Lunder Institute Resident Fellows
Established in 2021, the Lunder Institute residential fellowships provide artists with spacious studios as well as opportunities for collaboration with Colby College faculty, students, staff, and the Waterville community. This new studio program, which is based at the Greene Block + Studios at 18 Main Street in downtown Waterville, encompasses artists at all stages of their careers and working in a range of artistic disciplines and mediums. Resident fellows are provided with housing and a stipend; have access to Colby College campus facilities; and are in dialogue with local organizations and community members.
Shasha Dothan (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based artist working with video and installation. Her installations transform spaces through the immersion of painting, video art and a continuous discourse with visitors. Dothan has won many awards and scholarships over the last decade. In addition to showing her work internationally, Dothan teaches and curates. Dothan’s art reveals an ongoing debate between the power structures that built her way of thought and her subjective experience. Dothan’s work addresses conflicts: being a queer woman, an Israeli, an immigrant to the USA, an occupier, a victim, and an oppressor. Her work is always deeply inspired by the environment she lives in. Whatever surrounds her transforms into an installation.
She has exhibited in museums such as Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan (2014); Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Petah Tikva (2016); Ashdod Museum of Art, Ashdod (2020), and galleries such as Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2018); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); American Jewish University, Los Angeles (2018); University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo (2019); MCLA Gallery 51 (2021). Dothan has received the Minister of Culture Young Artist Award (2018), Adams Family Foundation Young Artist Award, Asylum Arts Grant (2021). The support of Artis Residency grant for Vermont Studio center and NARS Foundation; artist in residence at Field Residency Chelsea (2022), NARS Foundation(2021), Mass Moca (2019), Byrdcliffe (2020) and Vermont Studio Center (2019).
Tessa Greene O’Brien (she/her) is a Maine-based artist and curator with a multi-faceted painting practice. She views painting as a framework through which she connects to the world and deepens her understanding of it. Working in a variety of media and scales that range from architectural exterior murals to postcard-sized watercolor painting, O’Brien is perpetually interested in the possibilities of paint.
O’Brien has shown throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at Dowling Walsh Gallery and Elizabeth Moss Galleries, and has attended residencies at Surf Point Foundation, the Tides Institute, Monson Arts, Open Studio Residency at Haystack, Hewnoaks, Vermont Studio Center, Joseph A Fiore Art Center, and the Stephen Pace House residency. Her practice has received support through grants including the St Boltophs Emerging Artist Grant, Ellis Beauregaurd Travel Grant, Maine Arts Commissions Project Grant, The Joseph A. Fiore Painting Prize, Kindling Fund Grant through SPACE Gallery, and a Professional Development Grant through Maine College of Art. She is a co-director of Able Baker Contemporary Gallery, and lives in South Portland, Maine.
Dylan Hausthor (they/them) is an artist based on the coast of Maine. They received their bachelor of fine arts from Maine College of Art and master of fine arts from Yale School of Art. They were a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves fellowship for visual artists, runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, a W. Eugene Smith Grant finalist, 2021 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, 2021 Penumbra Foundation resident, 2023 Light Work resident, and the winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer’s Fund. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, and they have three books in the permanent collection at MoMA. They are currently an artist-in-residence at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. They teach ghost hunting, ritual, photography, and mushroom foraging. To write this biography, Dylan contacted a forensic medium, who suggested that they “seemed like someone who was passionate in the things they believed in and who hides messages in what they had to say.”
Gamaliel Rodríguez (he/him) was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, in 1977. He received his bachelor of arts from the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, San Juan, in 2004, and a master of fine arts from the Kent Institute of Art and Design in the United Kingdom in 2005. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011 and has participated in numerous residencies and fellowships, such as The MacDowell Fellowship in 2012 and the International Studio & Curatorial Program Residency in 2013. In 2016, Rodríguez had a solo exhibition at SCAD Museum in Savannah, Georgia, which featured Figure 1737, a 45-foot long ballpoint pen drawing. He has also exhibited his work at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. He is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York.
