Jean Zimmerman, author of critically praised nonfiction and fiction, returns to Catwalk for a fifth time to continue work on a historical novel, Summoning Jane, rooted in her fascination with America’s first female botanist and badass-before-her-time Jane Colden. During her residency, she will conduct research and imagine Colden’s life at the Hudson Valley ruin of Coldengham, her family’s Revolutionary-era estate in nearby Montgomery. Zimmerman’s forthcoming memoir Of Heartwood and Woundwood: An Unlikely Arborist’s Path to Courage and Joy (Broadleaf, Fall 2026), invites readers into a world where trees become teachers, healers, and companions amid life’s most daunting challenges.

Affiliation: Columbia

Nicole Saldarriaga is a Colombian-American writer based in New Jersey. Her fiction has appeared in Epiphany, The Hunger, and The Sarah Lawrence Review. She has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Felipe P. De Alba fellow and taught in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program. While at Catwalk, Nicole will complete her first novel, which follows a young woman haunted by her abuela’s ghost. To heal her family’s generational curse, she must finally bridge the gap between her assimilated American life and the mystical secrets her mother and aunts have spent decades trying to bury.

Affiliation: Columbia

Anna Jastrzembski is a New York City and Santa Fe-based playwright, lyricist, and transmedia artist. She graduated with her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University in 2019. Her work has been seen at The Cherry Lane Theatre, Signature Theatre, The New Ohio, and Joe’s Pub in New York City. Anna is also a member of the SOUR MILK experimental performance collective. They make interactive experiential games that explore how we, as people, find our place and power within complex systems. At Catwalk, Anna will be working on a new play inspired by the writings of W.G. Sebald -- a hybrid work that is part travelogue, part history, and part meditation on memory, loss, and decay.

Website: https://www.annajastrzembski.com/

https://www.sourmilk.xyz/

Affiliation: Columbia

J. Spence Holman is a designer, artist, and musician based in his native Baltimore. A graduate of Vassar College and Maryland Institute College of Art, his drawings use plants and a deeply personal iconography to explore physical and internal space. Flowers function as memories, markers of transformation, and maps toward healing, informed by—but not limited to—years of personal trauma. During his residency at Catwalk Institute, Holman will continue a series of large-scale drawings exploring resilience, recovery, and renewal through the metaphor of the river as both self and survival model. The resulting works will contribute to an upcoming exhibition tentatively titled The Resilience of Water / The Resilience of Memory.

Website: https://www.jspenceholman.com/

Affiliation: Vassar

Clancy Philbrick is a multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges visual arts, social practice, and relational research. His work investigates the transformative power of community, cultural dimensions of sports and play, and disassembling harmful patriarchal norms. At Catwalk, I will continue my work of world-building, housed within The Starling Institute, as both medium and method. Drawing from the traditions of science fiction, ecofeminism, and vernacular myth-making, the work will take advantage of the residency’s natural surroundings and cultural history. It will include creating new ritual objects, codex, and drawings.

Website: https://www.thestarling.org/ https://www.instagram.com/clancy_pantz/

Affiliation: Vassar

Miranda Mazariegos is a Guatemalan writer and translator. She began her career in radio, where she collaborated with NPR shows such as Radio Ambulante, Consider This, Throughline, and All Things Considered. She’s now an editor and podcast producer at Americas Quarterly, where she continues her passion for covering Latin American politics, culture, and art. She graduated magna cum laude from USC and has an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught creative writing to undergrads. At Catwalk, she will continue to work on a novel set in Guatemala in the early 2000s, exploring how language can guide the perennial search for peace.

Website: https://mirandamazariegos.com/

Affiliation: Columbia

Jarrett Murray is a Brooklyn-born writer and musician whose work spans the full spectrum of musical theatre, from short-form pieces to full-length shows, with a song for every occasion in between. This is my first year with the Catwalk Institute! As a musician, he has performed at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. He has collaborated with artists including Freda Payne, Lauren Daigle, Kuhoo Verma, Lee Summers, Kirsten Childs, and Michael John LaChiusa. American University BA. NYU Tisch GMTWP MFA. Charisma, the piece that he is currently working on, weaves together African and African American Folklore in an attempt to process the loss of a family home.

Affiliation: NYU