Drawn together in graduate school by a shared love of experimentation and play, Michelle Inez Hinojosa and Barbara Pearsall have built a collaborative practice centered on analogue animation, immersive installations, and vibrant abstraction. Their work explores movement, optical toys, and transformative viewing experiences. During their residency at Catwalk this summer, they will prepare artwork for their first collaborative exhibition, Under the Tent: Whirling & Flickering, featuring kaleidoscopic imagery, flickering abstractions, projection mapping, hidden elements, and hand-cranked mechanisms that shift perception. Their first public artwork, Turnabout Folly, will debut in Lansing, Michigan, in Fall 2026.

Website:

https://michelleinezhinojosa.com/

https://www.bpearsall.com/

Affiliation: Penn State

Ben Sandman began work on his novel at Catwalk in 2021 and is excited to return this summer to finish the book, which is set in upstate New York. His fiction has appeared in Story, Joyland, and Stone Canoe, among others, while his criticism has been published in The Nation, The New Republic, and Los Angeles Review of Books. A graduate of Vassar College, he holds an MFA in Fiction from Oregon State University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati. Born and raised in the Catskills, he currently lives in Decatur, Georgia.

Website: https://ben-sandman.com/

Affiliation: Vassar

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. At Catwalk she will work on an experimental film that engages with themes of nature, perception, and mystery, and is inspired by Persian mysticism. 

Website: https://amandasamimi.com/

Affiliation: Columbia

Geoffrey Giller has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia and a master of environmental science from Yale. His work integrates themes of queerness, American history, masculinity, and the intersection of the cultivated and the natural environment. As a science journalist, he has published work in the New York Times, Scientific American, Discover, and elsewhere. At Catwalk, Geoffrey will work on revising his first novel, This Is All We Get, a love story between two WWII veterans set on an apple farm in central New York in the early 1950s 

Affiliation: Columbia

Vito Adriaensens, (he/him) is a Belgian filmmaker, scholar, and Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. He is a co-author of Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema and the author of Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema. As a filmmaker, he works mainly on celluloid, and his first feature is the upstate anthology film Ovid, New York. At Catwalk, Vito will be working on Toward the Light, a sweeping 1870s-set novel in which three disparate lives converge in a dramatic love triangle on the Hudson River. 

Website: https://www.varowlands.com/

IG: @vitorowlands

Affiliation: NYU

The desveladas collective brings together poet Sheila Maldonado, journalist Macarena Hernández, and fiction/nonfiction writer Nelly Rosario in a collaborative exploration of memory, migration, ancestry, and place. During their residency, the trio will continue developing a sequel to “Arbographies/Arbografías,” originally anthologized in A Mouth Holds Many Things (Fonograf Editions, 2024), edited by Jyothi Natarajan and Dao Strom. The original fotoessay presented a series of “tree dispatches” from New York City and deep-south Texas, weaving together ancestral stories rooted in the United States, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. Their new project, “Arbographies II: Sky Below, Roots Above,” will continue these arboreal conversations from the Hudson Valley, exploring themes of fire, water, land, and migration.

Affiliation: Columbia

Laura Melnicoff is a classically-trained cellist based in Albany, New York. This is her first stay at Catwalk. She will be here together with her collaborator, flutist Melanie Chirignan. We have a flute and cello duo, Duo Envol, and will be working together on compositions we are developing, including a work that we will record at a Looking Glass Arts Neighborhood Recording Residency. They will also use this time to work toward becoming their own official nonprofit, read up on scholarship about the New Jewish School of Music, and practice for cello performances at the Berkshire High Peaks Festival..

Affiliation: Mannes

Jenny Magnus is a Chicago-based writer, performer, composer, musician, director, and educator whose work has played a significant role in shaping the city’s experimental theater community for decades. She is the founding co-Artistic Director of Curious Theatre Branch and co-producer of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival, Chicago’s longest-running fringe festival of new work. Beau O’Reilly is a musician, playwright, performer, and educator known for his contributions to Chicago’s independent arts and music scenes through projects that blend theatrical storytelling, folk, cabaret, punk, and alternative performance traditions. Together, Magnus and O’Reilly bring a deeply collaborative spirit rooted in experimentation, performance, and community-based artistic practice.

Website: https://www.jennymagnus.com/

Affiliation: SIAC