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.
Heather Flor Cron (she/they) is a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist who works with intuitive movement, dirt, installation, printmaking, fiber, social practice and food. From a young age, Flor frequently traveled to Peru to visit her maternal family. There, her passion for movement, food and textiles was ignited. Flor lives in Portland, Maine, which is settled on stolen and occupied territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Through performance and object making, Flor locates the present moment and the relationship between her two cultures. She explores the defeat and transformation of trauma through the twin powers of vulnerability and forgiveness, and how exposing pain can transcend trauma.
Flor works and organizes with Presente! Maine, a grassroots organization which works to empower displaced indigenous and afro-Latinx peoples of Maine through survival programs, community power building, cultural celebration, and transformative healing practice. There she co-lead the Food Brigade project, a food survival program and the Cuidado Colectivo Program, a youth recreation day program. Flor has been featured in a number of group exhibitions including SPACE Gallery’s Re-Site, Able Baker Contemporary’s Undercurrents curated by Veronica Perez, and Speedwell Projects Can’t Take My Eyes Off You curated by Faythe Levine.
She is also the recipient of awards and residencies such as the Kindling Fund via Space Gallery / Andy Warhol Foundation, David C. Driskell Black Seed Studio Fellowship, Speedwell Projects Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA Fellowship and the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Residency.
Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981) uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race, beauty, and cultural identity. Referencing regional and historical events, as well as a personal archive as a biracial woman, Gaignard creates environments that teeter between symbolic and autobiographical realms. She cleverly interrogates notions of skin privilege while challenging viewers to look more closely at racial realities. The ensemble of her work shatters viewers’ perceptions of culture and race, compelling them to piece together novel ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.
Since 2019, Gaignard has debuted six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous countrywide group shows. Last year, she presented two solo exhibitions: To Whom it May Concern with Rowan University Art Gallery and Strange Fruit with Vielmetter Los Angeles. Gaignard’s work has appeared at: The Broad, CA; The Nerman Museum, KS; Stephen Friedman Gallery, UK; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Getty Center, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. In July 2022, Gaignard partnered with Orange Barrel Media on Look At Them Look At Us: a permanent, site-specific public art installation in downtown Atlanta. Gaignard received her bachelor of fine arts in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her master of fine arts in photography from Yale University. She splits her time between her hometown of Orange, Mass, and Los Angeles.
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.”
