Ethan Mermelstein is a writer/director based in Queens, New York. His grounded, dark comedies explore the discomfort that surfaces when familiar social rules break down, often blurring the boundaries between narrative and documentary. His short films have starred Tony- and Golden Globe-nominated actors, as well as his grandmother, dentist, and a taxi driver he befriended while working as a hotel doorman. His films have screened at festivals worldwide, including Palm Springs ShortFest, New Hampshire Film Festival, NoBudge, Omeleto, Indie Memphis, Seattle International Film Festival, and Mammoth Lakes. His screenwriting has received recognition from the Panavision New Filmmakers Grant and the Sloan Science Foundation. A Catwalk resident in summer 2023, he returns to develop his feature screenplay, SATISFY MY NEEDS.

https://ethanmermelstein.com/

Affiliation: Columbia

Zhi Wei Hiu is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC who attended Catwalk in 2024 as a collaborator. Trained in analogue photography, they approach making and printing images as a sensuous process that connects the body with the materiality of the image. Working with silver, wax, and glass, they explore alternative image-making methods and the resonances created by combining disparate materials, forms, and gestures. Their practice also examines ornamentation's historical and cultural significance in relation to self-expression. Creating objects for personal adornment and spatial decoration, they consider ornamented objects essential extensions of the body and layered vessels for conveying meaning.

https://www.zhi-wei.co/

Affiliation: Collaborator

Josie Bettman is a choreographer and performing artist dedicated to the ongoing act of transformation. Her work explores self-authorship through physical presence, blending the imaginary with the actual. She has presented work in New York at PAGEANT, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Cathy Weis Projects, Bossa Nova Civic Club, Dripping Festival, and Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair. Internationally, her work has been presented at POUSH and Galerie Les filles du calvaire in Paris.

IG: @scum_network

Affiliation: Collaborator

Maite Iribarren Vázquez creates sculptures, installations, and interventions that question standardized forms and explore the body, labor, and cultural specificity. Drawing on her background in structural engineering and upbringing between Cuban Miami and the Basque Country, her work responds to the visual homogenization of these once-distinct landscapes. Through satirical sculptural systems, she investigates how humanity slips into industrial, infrastructural, and architectural forms. Her practice combines metals and polymers from mass-produced consumer goods and construction materials with traditional metalworking, artisanal goldsmithing, and digital fabrication techniques.

https://maiteiribarren.com/

Affiliation: Collaborator

Julia Solomonoff is an Argentine-American filmmaker, a Columbia University graduate, and a tenured professor at NYU Tisch Graduate Film. She has written and directed award-winning feature films, including Hermanas, The Last Summer of la Boyita, and Nobody’s Watching, as well as documentary series and television projects. She recently produced The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, which won top prizes at Locarno and San Sebastián and was selected for Telluride. Her next feature, Off Peak, is set in the Hudson River Valley and explores housing insecurity, racial tensions, and gentrification. After completing a screenplay draft at Catwalk in July 2026, she returns to continue her research and deepen connections with the Catskill community.

Affiliation: NYU

Keika Okamoto is a Japanese visual artist based in New York and Japan. Working across drawing, painting, printmaking, and installation, her practice explores nature, with a particular interest in the transcendent and the role of spirituality in contemporary life. During previous stays at Catwalk, she focused primarily on drawing. She will continue developing her drawing series through observation of the Catskills and Hudson Valley while exploring the possibility of extending her practice into installation, allowing forms and images emerging from observation and imagination to take shape within the natural environment.

https://www.keikaokamoto.com/

Affiliation: NYU

In 2024, Mark Gallay and I had a productive residency at Catslair during which we completed the first version of the soundtrack to my short film "The Impossible Garden." We worked with interviews, collaborative writing, recording and editing to complete the first version of this short film. Today I feel that aspects of this project are still unresolved, and that the project may be much larger I originally thought it was. I think that the project needs to return to writing and music, exploring other possibilities that we have not yet imagined.  The original short film completed during our 2024 residency seems like a first step to something much bigger. The grounds of Catwalk always activate our unique memories in the Hudson Valley and inspire us to delve deeper and explore further as artists. We look forward to revisiting the quiet and beautiful natural environment that has become so familiar to us and continues to inspire our work.

Affiliation: SAIC

Zoe Valery is writing with/within/into/through/despite/from/toward/as film. The reverse is true. She is interested in prepositions, positionings, liquid borders, and vice versas. It was at Catwalk, in the summer of 2023, that she began a text that turned into her first screened film. She is thrilled to find herself back in the same creative haven by the Hudson River this fall as she turns—just as tides do—into an essay her latest documentary, Batalla Naval (to premiere at Rotterdam in 2027): Mirroring U.S.-Venezuela tensions at sea, father and daughter play Battleship, as they have done remotely for a decade apart. Behind the screen of war games, they find oil, petro-magic, and each other by the Lake of Maracaibo when she returns to her country.

Affiliation: Columbia

Mikey Rose is a professional amateur, a community builder and theater experimenter.  As an actor/singer/playwright/composer/teaching artist, Mikey is constantly crafting new musical theater experiences. Mikey received his BM in Musical Theater Performance from Belmont University and his MFA from the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at TISCH/NYU (2020 Frederick Loewe Scholarship for Musical Composition, Grad Student Org Co-Pres). Mikey has co-created over a dozen scores/shows and produced and performed them at venues all over the world. Mikey is currently focused on new ways to share stories musically with a modern audience. His work is community-focused, inspired by the environment and constantly searching for more meaningful ways to connect. This is Mikey’s second time at the Catwalk Residency, where he will be continuing work on “SLEEPYHEAD”, an immersive folk-rock musical re-telling of Rip Van Winkle he’s been composing. Mikey hopes to find inspiration in the Catskills once again!

Website: https://www.themikeyrose.com/

Affiliation: NYU

Alex Chang is a harpist, composer, and improviser working across jazz, experimental music, and contemporary composition. Performing on acoustic and electric harps, she is a member of the Rock City Falls Trio and has appeared at EMPAC, Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, and the Banff Centre. A 2025 Art Connects award recipient, she co-founded and co-directs the nonprofit Improv Spaces. At Catwalk, I will develop Afterworld: A Lament for the Living, a composition for large instrumental ensemble and spatialized electronics exploring lament, human connection, and renewal amid ecological and social crises. Drawing on symphonic traditions, I will experiment with harp, voice, percussion, and electronics to create shifting sonic relationships that invite reflection on our responsibilities to one another and the natural world.

Website: https://alexchangmusic.wordpress.com/

Affiliation: Collaborator

Amanda Samimi is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. In her multi-disciplinary work –– across narrative and experimental film, drawing, painting, and music –– she aims to integrate the observable world with the imagined. Her work surrounds themes of nature, perception, and mystery. This is her second stay at Catwalk, where she will work on music composition with collaborator Drew Björkstén.

Website: https://amandasamimi.com/

Affiliation: Columbia

Drew Björkstén is a writer, editor, and researcher from Wyoming. She received an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University in 2026 and a B.A. from NYU Gallatin in 2020. She’s worked for publications such as Cabinet, Off Assignment, Narratively, and the Women Film Pioneers Project. Drew makes music in her free time.

Website: https://juliannabjorksten.com/

Affiliation: Collaborator

Marcus Scott is a playwright, musical theatre writer, opera librettist, and cultural critic whose work explores the subcultures, contradictions, and power structures shaping communities of color, particularly within the Black diaspora. Blending realism, satire, horror, mythology, music, and popular culture, he reimagines American history and regional folklore through a Black cultural lens. His work examines how people create identities, mythologies, sanctuaries, and communities in response to displacement, exclusion, and inherited histories, exploring imagination as both a form of resistance and a means of reshaping reality. His plays include Tumbleweed, Sibling Rivalries, and There Goes the Neighborhood. The Robert Chesley/Victor Bumbalo Foundation Award has recognized his writing, and his cultural criticism has appeared in The New York Times, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, and The Brooklyn Rail. At Catwalk, he may further develop his explorations of Black theatrical language, overlooked subcultures, and the intersections of identity, history, and popular culture.

IG: @therealmarcusscott

Affiliation: NYU

Adin Dobkin, who visited Catwalk in 2021 and 2023, is the author of the forthcoming These Bones Can Speak: A Border Fable of the Progressive Era and Sprinting Through No Man’s Land: Endurance, Tragedy, and Rebirth in the 1919 Tour de France, named a 2022 coup de coeur by the American Library in Paris. His essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, and the LA Review of Books, among others. During his stay, Adin will be working on a novel about an archivist, her late father, and the conversion of a home into a museum. 

Website: https://www.adindobkin.com/

Affiliation: NYU

Sean is a Canadian writer and composer living in NYC. Most recently, his musical Saint Sebastian, with music by Jinhee Kim, was off-Broadway at the Theater Center's Incubator Festival, and was part of Toho Stage's Songwriters Showcase in Tokyo, Japan. Saint Sebastian has also been presented by the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Barn, and the NYU Tisch New Musical Theatre Workshop. Sean's musical The Covenant, a queer re-telling of the story of David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel, was recently developed at the Catwalk Art Institute. His song "One Day", with music by Paulie Pecorella, won the Drama League's Anthem for the Future of Theatre. Sean has an MFA from NYU's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

This is Sean's fourth residency at Catwalk. He is grateful to have developed work here in 2021 (where he first met his co-habitants and now friends Durra Leung and Adin Dobkin), in 2023, and in 2025. At this residency, Sean will be working with Durra on the earliest stages of a new comedy horror play, working title: Thank You for Applying

Website: https://www.seanbarrettmccabe.com/about

Affiliation: NYU

Durra Leung is a Guangzhou-born, NYC-based multilingual writer and composer whose genre-bending work finds humor and heart in life’s absurdity. He has written musicals, operas, scores for film and dance, as well as plays and essays. His artistic practice bridges cultural, linguistic, and stylistic boundaries, often centering Chinese identity, immigrant experience, and queerness. Most recent productions include The People vs. American Cheese (Chicago’s Thompson Street Opera Company, NYC’s American Opera Projects), Hey Hey (NYC’s Episodic Theatre Project), and the revised Thoroughly Modern Millie (Japan’s Toho Company). His current projects include Durra Leung’s Lullabies for Motherf*ckers Trilogy, which has been developed at Catwalk. This is Durra's sixth Catwalk residency since 2021. He is grateful for the opportunity to return with Sean and Adin, this time with a collaborative project Thank You for Applying, a comedy horror play.

Website: https://www.durraleung.com/

Affiliation: NYU