** Featured residents from left to right – Sarah Drepaul, Soeun Bae, Steven Anthony Johnson, Nancy Huang
Meet our past and current residents! Click on their names to see our interview with them
Writers in Residence (2021 – 2024)
Yamilette Vizcaino Rivera
2021
Yamilette is a Dominican American writer and educator based in Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the HUES Foundation and Sundress Academy for the Arts, and was the inaugural writer in residence at Velvetpark. She is also A Tin House and VONA alum. Her chapbook Little, Little, Little, Big, Big, Big is available from the Hellebore Press.
Mai Tran
2022
Mai is a writer and communications strategist. They were a recipient of Epiphany Zine’s 2020 Breakout 8 Writers Prize and their work has appeared in Reductress, Apogee, The Margins, Vox, The Guardian, and elsewhere. They are currently a program coordinator for Lambda Literary’s LGBTQ Writers in Schools.
Sarah Drepaul
2023
Sarah is a writer who merges poetry and filmmaking.They hold a dual BA in Film Production and English Literature from Drexel University and a documentary directing certification from Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV in Havana, Cuba. Her work has been shown at the King Manor Museum (NYC), Queer Women of Color Film Festival (San Francisco, CA), Chaya’s Chatpati Mela (Queens, NY) and more.
Nancy Huang
2024
Nancy Huang grew up in Shanghai and near Detroit. Her poetry, plays, and prose are published by The Offing, poets.org, AAWW’s The Margins, film distribution company A24, and others. Her novel-in-progress, How to Skin a Rabbit, was a finalist for the UK Queer Fiction Prize, the winner of an NYU Global Research Initiative fellowship, and chosen for a ChaNorth Residency. She has a poetry MFA from NYU. She works at a cemetery.
Visual Artists in Residence (2021 – 2024)
Gabrielle Randall
2021
Gabrielle is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She works primarily with self-portraiture in photography, sculpture, video, mixed media, and writing. In 2018 she earned a BFA in Filmmaking from the School of Visual Arts, and in 2019, Gabrielle received the President’s Scholarship Award from The New School to pursue an MFA at Parsons School of Design. Gabrielle was the visual artist in residence at Velvetpark in 2021.
Darryl Keith Babatunde Smith (b. 1992, Georgetown, D.C.) is an artist-researcher and arts educator living and working in Bad Homburg, Germany. He holds an MFA in Drawing and Anatomy from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has studied French, German, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek which he uses in conjunction with his art practice.
Steven Anthony Johnson (July) 2023
Steven Anthony Johnson II (b. 1993, Baltimore, Maryland) is a draftsperson, interpretive archivist, writer and curator living in Brooklyn, NY. They hold an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Emma Bergman
(August – December) 2023
Emma Bergman (they/she) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She creates films, installations, performances, and archives, with a focus on relationship-based practices. In 2014, Emma co-founded Call Your Mom, a multimedia performance collective whose immersive works invite audiences to connect interpersonal experiences to larger social/political dynamics.
Soeun Bae
2024
Soeun Bae is a multidisciplinary artist born in South Korea, raised in Alabama, and now based in Brooklyn. She holds a BFA in Sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She received the T&W Contemporary Visual Art Award 2023 from the AHL Foundation. Previously, she has been an artist in resident at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and NARS Foundation in Brooklyn.
