Jenny O’Connell
2021 Artist-In-Residence
Jenny’s writing explores themes of outdoor adventure, wilderness, environment, vulnerability, risk, and joy; and reminds people, when they forget, that they are alive. Finding Petronella, her debut book project, traces her 2014 solo trek across Finland following the footsteps of a legendary woman beyond the Arctic Circle. A 2019 Maine Literary Award finalist and Pushcart Prize nominee, her award-winning nonfiction has appeared in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Backcountry Magazine, SLICE Magazine, Appalachia Journal, Maine Magazine, Decor Maine Magazine, and elsewhere.
Jenny’s 14 years as an outdoor guide have brought her all over the globe leading backpacking, sea kayaking, cultural exchange, winter adventure, and river expeditions from the Peruvian Andes to the wild waters of her home state of Maine. She is the Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Seguinland Institute, where she facilitates university level creative writing intensives based around craft, climate change, and the outdoors. She teaches craft seminars and creative writing courses at Stonecoast MFA, Maine Media Workshops, The Telling Room, and elsewhere, and guides creative writing-focused outdoor expeditions in Maine.
Susan Bickford
2020 Artist-In-Residence
Susan Bickford is a lecturer at the University of Maine at Augusta as well as Director of the Danforth Gallery. Bickfords’ approach to art is a deep ecological one. A Certified Nature Therapy Guide, Bickford also holds an MFA from Maine Collage of Art and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Winner of the 2017 Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Media and Performance, Susan Bickford has been making interdisciplinary collaborative retreats/performances in nature since 2001.
Maestra Kim Diehnelt
2018 Artist-in-Residence
Maestra Kim Diehnelt has been called “a renaissance woman” for bringing her own brand of beauty and passion to the world through her work as an international conductor, accomplished composer and artistic coach.
Trained in the United States and Europe, Maestra Diehnelt established her craft as conductor and composer in both Finland and Switzerland, leading Baltic, Russian, and European ensembles.
Maestra Diehnelt has been composing works for solo instruments, chamber, orchestral and choral ensembles since 2011. Her style is best described as a “Nordic Palestrina” as her works possess a lyrical, vocal quality with an attention to beauty and the sense of an unfolding story. She was a semi-finalist for The American Prize in Composition in the Professional Orchestra division in 2015 for her work Montegar for viola and strings.
An active guest conductor in the United States and abroad, she is acknowledged as an authority on the music of Edward Elgar. Maestra Kim Diehnelt recently served as Music Director and Conductor for the Northwest Symphony Orchestra in the Greater Chicago area.
Adriane Herman
2017 Artist-in-Residence
Adriane Herman has had solo exhibitions at Adam Baumgold Gallery (New York), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Kiosk Gallery (Kansas City); Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Rose Contemporary in Portland, Maine. Her most recent body of inlaid burnishing clay panels, entitled “Finish Lines,” focused on the marks we make when crossing accomplishments off our “to do” lists, while simultaneously paying homage to the efforts of her former studio assistant to attend to the details of daily life as a graduate student transitioning from female to male, i.e., literally "refinishing" himself.
Herman has shown in numerous group exhibitions at venues including The Dalarnas Museum (Falun, Sweden), the Portland Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Chapel Street Gallery at Yale University, The Ulrich Museum (Wichita), The H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute and Paragraph Gallery (both Kansas City), Mount Airy Contemporary (Philadelphia), and The International Print Center New York.
She has received grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the Charlotte Street Foundation, and the Avenue of the Arts Foundation, and her work has been written about in publications including The New Yorker, artforum.com, Art in Print, Art on Paper, The Kansas City Star, The New Art Examiner, and Art New England, and included in the following books: A Survey of Contemporary Printmaking; Printmaking at the Edge; Imprint of Place: Maine Printmaking 1800-2005; The Best of Printmaking; Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials and Processes; and Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall.
Herman’s independent efforts to normalize consumption of fine art dovetail with collaborative curatorial efforts such as Slop Art and projects she has undertaken with her students at Maine College of Art and Kansas City Art Institute. Herman holds a B.A. from Smith College and an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a Level II certificate in the Wilton Method of Cake Decorating.
Currently a finalist for a United States Artist Fellowship, Herman has been a visiting artist at over fifty institutions and an Artist In Residence at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India; The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City; and the Baie Sainte Marie Artist & Family Compound in Nova Scotia. Herman’s work has been collected by The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, The Progressive Corporation, The Ulrich Museum of Art, and The Walker Art Center, plus some individual humans.
Louise Bourne
2017 Artist-in-Residence
I hold a BFA from Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art), and an MFA from the University of Michigan. My work is in collections throughout this country and in the UK. I teach at the University of Maine in Orono, Colby College, Maine Maritime Academy, and privately.
I am interested in how color shifts in a given light condition and how those changes move through and structure a painting. Gathering and responding to visual information, to the sensual world, keeps me itching to paint. The dynamic quality of natural light fascinates me.
We’ve learned that most of what constitutes a person is not so much human molecules, but water and bacteria, not so different from the surrounding air, or from the next person. Similarly, the constitution of a painting is not about separate objects and their locations, but about the pieces of color these things and spaces divide into, and that, simultaneously, unify them. This matrix informs my paintings.
Recently, I have been making multi-panel paintings. When we experience wide open space, we turn our heads; stop, and turn again. This is how I think of each panel: a moment of vision, a chance to compose a painting within an overall experience. Usually the sections are vertical or square, like a cross section of the traditional landscape horizontal. I enjoy working large, as I can deal with the proportional intervals between islands and navigational markers.
Tracey Jasas-Hardel, Violinist & Benjamin Noyes, Cellist
The Abitare Project
2016 Artists-in-Residence
We have a great way to think about classical chamber music. It can happen anywhere, anytime, and for any reason at all. It doesn’t need to be in concert hall. It should be out and around, teaching and transforming people and places. Our mission is to widen the classical chamber music audience in Maine, while bringing together seriously amazing talent from all over the place.
Tracey Jasas-Hardel attended Interlochen Arts Academy, received two degrees at the Cleveland Institute of Music and studied for a time in Berlin, Germany as a Fulbright grant recipient. She has performed at the White House and played with the National Symphony and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.
Benjamin Noyes grew up in Portland Maine. He was chosen by famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma to participate as soloist and recitalist throughout China. After earning music degrees from Rice University and Northwestern University he went on to play in the Naples Philharmonic Orchestra and later the Roanoke Symphony.
George Mason
2015 Artist-in-Residence
George Mason has a background in ceramic architectural tile and his work is steeped in the exploration of materials and history. Richly textured and saturated with color, the largest of his “relief tapestries” are pieced together panels that occupy entire walls. Mason began to combine encaustics with layered paper cut outs while teaching in Jerusalem, Indonesia, and India. Eventually, these works led to a multi faceted question that challenged the artist to synthesize several divergent interests. He asked, “Is it possible to create large dimensional works, outside the frame, highly textural, referencing textile, ceramic, and cut out traditions, that hang with authority yet surrender to gravity with grace? He is currently finding out, and living on the coast of Maine with his family. A recipient of 3 National Endowment for the Arts awards, and a founder of Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Mason has taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Ohio State, U.C. Boulder, and Haystack.
In his home state of Maine, he has shown at The Portland Museum of Art, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art; with solo shows at The Farnsworth Museum, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Mason has completed 30 plus Percent For Art architectural ceramic projects for schools in Maine and New York City between 1986 and 2003, including a commission for The Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, Georgia.