Ellsworth Artist Residency Program

Bloomer’s work merges floral imagery with the raw energy of street art, balancing a guerrilla attitude with refined, poetic technique. By linking flowers and graffiti, the practice explores impermanence, ownership, and context - questioning what is lost when public work is contained or possessed. It also challenges traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity, using both as symbols of vulnerability, visibility, and expression beyond gender. During the Ellsworth Residency at Art Share L.A., Bloomer has been expanding his stencil-based floral works, experimenting at a larger scale, and engaging with an artist community while drawing inspiration from the Arts District.

Arcas artwork represents the culmination of research into ceramic materials and the social structures that shape everyday life. Drawing from archaeology, they explore fractured forms and symbolic adornments to reflect historic instability. Their practice captures the pressure of the present shaped by political repression, violence, and the erosion of human rights, now expressed through the grounded tones of raw clay. Beginning on the potter’s wheel, Arca disrupts rigid forms with coils and extensions, mirroring resistance to societal constraints. Through experimental material combinations, they explore gender and identity as fluid and unfixed. Embracing fragility, their work considers how identity and care persist in uncertain conditions, asking what remains when systems begin to fracture.

Villalba is a multidisciplinary artist who explores identity through abstraction and vibrant color. Working across sculpture, fiber art, collage, painting, and performance, she draws from her experience as a first-generation Ecuadorian–Salvadorian American, incorporating pattern and color inspired by childhood travels to South and Central America. Since 2020, she has focused on soft fiber sculpture, using weaving techniques to create bold, immersive forms that evoke tension, tenderness, and movement while addressing themes of queerness and societal expectations of the body. During the Ellsworth Residency, she plans to develop three human-scale, fiber vessels that explore confinement and safety through interactive, experiential forms.

Sandra Khalifa is a first-generation Southern Californian and the daughter of Egyptian immigrants. Her clay practice explores identity, memory, and what is lost, carried, or transformed across generations. Drawn to large-scale sculptures and vessels, she creates works that feel both intimate and expansive, treating clay as a malleable archive shaped by place, history, and lived experience. Based in Los Angeles, Khalifa works at Sooki Studio in Frogtown and has studied at the Infinite School and Penland School of Craft. She holds a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley, where her research on race and immigration continues to inform her exploration of lineage and belonging.

Nolan Roy is a multifaceted artist with a diverse portfolio encompassing painting, photography, and filmmaking. He's recognized as an innovative director, cinematographer, and producer known for crafting captivating visual content across various media. His filmmaking experience spans narrative fiction, documentaries, fashion, and music videos. As a photographer, he has a strong command of lighting, composition, and digital editing tools like Lightroom and Photoshop. Roy's artistic process is deeply personal and introspective. He uses his art to explore themes of self-discovery, expression, and emotional states. He even utilizes unconventional techniques, such as dipping fabric strips tied to a pole in paint and striking the canvas to create unique textural landscapes. This unorthodox method, inspired by the Japanese "Yamatoe-style" of painting, allowed him to create imagery that he believes couldn't have been achieved through any other means. This approach speaks to his experimental and innovative spirit, reflecting a continuous search for new ways to translate his inner world onto the canvas. His work reveals a journey of self-exploration and a commitment to pushing creative boundaries.

Emmanuel Camacho Larios (he/they) is a first-generation, borderless queer artist based in Southern California. His practice operates as a biographical interruption and reclamation of both his own intersecting identities and those of his community. Threads of ritual, weight, decay, and mourning move through his work. Through repetition, accumulation, and arrangement, he creates space to dwell within and challenge themes of migration, marginalization, and inherited memory. Working interdisciplinarily, with a particular emphasis on sculptural and performative strategies, he materializes the emotional and physical impact of political borders and heteronormative white structures.

Carly França is a Pasadena-based artist whose work explores survival, transformation, and the shifting nature of what we hold onto and what we let go. Equal parts Californian, Idahoan, and Brazilian, her practice is shaped by early medical trauma, visible scars, queerness, and the experience of losing her home and studio in a 2025 fire. Working with paint, charcoal, and mixed media, Carly embraces a process-driven approach rooted in gestural spontaneity and improvisation. Her work resists erasure, instead layering form over uncertainty—mirroring her lived belief that what changes us can also shape us. Carly’s art makes space for impermanence, visibility, and the beauty of becoming. She has exhibited at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Art Share LA, Pasadena City College, and the California State San Bernardino Anthropology Museum. She was awarded the 2025 Ellsworth Artist Residency at Art Share LA and received support from the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund.

Gabe Medina's art practice explores Mexican-American im/migration, cultural hybridity and familial history through the lens of local plant life and family photo archive of South Central Los Angeles. Central to his practice is the exploration of ancestral connections to the land, which has been severed as a result of colonial/cultural displacement and erasure. Using family photo archives from the 1970’s and clay-based installations, Medina's current work delves into domestic visual languages, such as wrought iron fence motifs, stucco walls and local plant life indigenous to Mexico Michoacán. Much of his work is Informed by his family’s agricultural history. Despite physical displacement and the loss of access to ancestral lands, his family has to cultivate plant life indigenous to in their family garden the same plant life that is Indigenous to Michoacán in their garden. The Nopales, Corn, Aloe Vera, and Rose Bushes they now persistently grow here come into contact with wrought iron fence gates and window bars present in South Central Los Angeles. Medina's work investigates how immigrant communities terraform our visual, spatial and sensory landscape to reflect that of their heritage. Focusing domestic cultural artifacts, ceramic and clay objects play a significant role in his approach due to their historical functional and ritual use deeply embedded in Mexican homes. Medina's work vividly narrates the theme of im/migration and resilience, inviting others to reflect their own stories and experiences of navigating dual cultural identities in the United States.

Moti Tavassoli is a Persian-born Los Angeles-based product designer and visual artist. The themes she is currently exploring revolve around experiential spaces, whether they are emotional states she is navigating, or metaphysical environments she imagines she could belong to. This theme emerged when Tavassoli transitioned to a new career, feeling fully out of her depth, drenched in uncertainty, yet slowly embracing growth as she ventured beyond her comfort zone. Inspired by this journey, she creates magical worlds beyond the laws of reality that she can explore with childlike curiosity and deep connection. Tavassoli hopes viewers resonate with these abstractions which reflect universal experiences like discomfort, curiosity, growth and belonging. Her visual language draws inspiration from mushrooms, marine landscapes, and plants, whose resilience, intelligence and beauty embody the themes of her work. The Intricate line work is a key element in her art, symbolizing the hidden mysteries of these spaces. It’s as if you’re wearing special goggles that reveal the inner workings and energetic flows of the worlds she creates.

A native of Los Angeles, Mike Saijo guides his viewers through the complexities of “memory reconstruction”: how memories are built, what goes into the creation of memory, and how it is preserved. Saijo touches on themes of loss, entropy, transformation and mapping the unconscious. Influenced, in part, by ancient manuscripts, he reclaims history by redefining it based on human experience. Saijo transforms objects like books, office supplies, and building materials to construct art with a wide range of subject matter, from mid-century modern architecture, WWII photos, cinema stills, imaginary landscapes and ethnographic history. Saijo cites graffiti street art and Oshuji-Japanese calligraphy as some of his chief influences, dating back to his first “book piece” made using the pages of a New Testament Bible issued by the US Army in 1944. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, and at shows in the Japanese American National Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has conducted presentations about his work at The Buckley School in Sherman Oaks and Edward Schwartz Federal Building. His work is now in the permanent collection of The Skirball Cultural Center with plans to be exhibited this year. He has recently completed a public art project commissioned by the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and Department of Parks and Recreations. Saijo has also been featured in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Dwell, and New York Magazine. His story about Intersections was recently published in the LAist website and featured on National Public Radio on 89.3 FM.

Bad Talents is the creative identity of mixed-media artist, Shelby Alexander, and the pseudonym under which she exhibits her fine art nationally. Shelby lives and works in Los Angeles. Shelby graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and she also studied fashion design at Pratt Institute in NYC. Her work references the pollution of the fashion industry, while highlighting the tension between the modern experience of beauty, consumption, and industrialization—and the long-term environmental impact of the clothing we wear.

Reginald Tucker (Artist name R.Tucker) is a mixed-media artist and a trailblazer in both art and finance. Known for his innovative use of repurposed materials, Tucker’s work reflects his commitment to thinking outside the box, a theme that has defined both his personal and professional life. Without formal art training, Tucker embraced the role of an outsider, forging a unique path in both the art world and his career. In his professional life, Tucker has been a key contributor to the development of the Opportunistic Portfolio and a Unique Strategies allocation at two separate large public pension plans, helping to seed and anchor new strategies and platforms that broke away from traditional investment models. This approach of embracing non-conventional strategies mirrors his creative process in the art world, where he continually pushes boundaries by blending repurposed materials with abstract compositions. Tucker founded Recycled Abstract as a platform to explore new artistic forms that fuse the historical significance of past mediums with modern innovations that leverage tech. Through his work, he preserves the communicative power of magazines—once a dominant but now fading medium—capturing snapshots of societal norms and values that are reinterpreted through his abstract 3D collages. These pieces reflect how cultural norms evolve, giving new relevance to discarded materials. Tucker frequently exhibits in Long Beach and Los Angeles, including Culver City, Downtown LA, and Santa Monica, earning recognition for his ability to blend the past with the future. Each piece challenges conventional boundaries, offering new perspectives on art, culture, and the power of the preservation of tradition and transformation of the forgotten.

As a welding, painting, fabricating, and tattooing artist, Marina’s work is a constant manipulation of the physical: metal, paint, ink, and bodies. Plato’s inquiries into the timeless perfection of imagined geometric shapes, and into how geometries might lie behind all nature, inspire her to make objects that (though necessarily imperfect because they will never have perfect straight edges, and must eventually erode) tease our minds toward the perfect. The objects she makes — always imperfectly embodying perfection — ask viewers to drift within that gap between the non-physical, conceptual realm and our tangible, sensory experience. Marina is the recipient of the 2024 Etcheve Rising Star Fellowship and has exhibited work nationally and in Germany, including the Maryland Federation of Art, NRM Gallery, Sleep Center (New York, NY), Infinite Balcony (Brooklyn, NY), Sidestreet Arts, ADX, Past Lives, Blind Insect (Portland, OR), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Echo Park Art Gallery, bG Gallery, and TAG Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Philosophy from Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College in New York. She studied sculpture with Katja Strunz on a scholarship to Universität der Künste Berlin. She is currently fabricating museum exhibition displays and making ideas physical through paintings in Los Angeles.

Elena Peng is an interdisciplinary designer driven by imagination, the sense of self, and the art of fusion. She is a firm believer in the power of interdisciplinary knowledge which fuels my ability to break rules and forge new paths in fusion. As a designer with industrial design background, she cares about spirit in an unconventional way that she doesn’t just design physically. She crafts experiences spiritually. Object as her physical media to express and explaining the feeling. She explores materials like ceramics, wood, fabric, metal and any potential material to dig the fusion possibility.