans to use the residency to create a series of paintings that reflect on current events and our relationship to the digital world, and to make progress on a philosophy book that explores how flaws in Google Vision’s API label production will negatively impact how the climate crisis is reported. She also plans to use her residency to prioritize rest, walking the property, taking photos for future work and moving slowly. 

Janet L. Boyd (she/her) of Louisville, a creative nonfiction writer, plans to work on two books during her residency that address feminism and gender justice by telling women’s stories. Her full-length memoir, “Long Division” is about the lifelong, and sometimes surprising, effects of childhood sexual violation as demonstrated by a mysterious event she experienced at the age of 12. “Life, Love, and What I Ate” is a collection of essays that focus on themes of female relationships, navigating life in a patriarchal society, budding feminism, family legacy and the role of food in human lives. 

Ann DeVilbiss (she/her), of Louisville, writes poetry that engages with the natural world and her feelings of responsibility toward the environment while considering the role of women in society, asking readers to shift their perspectives about what is expected of women and reframe their ideas via a feminist lens.  During the residency, she plans to spend time revising and editing her book-length manuscript that engages with issues of climate change as well as generating new work about art making and its intersection with feminism and her lived experience as a woman. 

Joanna Thornewill Hay (she/her), of Frankfort, is a media artist, musician and oral historian who creates films and sound-art pieces. She plans to engage in a silent retreat during the residency, where she plans to record the sounds of nature, mimic those sounds on the violin and think about the voices and stories to accompany these sounds and tones as she ponders her next public art sound installation. Her primary goal is to experience a silent retreat to nurture her creative spirit and to move forward in her artistic practice, preparing for social activism and collaboration.

Amelia Martens (she/her), of Paducah, plans to create new fiction stories, to revise ten stories, as well as prepare for publication opportunities. She plans to work on what she calls “strange little animal human stories” which centers a human experience in the natural world and ties the humans to that world in concrete ways. The stories are about us as people, how we move through the world, and how we impact the environment and each other. 

Julia C. Martin (she/her) of Covington, a visual artist, plans to work on small sculptures and print work during the residency. Her work revolves around the relationship between humans and the planet and our ability to connect. She says, “finding joy in creation is a radical act in today’s climate.” 

Ellie Miller (she/her), of Louisville, is a musician, writer and visual artist. During the residency, she plans to continue her work composing ambient/experimental music, as well as her lyrical songwriting. She plans for these works to be part of her first album as an independent artist. The topics she approaches in her writing include relationship to oneself/mental health, feelings and experiences of gender expression, and environmental issues/climate change. 

Angie Mimms (she/her), of Prospect, is a former print journalist who works in creative nonfiction and poetry. As a mother of a 24-year-old daughter with a severe epilepsy syndrome that includes intellectual, physical and behavioral disabilities, she writes to advocate for people with disabilities by creating awareness of their needs. During the residency, she plans to work on her current project, “My Beautiful One, Come with Me”, a book of devotionals for teens and adults with intellectual disabilities. She hopes her book of devotionals nurtures the spirits of people with intellectual disabilities and gives them hope in the midst of daily challenges. 

Tina Parker (she/her), of Berea, writes narrative poetry, often in the voice of women whose stories have been forgotten. During her residency, she plans to research and write poems about how women in Appalachia have been portrayed throughout history, specifically their roles as healers and leaders in their communities, and call into question stereotypes about Appalachian places and people. She plans for these poems to become part of a full-length collection of poetry currently titled “Appalachian Survey.” 

Sarah Pennington (she/her) of Louisville is a writer and visual artist who writes about her lived experience as a queer, disabled Appalachian woman as well as the experiences shared with her by others in her family. During this residency, she plans to complete a chapbook of poems that reckons with Appalachian identity and to pursue publication. 

Ashlee Phillips (she/her) of Louisville is a multidisciplinary artist who creates visual art via photography, film, and immersive installations. Her work is rooted in addressing social justice concerns as it relates to the BIPOC community and strives to build community by focusing on cultural equity, mental health advocacy, and the arts.  During the residency, Ashlee plans on creating the framework for an upcoming photo series exhibition.  

Tatiana Rathke (she/her), of Louisville, is a visual artist who observes the natural world in a mindful way, and creates pieces that evoke animals, plants, and feelings felt in nature using a variety of mediums (paint, transformed photography, digital collage, ink, and pencil drawings). This work represents time spent in nature as a feminist artist and shares her perspective of what she has been particularly paying attention to while in natural spaces. During the residency, she plans to start work on three new pieces and begin working on a larger scale than in previous work. 

Marcia Holloway Ross (she/her), of Crestwood, is a visual artist. She creates primarily with watercolor and acrylic both on paper and canvas and sometimes uses found objects to create abstract patterns of circles, dots, and pill-shaped brush marks. During the residency, she plans to continue using paper products that her children have used by incorporating all the composition books they bring home at the end of the school year. The intention is to highlight the number of disposable products we rely on to raise our children in our society. By taking the remnants of her children’s schoolwork or scribbles and doodles that clutter parents’ homes and incorporating them into her process, she is taking the refuse that is traditionally left as a burden for the female caregiver and making something beautiful and new. 

Leigh Claire Schmidli (she/her), of Lexington, is a fiction writer whose writing explores questions of connection, as well as self-discovery and the elusive balance between individual truth and responsibility to others. During her residency, she plans to revise and finalize her book in which her main characters are a young mother and her adolescent daughter. The book explores questions about motherhood, caregiving, and female sexuality and explores the expectation of service and sacrifice in women’s relationships. 

Mandi Fugate Sheffel (she/her), of Jackson, plans to work on her essay collection of creative nonfiction titled “The Nature of Pain” which is currently under contract with the University Press of Kentucky. The collection focuses on her ten-year battle with substance abuse during the mid-nineties and early two thousands. The pieces give a glimpse of addiction from the inside and address the part Purdue Pharma and OxyContin played in the perpetuation of addiction in the region. She wants the book to help change the narrative around addiction and push back against the stigma associated with substance use disorder. 

Julie Anne Struck (she/her), of Berea, a writer and visual artist, plans to complete editing on three interconnected memoirs entitled “Semesterland,” “Enduring Work,” and “The Art Bag Lady,” and do the research and outreach necessary to get excerpts to agents and to literary journals for publishing. In between writing sessions she will also be working on two large drawings that visually explore the concept of living joyfully and fully with disability. 

Lacey Trautwein (she/they) of Louisville, a literary artist, writes in various mediums and forms that examine and subvert misogyny, gender, and culture in horror and its subgenres. During the residency, Lacey plans to work on the first draft of a nonfiction book, “Champagne Problems: A Feminist Examination on Gender, Culture, and Monster Brides in Horror” and to work on the first draft of a novel, “The Discovery,” that captures millennial burnout–and millennial rage–while exploring women’s roles in present day and medieval times.