Emerging Artist Fellowship Residency

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Flora Ranis is a sculptor and storyteller whose work examines the tensions between human bodies and our built environment. Working primarily with industrial materials, Flora reimagines large-scale structures as hand-crafted, fluid forms. A creation story of the modern age, her works reorient quotidian objects as contemporary myth-makers. She graduated from Yale University, where she learned how to weld and discovered her love for sculpture. 

Elise Gersky is an emerging multimedia artist, and freelance digital illustrator from Minneapolis and raised in Columbia, Missouri.

As a child, she was unschooled, and spent her afternoons painting with watercolors in the woods, and visiting local galleries by bicycle. As teenager, got her first job at a co-op gallery, and shortly went on to attend Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2021. Today, she maintains a studio practice utilizing representational oil painting, digital art, collage, and sculpture. She takes inspiration from recent history, her unique childhood, plants and animals, life-altering delusions, technology and architecture. Her work has been displayed at MCAD, the Rogue Buddha Gallery, and ACME Collective.

Hannah Walter is an emerging Edmonton artist and recent Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design graduate from the University of Alberta. Her painting and sculpture practice reflects introspective moments of her life and imagination. Hannah's best and most constant source of inspiration is nature and its serendipity, having grown up with many outdoor experiences that shaped her upbringing like canoeing, camping, and hiking. Appropriately, even more of her life is spent looking for and appreciating beauty in ordinary moments of life than creating them herself in the studio. 

Micah Meyers (they/them) is a conceptual artist based in central Maryland whose practice explores the collection, transformation, and re-contextualization of material remnants as a means of documenting presence, labor, and memory. Meyers will graduate with a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Maryland, College Park in Spring 2025, where they are a member of the competitive Honors Program in Studio Art. Following graduation, they will participate in the North East Sculpture Gallery Emerging Artist Fellowship in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Torpedo Factory Emerging Artist Residency in Alexandria, Virginia.

Ashley McNamara is a Minnesota-based airbrush artist and furniture designer. After going to school for Auto Body Repair, Custom Cars, working as a welder, and working in the automotive paint industry, she decided to turn her love of building things and working with her hands to art and design. Her 2D work focuses on the reclamation and retelling of myths through a modern lens. Ashley’s 3D work is informed by found materials, and is often an exploration of the uncanny.

Nina Rivera is a Mexican-American artist whose work engages a wide variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. They were born in Saint Paul and currently reside in Minneapolis, MN. Their work explores the relationships between the body, disorder and the absurd in the digital age. They graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2025 with a BFA Fine Arts Studio degree. Click here for more.

Ren Anan (b. 1999) is a traditional and digital sculptor. He is a Japanese-European artist born in São Paulo, Brazil, but currently resides and works in Minnesota, MN. He has a BFA Fine Arts degree from Ringling College of Art & Design, class of 2023. Ren has attended residencies at NE Sculpture | Gallery Factory (Minnesota, MN, 2023), Salem Art Works (Salem, NY, 2023), and Pilchuk Glass School (Stanwood, WA, 2022). He was awarded the AXA US Finalist Art Prize (New York, NY, 2023), Best of Ringling – Bronze Award (Sarasota, FL, 2023), and Crossing the Finishing Line Award (Sarasota, FL, 2023). He has been an active participant in numerous group exhibitions, including Silly Geese (Salem, NY, 2023), Antithesis, 然[Rán], Pot-Pourri, and Memoir (Sarasota, FL, 2022-2023) group exhibitions. To quote Ren about his work: “What drives me to create my art is how I can explore, reflect upon, and finally translate visually my life’s experiences and my personal identity into a compelling piece, something tangible.