The Church: New Residency Sched & Lineup for 2026 / Community Residency in December, 2026

THE CHURCH ANNOUNCES A NEW RESIDENCY SCHEDULE AND LINEUP FOR 2026

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2026 Artists-in-Residence

The Church, the center for art, creativity, and community located in Sag Harbor and founded by Eric Fischl and April Gornik that opened in April 2021, announces the continuation of our RESIDENCY program for 2026. Residents have been nominated for selection by community members and industry colleagues that include Fischl, Gornik, Executive Director Sheri Pasquarella, Workshop & Residency Manager Samuel Havens, along with artist Arcmanoro Niles, Dominic Molon (RISD Museum), Heather Lynch, PhD (Stony Brook University), ecologist & writer Carl Safina (The Safina Center), artist Jamie Diamond, Peter Drake (New York Academy of Art), artist Jeremy Dennis (Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio), curator Sara Cochran, PhD, and others.

Our 2026 Artists-in-Residence are: Kristine Bendul & Abdiel (dance, choreography, & performance), Lloyd Knight, Jamar Roberts and Stahv Danker for the Martha Graham Dance Company (dance, choreography, & performance), mayfield brooks (interdisciplinary performance), Brandon Ross (music composition & performance), Daniel Emond (music composition & performance), Bunni Brown (interdisciplinary), Kylee Snow (interdisciplinary), Daniella Williams (painting), Kariny Padilla (painting & mixed media), Francisco Graciano (sculpture & mixed media), Cate Pasquarelli (mixed media installation, sculpture, & works on paper), Paul Greenberg (writing), Linda O’Keeffe (mixed media installation/sound art), Victoria Roth (painting & works on paper), Nick Lehane (interdisciplinary, puppetry, & object theatre), Ella Mahoney (painting & mixed media), kiarita (painting & mixed media installation), Ben Jackel (sculpture), Jazzmen Lee-Johnson (interdisciplinary), Elliot Reed (interdisciplinary), and Jackson Polys (interdisciplinary).

NEW THIS YEAR! We are delighted to announce the Hedda Sterne Fellowship, which supports three female-identifying visual artists specifically in residency at The Church. The 3 inaugural Hedda Sterne Fellows are Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, Ella Mahoney, and Victoria Roth.

“Our rhythmic, annual cadence features diverse makers and mediums and fosters artistic innovation and cross-disciplinary dialogues between artists of all backgrounds. We aim to keep alive the tradition of artistic ingenuity that is endemic to the history of Eastern Long Island,” says Pasquarella.

When co-founders April Gornik and Eric Fischl first built and conceived of The Church, a key component was an interdisciplinary residency program. The intent was to nurture artistic innovation and dialogue, while making artistic processes and concepts accessible to the wider community. In 2022, with the arrival of Executive Director Sheri Pasquarella, a cadence and infrastructure were added to ensure that a wide diversity of artists are participating in the program all year long, including the first Community Residency cycle that has been held every year since. With the management of Samuel Havens, Workshop and Residency Manager since 2023, the program has flourished.

Since its inception, the residency has grown exponentially, bringing over 100 artists, makers, and scholars to Sag Harbor in the past two years alone. In 2025, we welcomed a total of 60 artists & collaborators, including our Community Residency of six artists from the region and over 45 percent BIPOC residents across the whole program. In 2026, we’ll continue to build upon this momentum, extending the average residency duration to three weeks and promoting interaction and engagement of residents within the local community.

PERFORMING ARTS & GROUP PRACTICES: JANUARY – MARCH

For practices requiring multiple individuals for the creation of the work

Kristine Bendul & Abdiel | January 4^th – 10th

Kristine Bendul & Abdiel is a partnership between Abdiel, former Principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, and Kristine, ballerina turned Broadway veteran with 13 production credits. They have performed their joint work at Carnegie Hall, Broadway’s Music Box theater for the Sono Osato Benefit, Canada Salsa and Bachata Congress, and Buglisi Dance Theater, to name a few. They became Disco America’s 1st place Champions with their Hustle choreography for the Professional Dance-Off Division. They made history by becoming America’s first professional ballroom duo to compete in DanceSport as gender-neutral, equally exchanging roles of lead and follow within all five American Rhythm dances. Abdiel and Kristine presented their first production, The Color Iz, at the iconic Stonewall Inn honoring the 50th year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The Color Iz received a rave review on broadwayworld.com. In 2021, they received the NYFA City Artist Corp grant and a Bridge Street Theatre residency. In 2022, Works & Process chose them to develop an original project, “Do the Hustle” and performed their newest piece, “Dreamin” in the Guggenheim rotunda in 2023 for a Dance is Life special event presentation. Abdiel and Kristine are the lead subjects of the upcoming documentary “Follow Lead Love” by Emmy-nominee and award-winning director Brian Thomas.

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Lloyd Knight, Jamar Roberts, and Stahv Danker for the Martha Graham Dance Company | January 19^th – 25^th

Lloyd Knight joined the Company in 2005 and performs major roles of the Graham repertory including Appalachian Spring, Embattled Garden, Night Journey among others. Bessie Nominated for best Performer in 2022, Dance Magazine also named him one of “Top 25 Dancers to Watch” in 2010 and one of the best performers of 2015. Mr. Knight has starred with ballet greats Wendy Whelan and Misty Copeland in signature Graham duets and has had roles created for him by such renowned artists as Nacho Duato and Pam Tanowitz. Knight has performed as a principal guest artist for The Royal Ballet of Flanders directed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as well as with Twyla Tharp Dance. Born in England and raised in Miami, he trained at Miami Conservatory of Ballet and New World School of the Arts. Recently he was an 2023 Dance Research Fellow for The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and will be performing his One Person show titled the “The Drama” at The Guggenheim in 2025.

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Jamar Roberts (Miami, FL) was the Resident Choreographer of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from 2017-2022. Mr. Roberts made five works on the Company, all to critical acclaim: Members Don’t Get Weary (2016), Ode (2019), A Jam Session for Troubling Times(2020), Holding Space (2021), and In a Sentimental Mood (2022). He also set Gemeos on Ailey II. Mr. Roberts is a graduate of the New World School of the Arts and the Ailey School and has danced for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ailey II, and Complexions. Mr. Roberts won the 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performer and has performed as a guest artist with the Royal Ballet in London. Commissions include Vail Dance Festival, Fall for Dance, The Juilliard School, BalletX, New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, L.A. Dance Project, ABT Studio Company, Miami City Ballet, Parsons Dance and Works and Process at the Guggenheim where he created the film Cooped. The March on Washington Film Festival invited Mr. Roberts to create a tribute to John Lewis and he has also made a film for the LA Opera entitled The First Bluebird in the Morning. Mr. Roberts was a Director’s Fellow at NYU’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, Creative Associate at the Juilliard School in 2023, and was recently featured on the cover of Dance Magazine, previously having been on the cover in June 2013 and been named one of “25 to Watch” in 2007.

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Stahv Danker (Composer) Born in Los Angeles and raised in Israel, Stahv Danker is a composer, percussionist, and pianist whose work bridges rhythm and movement. He studied at the New School Extension for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Tel Aviv before earning a scholarship to The New School in New York City, completing his BFA in 2015. He has performed internationally, including a residency at the Bern Jazz Festival in Switzerland, and was the drummer for the Off-Broadway production The Office: A Musical Parody. In New York, Danker has become a leading accompanist for dance, working with the Martha Graham School, The Juilliard School, The Alvin Ailey School, and Giordano Dance Chicago, for whom he composed Sana in 2025.

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mayfield brooks | February 1^st – 12^th

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is currently a Creative Time Research & Development fellow. They love living by the sea.

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Brandon Ross | February 26^th – March 11^th

As a performing and recording artist, guitarist, and composer, Brandon Ross has worked and collaborated with many important voices in modern music. Ross toured and recorded with (Pulitzer Prize winner and NEA Jazz Master) Henry Threadgill – during a decade in which he was also principal arranger and musical director for the defining sound of NEA Jazz Master, vocalist Cassandra Wilson’s classic Blue Note recordings “Blue Light Til Dawn” and “New Moon Daughter”. Both recordings pioneered a new terrain and context of Jazz vocal music, elevating Wilson’s career to new heights. Ross has shared stages and studio sessions with Tony Williams, Lizz Wright, Arto Lindsay, Leroy Jenkins, Oliver Lake, Lawrence D.”Butch” Morris, Kip Hanrahan, Bill Frisell, Me’Shell N’degeocello, Arrested Development, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Muhal Richard Abrams, and many others.

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Daniel Emond | March 19^th – April 1^st

Daniel Emond is a Queens-based composer, performer, and writer of musicals. His Moby-Dick rock opera KILL THE WHALE has seen development at Joe’s Pub, Yaddo, Montclair State University Peak Performances, Polyphone Festival, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Cork- screw Festival, NYU, the Melville bi-Centennial Conference, and Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, and has received funding through the American Theatre Wing, the Saw Recording Grants, and the NYFA. His sophomore project, Mind Canary: A Freudian Musical is a musical dreamscape around Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud, set in the Freudian dreamspace. Peak Performances at MSU has commissioned a third draft, and it has also seen development at Adelphi University, the Good Hart Residency, Yaddo, and the emergence residency at Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City. Emond has also been commissioned to compose music for the Hong Kong Arts Festival (2021) and Catskills Mountain Shakespeare (2025).

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‘MIXED MEDIA’ RESIDENCY: MARCH – NOVEMBER

Individual artists and scholars of all disciplines are invited together in combinations designed by The Church to stimulate dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration

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Bunni Brown | April 9^th – 29^th

Bunni Brown is an exhibiting artist, performer, and published writer based in Philadelphia. Brown’s scope of work disrupts temporality through site-specific research, installation, and performance. Brown received a B.A. in Integrative Art from Pennsylvania State University and a dual master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and School of Social Policy & Practice.

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Kylee Snow | April 9^th– 29^th

Kylee Snow is a figurative artist working primarily in graphite and sculpture. Her current body of work explores how people live in communication with built space, and the deep relationships between home, objects, and inhabitants. Originally from Vermont, she is based in Brooklyn and completed her MFA at the New York Academy of Art, where she was also a recipient of the 2023-2024 Chubb Postgraduate Fellowship.

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Daniella Williams | April 9^th– 29^th

Daniella Williams is a Canadian figurative painter based in Toronto, Ontario. She holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Guelph and has refined her practice through residencies at the New York Academy of Art and The Pouch Cove Foundation. Her work has been exhibited widely across Canada and the U.S., and in 2025, she was awarded a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation in recognition of her technical skill and emerging voice as a Black woman in contemporary painting. Rooted in classical figurative traditions, her practice often draws on archival materials and lived experience, transforming memory into narratives that feel both personal and universal. By creating subtle gestures and everyday moments, she highlights the quiet power of human connection and the ways intimacy transcends across time and place.

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Kariny Padilla | May 7^th – 20th

Kariny Padilla is a visual artist based in Queens, NY. Kariny’s work blends hand-sewn unstretched canvases with painting, using stitching as both a technique and a conceptual tool to create layered surfaces that explore themes of memory, identity, and materiality. Just as the 18th and 19th century quilts arose out of necessity for warmth in clothing and bed covers, Kariny’s work is derived from a yearning to create sanctuary-like spaces for the subjects present in her work. Kariny earned her BFA in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2021. Her work has been featured in prominent exhibitions, including the 15th A.I.R. Biennial at A.I.R. Gallery, NY, The New Contemporaries, Vol 3, Residency Art Gallery, CA, she was a participant in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program in 2022 and attended Chautauqua School of Art Six Week Residency Program in 2025.

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Francisco Graciano | May 7^th – 20^th

Francisco Graciano is a self-taught artist using everyday materials to create new works that address the interconnectivity among all people. He has spent the last 25 years working with wire, learning its strengths and weaknesses. His sculptures are made from 100 ft. spools of wire, which are bent, twisted, wrapped, and pulled to create forms, faces, and figures, all united by a single line. Graciano crafts all works by hand, forgoing the use of any tools to extend the human connection from artist to viewer. His unique style evokes emotion through the gestures, placement, and craftsmanship of each piece. Graciano lives and works in San Jose, CA.

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Cate Pasquarelli | May 7^th – 20^th

Cate Pasquarelli received a BFA from the Cooper Union and studied at the Slade School of Art in London, UK. She has exhibited with Perrotin, the Brooklyn Museum, François Ghebaly, Steve Turner, and The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody as well as filmmakers Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver. Selected residencies and awards include the Cooper Union Medici Award for excellence in art, a Residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA, and a Programming Fellowship at the Wassaic Project. Pasquarelli currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Paul Greenberg | September 24^th – October 7^th

Paul Greenberg writes at the intersection of the environment and technology, seeking to help his readers find emotional and ecological balance with their planet. He is the author of seven books, including the New York Times bestseller Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. His other books are The Climate Diet, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, The Omega Principle, American Catch, A Third Term, and the novel, Leaving Katya. Greenberg’s writing on oceans, climate change, health, technology, and the environment appears regularly in The New York Times and many other publications. He’s the recipient of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and many other grants and awards.

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Linda O’Keeffe | September 24^th – October 7^th

Linda O’Keeffe is a sound artist, scholar, and Chair of the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. Her interdisciplinary practice explores listening as a method for sensing and responding to environmental and social change, often through sculptural sound installations, field recording, and community-based engagement. She is co-PI on a two-year climate justice project funded by the Stony Brook Climate Seed Fund, which brings together artists, scientists, and local organizations to investigate environmental racism and ecological transformation on Long Island. Her recent work has been exhibited and supported internationally, and she is also the founder of the Women in Sound Women on Sound (WISWOS) platform and co-lead of the Non Random Collective. During her residency, she will begin translating community recordings and sensor data into a new body of sonic and sculptural work.

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Victoria Roth | September 24^th – October 7^th

Hedda Sterne Fellow

Victoria Roth is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her biomorphic abstract paintings sit on the edge of recognition— a meaty shape expands like a muscle, a gnarled form morphs into a heart, that bulbous symbol. Through her imagined and high-keyed compositions, she explores ideas of queer abstraction and desire as embedded in bodily forms that appear to constantly transform. Roth has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She has held solo exhibitions with Broadway Gallery, NY; Brennan & Griffin, NY; and fAN Kunstverein, Vienna. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2014 and a BA in History of Art & Architecture and Visual Art from Brown University in 2008. In addition to her studio practice, Roth is also an arts educator.

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Nick Lehane | October 8^th – November 4^th

Nick Lehane is a puppet artist and theater maker based in Brooklyn, NY. He works as an actor, puppeteer, designer, deviser, and director in theater, television, film/video, and performance art. His work has been presented throughout the United States, in Canada, England, France, Singapore, and Uzbekistan, has been named a New York Times “Critics Pick”, and has been selected among the yearly “Top 10 Theater Moments” by Vulture/New York Magazine. Lehane was the lead puppeteer and puppet director for Alex Da Corte’s ROY G BIV at Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept. He holds a BFA from The Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and studied at The Moscow Art Theater School and The Rhodopi International Theater Laboratory in Smolyan, Bulgaria.

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Ella Mahoney | October 8^th – November 4^th

Hedda Sterne Fellow

Ella Mahoney is a visual artist, illustrator, and educator, and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). Her interdisciplinary practice centers on storytelling, often drawing from Wampanoag creation stories and her personal experience of indigeneity and connection to land and water. Working primarily in oil, acrylic, and silk painting, Mahoney’s recent work focuses on large-scale silk installations that evoke the movement, memory, and atmosphere of north-east coastal environments — and more specifically, Aquinnah. She has illustrated children’s books for the Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project and collaborated with institutions such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Long Island Children’s Museum, and MassArt, exhibiting in gallery and museum settings and creating immersive works in dialogue with performance and place.

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kiarita | October 8^th – November 4^th

kiarita is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist of Caribbean descent. Their practice explores intimacy, memory, and care through oil-painted portraits of chosen family, often integrated within found furniture and sculptural elements that activate the surrounding space. Their work investigates the creation of home, examining the intersections of healing, generational trauma, and relational proximity, inviting viewers into immersive installations that require interaction and reflection. Through a combination of portraiture, assemblage, and material experimentation, kiarita seeks to extend beyond representation, offering a nuanced exploration of connection, presence, and the tender complexities of everyday life. They have been the recipient of the Bronx AIM & Van Lier Trust Fellowships, as well as participated in many group exhibitions nationally, their work culminating in a six-month 2025 solo exhibition entitled “home[body]” at Hausen in Brooklyn, NY.

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Ben Jackel | November 5^th – 18^th

Ben Jackel has been creating and exhibiting art in Los Angeles for 25 years. Represented by LA Louver Gallery in Venice, CA. Jackel’s work has also been shown internationally and regionally at the Denver and Phoenix art museums as well as at the Venice Biennale. He received his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an MFA from The University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA. He has taught ceramics at California State University, Long Beach, The University of California, Los Angeles, and California State University, Los Angeles. Jackel is currently the Art and Foundry Director at the family-owned and operated Starlite Originals. Jackel is the volunteer director and curator of the gallery Alfa Romeo Tango onboard the historic USS Battleship Iowa Museum in San Pedro, CA. He is also a 25-year member of the Denver-based art collective, the Artnauts, and has shown with them in over a dozen countries around the world.

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Jazzmen Lee-Johnson | November 5^th – 18^th

Hedda Sterne Fellow

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator from Baltimore and based in Rhode Island. Her practice centers on the interplay of animation, printmaking, music, and dance, informed by a yearning to understand how our current circumstance is tethered to the trauma of the past. Through her visual, sonic, and movement investigations across time and technology, she disrupts and asserts ideas of history, body, liberation, and otherness. Above all, she is interested in redistributing the privileges that allow her to maintain her creative and scholarly practice. She received her BFA in Film, Animation, and Video at RISD, and her MA in Public Humanities at Brown University.

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Elliot Reed | November 5^th – 18^th

Elliot Reed is an artist, based in New York working across video, dance, performance, and sculpture. He received his MA in Choreography from Master EXERCE ICI-CCN in Montpellier, France, and was a member of The Whitney Museum ISP 23-24 cohort. Reed is a danceWEB scholar, 2019–20 Artist in Residence at the prestigious Studio Museum in Harlem and part of the museum’s permanent collection. Reed was also the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Recent gallery and museum exhibitions include anonymous gallery , Kunsthaus Glarus, Lucerne Festival with JACK Quartet, Metro Pictures, MoMA PS1, OCD Chinatown, The Getty Center, Hammer Museum, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, The Broad, and performances in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Mexico City, Vienna, and Hamburg.

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COMMUNITY PRACTICES: DECEMBER

For the support and exploration of artists working in community

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Jackson Polys | December 3^rd – 16^th

Jackson Polys is a Tlingit multi-disciplinary artist, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2015) and recipient of Native Arts and Cultures Foundation fellowships, and a United States Artist Fellowship. He is a core contributor to New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society who, with an interdisciplinary network of Informants, co-produce video, performance, and installation works that examine and aim to shift obstructions to Indigenous growth. His individual and collaborative works have appeared with the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Art Sonje, Artists Space, Creative Time, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MOMENTA Biennale de l’image, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial of Art, and the Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.

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South Fork Residency | December 2^nd – 15^th

The Community Residency allows artists of the East End to work on campus at The Church, to enrich and foster artistic community and dialogue. This project was piloted in December 2022, and, to date, has provided opportunities and studio space for more than 24 local artists. 2025 artists included A G Duggan, Robin du Plessis, Christina Graham, Laurie Hall, Eva Iacono, and Nathalie Shepherd.

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The Church was established in 2019 by artists Eric Fischl and April Gornik. Housed in a deconsecrated 19th century church, its doors were opened in April 2021. Our mission is to foster creativity and to honor the living history of Sag Harbor as a maker village. The East End represents an exceptional artistic legacy, spanning the practices of indigenous art of several centuries ago, Abstract Expressionists of the mid 20th Century, and the many celebrated writers, makers, musicians, and visual artists of the recent past and current moment. Core programming includes visual art exhibitions, concerts and events, educational programming, workshops, lectures, and an artist’s residency.