Artist-In-Residence Program

Mattia Casalegno

How do flavors unlock personal histories? How do sensory cues reshape our perception of taste? Guided by influences as eclectic as Derren Brown’s choreography of the mind, Plutchik’s cartography of emotion, Niki Segnit’s synesthetic language of flavor, and the uncanny companionship of AI chatbots, Mattia Casalegno uses this residency to explore how taste, memory, and identity entwine with immersive technologies to shape new ways of telling stories.

Mattia Casalegno is an interdisciplinary artist and technologist working in video, performance, immersive installations, and mixed reality. His practice investigates the relationship between nature, society, and technology, drawing from the disciplines of anthropology, ecology, biology, neurosciences, and informatics to create sensorially embodied, psychologically heightened experiences. Mattia has exhibited in more than 100 international venues including SIGGRAPH Asia, ISEA – International Society of Electronic Artists, Ars Electronica, Mutek festival, Untitled Art Fair, Superblue Museum, MACRO Museum, Cini Foundation, Rome’s Auditorium and RomaEuropa Festival, Cimatics festival, Festival de La Imagem, Quintai Museum of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in publications such as “A Touch of Code” -Gestalten Books; “Tactics of Interfacing” -MIT press; “Deleuze and Audiovisual Art” -Manchester Metropolitan University, and on media outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, Sky News, Artribune, Exibart, Hyperallergic, among others.

Mattia has also received number awards and fellowships including New Technological Art Awards in 2014, artist-in-residence at Eyebeam in 2015, NEW INC, the Center for Cultural Innovation, Young Italian Artists Network, NYFA, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the Chronus Art Center. In 2018, Mattia was a recipient of the Lumen Prize.
He currently serves as faculty in the department of Art and Computation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and in the Digital Arts department at Pratt Institute, NY.

IG Handle: @a_radical_hypothesis

Alia Ali

Alia Ali is an artist whose practice is informed by Yemeni cultural heritage and shaped by a life lived through movement, displacement, and sustained research. Working in collaboration with Indigenous communities globally, her multimedia practice engages material traditions and shared systems through which knowledge circulates across place and time.
Grounded in the present while attentive to both ancestral memory and futurist thought, Ali’s work challenges the tendency to frame Indigenous cultures solely through the past. Instead, her practice considers how the deep histories carried through material, ritual, and language are essential to imagining futures—how looking further back enables us to see further forward.

Language forms a central foundation of Ali’s work, understood not only as verbal or written communication but as something embodied and lived. Across photography, textiles, sculpture, and installation, she engages cultural memory, lived histories, and lineage, while examining asymmetries of power and the ways knowledge is preserved, transmitted, and reimagined beyond dominant representational frameworks. Alia Ali is a Jameel Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a Global Nikon Ambassador. Her work is held in notable public collections around the world and has been featured in publications including The New York Times and the Financial Times.

During her two-month residency at The Momentary, Alia Ali will develop a new multi-channel video installation that marks a return to her foundational training in moving image.
While widely recognized for photographic sculpture and immersive textile-based environments, Ali began her practice in video and remains deeply engaged with its spatial and temporal possibilities. At Crystal Bridges, she will explore video as a diasporic medium—one capable of holding parallel narratives, overlapping soundscapes, and simultaneous temporalities within a single environment. The project departs from her earlier focus on pattern as shared visual language and turns toward recurring cross-cultural motifs: the spider, the serpent, and the scorpion. Often misread as symbols of threat, these figures function in many traditions as protectors, agents of regeneration, and keepers of time. Through immersive moving image and sound, Ali will reorient these forms as poetic presences, inviting audiences to reconsider fear, symbolism, and relational knowledge.

Blas Isasi

Blas Isasi is a Peruvian visual artist exploring the aesthetics and poetics associated with the Peruvian desert. Based in Greensboro, NC, Blas uses these explorations to ground investigation of Andean cosmology and its ability to illuminate unseen elements that shape our contemporary present. Rather than seeking to re-enchant the world in the realization of Modernity’s limits, Blas’s work brings attention to the enduring cosmic energies that influence politics, society, culture, economy, materiality, and reality.

Blas’s work has been presented in exhibitions across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. He was an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans (2021) and participated in Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home, curated by Miranda Lash and Ebony G.Patterson at New Orlean’s triennale. Blas was the 2024-2025 Henry L. & Natalie E. Freund Fellow at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, a fellowship that culminated in a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in February 2026 titled Currents 125: Blas Isasi. Past honors include the Braunschweig Projects Scholarship, a year-long residency in Brunswick, Germany.

Blas currently serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He received his BA in painting from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru and an MFA in sculpture from Tulane University, in addition to being an alumnus of the Jan van Eyck in Maastricht, Netherlands.

While in residence, Blas’s work will gesture towards an inter and trans-species future, where hybridity is the norm. The work will explore rehabilitating ancient and non-Western political and symbolic practice technologies to foster interspecies alliances embedded in Lakota and Quechua epistemologies specifically between the Llama, Tatonoka (buffalo) and the human body. Blas seeks to draw upon ancient Andean embodiment practices to reclaim other-than-human beings from the colonial, domesticated, ossified nation-state imaginary and reinstate them as active political subjects in their own right.

Karen Navarro

Karen Navarro is an Argentinian artist based in Houston, of Mapuche, Guaraní, and European descent. Working across photography, collage, and sculpture, her practice examines the intersections of identity, race, representation, and belonging through the lenses of migration, Indigenous identity, and the enduring legacies of colonization. Navarro’s work engages the complexities of cultural hybridity, communication technologies, and the politics of beauty, creating visual spaces that affirm presence, acceptance, and embodied existence.

Navarro is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Artadia Fellowship, the Top Ten LensCulture Critics’ Choice Award, and the Houston Center for Photography Beth Block Honoraria. In 2026, she was the inaugural artist-in-residence at PAC Art, alongside Claudia Alarcón and Silät. In 2024, she was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Artsin New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. Selected exhibitions include the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Artpace, Galerija Upuluh, the George Washington Carver Museum, the FAR Center for Contemporary Arts, the Holocaust Museum Houston, and Melkweg Expo.

Navarro’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including ARTnews, The Guardian, The Observer, and Rolling Stone Italia.

While in residence, Karen will develop a series of work on paper that speaks to material economy while foregrounding the layered histories of Indigenous bodies and symbols in Argentina. Through collage, and installation, the works will examine how imagery and material culture operate as unstable cultural codes—carrying memory, inheritance, and generational knowledge while bearing traces of commodification and appropriation

Kholoud Sawaf

Kholoud Sawaf is a Syrian director and creator living in The United States whose work is driven by visual and physical storytelling and ensemble practice. Kholoud’s work often incorporates both movement and music, while simultaneously leading an audience on an emotional journey.

During her residency, Kholoud will be developing a new physical process for performance—shaped by years of cross-cultural movement exploration and a diverse foundation in physical and performance training. Though newly taking shape in practice, the work emerges from years of reflection, research, and embodied dreaming, and gestures toward new possibilities in how presence, authenticity, and the body are approached in contemporary theatre.

Sichong Xie

Sichong Xie is a multidisciplinary artist currently living and working in Los Angeles. Her practice combines materiality, movement, and performance of memory through elemental media and site-specific installations. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, she investigates these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. Her practice raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Xie is interested in the research of human populations, their geographical locations, and the resulting cultural movements, she strives to create work that reflects the importance of the spaces we find ourselves in and their impact on our lives.

Xie holds an MFA from CalArts and is a 2022 MAP Fund and 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award recipient. In her recent durational performance/installation, Trampoline House: Memory Drawing Series, at the Armory Center for the Arts, she transforms a playground into a stage of temporal disintegration. Drawing from children’s games and the rawness of construction site materials, this durational performance collapses the boundaries between play and labor. A trampoline becomes the platform for a living drawing, where a large chalk piece is layered over original architectural blueprints from Xie’s grandfather in the 1960s. Every memory is an empty theater—a space that once held meaning, now gradually fading into oblivion. As the durational performance slowly dissolves the chalk drawing, the ephemeral nature of memory takes form in every movement. Xie’s commitment to durational performance extends across her practice, including her 2017 project Walking With The Disappeared during the Hauser & Wirth Somerset exchange residency in the U.K. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, the Studios at MASS MoCA, Yaddo, the Watermill Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her practice has been supported by grants from Artadia, The MAP Fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Marciano Art Foundation.

During her residency at the Momentary, Xie hope to develop a new body of work that
expands on her ongoing investigation into diasporic memory and architectural temporality, with particular attention to how inherited structures, both physical and familial, carry and lose meaning across generations. Building on Trampoline House: Memory Drawing Series, she is interested in pushing the relationship between durational performance and sculptural installation, exploring how repetitive movement, site-responsive materials, and the gradual dissolution of form can enact the lived experience of memory fading and reforming.