These extraordinary artists are supported by ACA Mentoring Artist Endowment, funded by a $50,000 gift from each of these generous donors: Joe and Lynn Conte, Don Funk, Ed and Jeanie Harris, Roy and Peggy Hester, the Pabst State of Florida Cultural Endowment, Bob and Genie Stine, Jim and Alexis Pugh, Bryce West, and John M Jeronimo, FAIA.
Each residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts partners will Central Florida institutions to present our public colloquium series OUTreach, featuring talks from Mentoring Artists. To inquire about partnering with us for an upcoming programs, we invite you to review and complete our Mentoring Artist Outreach Request Form.
Sunday, October 08, 2023 - Saturday, October 28, 2023
Applications Closed
composer / pianist
“History and style place her among the post-minimalists who use repetitive means and classic, tonal harmonies. But while many of her peers are self-consciously chasing after hipster-pop relevance, Mazzoli is composing substantial pieces that can appeal to those listeners without pandering to them. Her work is clear and uncompromising, and even when it is not at its best, she never plays to the crowd.”- George Grella, New York Classical Review
playwright / dramaturg / director / cultural worker
“As both a playwright and a new play development dramaturg, the cultivation of new work and unique and diverse voices has been central to my artistic practice for 18 years.” - Addae Moon
Interdisciplinary Artist / Educator / Artivist
Chicago's inaugural Poet Laureate avery r. young is as remarkable, and multitudinous, and mesmerizing, as the city itself. His poetry is equally generative and multifaceted, and extends far beyond specific boundaries of language, music, performance, and visual art. - Mandana Chaffa
Sunday, February 11, 2024 - Saturday, March 02, 2024
Application Deadline: Sunday, October 15, 2023
Performing Artist, Writer
Theatrical jazz aesthetic [is] the artistic lineage in which my work is rooted...Theatrical jazz borrows many elements from the musical world of jazz—a respect for truth in the present moment, improvisation, process over product, ensemble synthesis, solo virtuosity, simultaneity, collaboration, audience engagement—and it disrupts the traditional conventions of Western theatre, including a single narrative with a throughline. - Sharon Bridgeforth
Cultural Practitioner
Creative folks who knew how to problem solve, and that's the essence to me of what art can be. It's a tool. But creative practitioners, whoever they are, not limited to the visual arts, can be problem solvers. - william cordova
Photographer, Lecturer, Political Activist, Curator
A Jamaica-born and New York-based photographer, artist, lecturer, and political activist, Renee Cox is celebrated for works that capture the identities and beauty within her subjects. Dedicating her career to deconstructing stereotypes, she has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural work, activism, gender, and African studies. - Elena Martinique
Sunday, May 12, 2024 - Saturday, June 01, 2024
Application Deadline: Sunday, December 03, 2023
Sculptor, Visual Artist
Sonja Henderson is a sculptor, mixed-media artist, teacher, collaborator and innovator. Her sculptures and installations challenge socio-political constructs through manipulation of media, scale, and re-contextualization of form. Sonja teaches and works directly with communities using restorative and social justice practices centering equity, healing, and human rights.
Poet, Writer
Language has the propensity to heal. It can illuminate the dark spaces, the spaces where things make us uncomfortable, but it can also illuminate the basic foundations—joy, pain, fear, and hope—these deeper emotions that make us most human. Poetry...enables us to fully experience something outside ourselves, while simultaneously learning more deeply about who we are or who we want to be—individually and collectively. - Crystal Wilkinson
Composer, Media Artist, Performer
“Pamela Z made electronica performance into a natural extension of the way artists could explore the contemporary world, mirroring its complexity in layers of sound that helped make her point, rather than being the point.” – Michael Zwiebach
Sunday, June 23, 2024 - Saturday, July 13, 2024
Application Deadline: Sunday, January 14, 2024
Painter
Using humor and over-the-top sensuality, Angela Dufresne creates narrative paintings that depict absurdist allegories of perversion and debauchery.
Composer, Musician, Interdisciplinary Artist, Activist
I thoroughly enjoy the exercises associated with making art. Music is a healing force in my personal life and I’ve tried to use it as an instrument for positive change in the world. My creative process starts with a dream. I see colors within this process, and then translate those colors to noted value through music. - Kahil El'Zabar
performance maker
"The impact of her performances is in the tenor and emanation of utterances, the experience of being present with her body and its vibrations, generating an experience irreducible to language. Yet the depth of research in Okpokwasili’s work does not vanish under these proto- or extra-linguistic measures. Instead, she is interested in activating themes deep inside us: the ways in which Western ideologies deny histories, experiences and social systems, particularly for women of colour, which challenge Euro-American dogmas." - Andrew Hibbard, Frieze
Sunday, October 06, 2024 - Saturday, October 26, 2024
Application Deadline: Sunday, May 19, 2024
Composer, DJ, Musician, Producer
"My work is all about uplifting humanity." - Andy C
Critic, Poet, Writer
“Kwame Dawes is not a poet of the American Great Plains, though the landscape and its seasons serve as the space for the poet's latest room for meditation. Unlike his colleague at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Ted Kooser, Dawes is a transplant to the American Midwest. In his latest poetry collection, Nebraska, Dawes’s obsession is fixated on ideas of place and the feeling of displacement this landscape so foreign to his own has conjured”. – Jordan Charlton, The Adroit Journal. Kwame Dawes is a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers
Visual Artist, Designer
By drawing upon the language and tools of the design world and capitalizing on his expertise as a typographer, Bob Faust creates visual, visceral and contextual art experiences that inform, empower and/or instigate in the service or celebration of human difference. Faust has been recognized nationally and internationally for his creativity and clarity through many prestigious exhibitions and publications.
View Atlantic Center for the Arts’ full Mentoring Artist-in-Residence history.
For information on contributing to this endowment, please contact Executive Director Nancy Lowden Norman at nlowden@atlanticcenterforthearts.org.