Artist in Residence Alumni

Annie researches and depicts her connection to Mexican culture in her work. Her art is inspired by nature and her Mexican heritage. Annie has many disciplines that range from book binding, printmaking, ceramics, sewing, bead and leather work, egg tempera, gouache and drawing. Annie has shown her work in group exhibitions and solo shows in Hawaii, California, Oregon, New Mexico and Guatemala. Her work is in private collections internationally. During her residency, Annie researched the many ways in which the Colorado River shapes the lives of those living in the Southwest. Annie interviewed over 50 visitors about their relationships with water, taught Grand Canyon youth, and began painting a codex on handmade Amate paper that honors the water crisis in the Southwest. Annie shared her eight-foot-long codex alongside the codices of the summer school students at an exhibition for the public, which inspired conversations about how we honor water in our lives.

Terry was born and raised in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican and Jamaican family. She began studying classical violin at age 8 and attended the acclaimed High School of Music and Art in New York City. After college, she became a protégé of the Free Jazz movement, touring, performing, and recording with some of the most exemplary musicians of the genre. With a career spanning four decades, her performances as composer and violinist/vocalist include appearances at prestigious jazz venues and international festivals across the U.S., Western and Eastern Europe, and South America. During her residency at Grand Canyon, Terry taught a music improv workshop to the public and a music workshop to Grand Canyon high school students. She performed several pop-up improvised jazz sets on the rim and began work on several Grand Canyon-inspired musical compositions.

Julie Anand is a desert-loving artist and educator. She is currently Associate Professor in the School of Art at Arizona State University. Her projects, informed by a background in ecology and geology, often explore material culture, body/land relations and issues of interdependency. ​​​​​​​ While at Grand Canyon, Anand organized several River Print workshops where she and park visitors made cloth cyanotype murals of the canyon’s native fish species after short presentations by park fish biologists. She also worked collaboratively on several projects with longtime artistic partner, Damon Sauer. Together they created a series of time-based explorations, including an archive of seventy video portraits of visitor responses to the canyon. Sauer and Anand further created a series of large-scale photographs of the interior depths of the canyon.

Mark Chen is a photographic artist, educator and author. His practices center on the visual discourse on science and environment. He crosses media boundaries, often collaboratively, from photography to other visual art, sound art, creative writing and performance. He aims to evoke feelings that can bring about change of thoughts and behaviors. Chen’s ongoing project Pilgrimage of Light has brought him and his projector to 12 sites including iconic national parks such as Yosemite, Big Bend and Arches, where he photographed projected celestial images on geological formations. Showcasing 1.8 billion years of geology, Grand Canyon National Park was a holy grail for Mark. 

Leah Aegerter is an artist working in object-based sculpture and installation. She lives and works in Carbondale, CO, and spends much of her free-time exploring mountains and deserts of the American West on foot and raft. Using a combination of digital fabrication techniques and traditional processes in materials such as wood and steel, her work investigates her relationship to landscape and intimacy with material. To engage park visitors and the local Grand Canyon community during her residency, Aegerter hosted two in-person workshops on paper and form making. These workshops gave participants a chance to learn about aspects of Leah's sculptural process while making art that helped them look at Grand Canyon in new way.

Elijah Jamal Asani is a Nigerian-American experimental artist and educator based in Chicago. He is a self-taught music producer, designer, and filmmaker with a degree in creative writing. During his residency at Grand Canyon, Asani developed a collection of audio-visual works inspired by, dedicated to, and in collaboration with sites and themes throughout Grand Canyon. Sounds from the canyon were recorded, edited, and engineered into musical compositions. Some pieces are strictly sound-based, utilizing manipulated sounds that were found and recorded within the canyon itself and turning them into musical compositions, while other pieces incorporate visuals and audio together to tell a story.

Daniele Genadry is an artist whose practice focuses on the relationship of painting and photography, which she uses to examine the potential of an image to generate its own temporality, and sensitize our perceptions. She studied at Dartmouth College, NH (BA in studio art and mathematics, 2002) and at the Slade School of Art, London (MFA painting, 2008). To engage visitors during her residency, Genadry hosted two in-person drawing workshops near the rim of Grand Canyon. These workshops gave participants a chance to practice their artistic skills and use drawing as a means of looking at Grand Canyon in a more sustained, full, and conscious manner.

Erin Reynolds grew up dancing in a small town in rural California. She has an AA in Dance and an AS in Chemistry from Cabrillo College, a BA in Dance and Performance Studies from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in Dance from California State University, Long Beach. During her residency, Reynolds created a dance film, "The Sum of One's Parts." The film summarizes her experience as a Grand Canyon Artist in Residence and depicts the seemingly vast, endless, unbounded landscape of the canyon in comparison to the vital yet ostensibly minute role of the human body as tender of the land.

Heather L. Johnson saw her time as Grand Canyon’s Artist in Residence as an opportunity to broaden her self-awareness by examining intimately how her presence affects parts of the park and how the qualities and features of these environments affect her. Based in Houston, Texas, Johnson has been focusing her recent work on the landscapes and the people she encounters through travel. Heather conducted two guided sketch hikes during her residency in which she shared her practice of careful observation and spontaneous drawing. Participants were invited to walk attentively and select a subject to draw using all of their senses, paying attention to how the drawing makes them feel.