Past Artists-in-Residence

The IMSS Artist Residency Program provides artists with extended and in-depth access to artifacts from its collection, working space within the Museum, and support to present exhibitions that introduce additional perspectives to the institutional depiction of medical history. As artistic practice occupies an increasingly pluralistic field, The International Museum of Surgical Science believes that artists are uniquely equipped to extrapolate on Museum collections in innovative ways. Artists-in-Residence present a capstone exhibition at the end of their residency.

Past Artists-in-Residence:

Kathleen Gallo’s (Spring 2021 Artist-in-Residence) work finds its home at the intersection of science and art. She creates post-mortem facial reconstructions, or the artistic approximation of the facial characteristics of an unidentified deceased person based upon the person’s unique skull structure. She created 2D post-mortem facial reconstructions from the Museum’s unique collection of trephined skulls from ancient Peru.

Kioto Aoki (Fall 2020 Artist-in-Residence) is a visual artist and educator using the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process to explore modes of perception as a politics of vision. Her photographic work oscillates between the still and the moving image, attentive to the apparatus of the human eye and the camera; while installation and artist book works engage mechanisms of structural tangibility and site-specificity. Forming a rhetoric of nuanced quietude, her practice considers the intimacies of vision through the experience of sight from inception through presentation.

Selva Aparicio (Spring 2020 Artist-in-Residence) is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture and performance, creating artwork that functions as a research practice of memory, death, intimacy and mourning. Aparicio was born and raised in the woods of Barcelona, Spain; she received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions; she was recently named the recipient of the JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights and the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize.

Namir Fearce (Winter 2019 Artist-in-Residence) is an interdisciplinary artist residing in Chicago, by way of North Minneapolis. His practices include experimental film, sculpture, painting, audio, and performance. Fluidity is central to his practice, drawing on a constellation of references and sites of Black American queer experience. He uses these histories, both personal and cultural, to weave complex, emotional, and political landscapes while exploring the potential bodies, identities, and stories that can arise in these newly woven domestic spaces. Fearce is a 3rd year BFA candidate at the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been featured in Red Bull Music Academy, Paper Magazine, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Walker Arts Center, Soap Factory and more.

portrait of Artist in Residence Namir Fearce hanging upside down

Jon Chambers (Spring 2019 Artist-in-Residence) is an artist and educator based in Chicago where he teaches media literacy, media art histories, net art, new media art (software + hardware) and video at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University. He has shown work nationally and internationally, in screening venues, galleries and online.

Learn more about Jon Chambers current work here.

Emma Rozanski (Fall 2018 Artist-in-Residence) is an Australian filmmaker, multi-media artist and a first-generation MFA graduate of Bela Tarr’s acclaimed film.factory experiment in Sarajevo. Her debut feature-length film, PAPAGAJKA (The Parrot) had its World Premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in 2016 and continued on to a successful festival run worldwide. Emma’s moving image works have collectively have been selected for over 150 festivals and exhibitions worldwide and won several awards. She is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talents, the Berlinale Short Film Station and the Reykjavík Talent Lab. Emma is part of the artist collective, Bistrik7 (@Bistrik7), a group of 20 filmmaker-artists from around the globe who make collective projects and curate screenings and exhibitions of their work. Currently, Emma is developing her next two narrative feature films, along with an ambitious long-form video art piece.

Learn more about Emma Rozanski’s work here.

Justus Harris (Winter 2018 Artist-in-Residence) combines medical data visualization and 3D modeling to understand health trends. His work is inspired by using continuous monitors for his type 1 diabetes. The 3D printed Diabetes Data Sculptures and public health data projects that come from his research have been featured internationally at venues including the Stanford School of Medicine, Theorizing the Web (New York), the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library where he was the inaugural Maker in Residence, and at the European Commission’s Internet of Things exhibit ‘Adaptation’ (Berlin). He is a portfolio reviewer and alumni of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BA, Visual & Critical Studies). Justus has participated in five artificial pancreas research studies and is currently using a DIY artificial pancreas system. He is currently developing his projects at mHUB, Chicago’s premier prototyping innovation center.

Learn more about Justus Harris’ current work here.

Terri Kapsalis (Fall 2017 Artist-in-Residence) is the author of Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit (Hull-House Museum), The Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls) and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press). Along with John Corbett and Anthony Elms, she co-edited Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, the Astro Black, and Other Solar Myths (WhiteWalls) and Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn, and Chicago’s Afro-futurist Underground (WhiteWalls) and co-curated the touring exhibition Pathways to Unknown Worlds.

Her writing can be found on Literary Hub and in such publications as Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, Parakeet, The Baffler, New Formations and Public. She is a founding member of Theater Oobleck and serves on its artistic board. Since 1991, she has been a collective member of the Chicago Women’s Health Center. She is Adjunct Full Professor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Carrie Olivia Adams (Spring 2017 Resident) lives in Chicago, where she is the communications specialist for the American Medical Association Foundation and the poetry editor for the small press Black Ocean. She is the author of “Operating Theater” (Noctuary Press 2015), “Forty-One Jane Doe’s” (book and companion DVD, Ahsahta 2013), and “Intervening Absence” (Ahsahta 2009) as well as the chapbooks “Grapple” (above/ground press 2017), “Overture in the Key of F” (above/ground press 2013), and “A Useless Window” (Black Ocean 2006). She has an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia.

Learn more about the artists’ capstone exhibition at the Museum here.

Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) (Spring/Fall 2016 Residents) are a provisional collective exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st-century embodiment through performance, language, and emerging technologies. Participants include Mark Jeffery (choreography), Judd Morrissey (text and technology), Justin Deschamps and Christopher Knowlton (collaborators/performers).

Learn more about the artists’ capstone exhibition at the Museum here.

Marisa Zanotti (October 2016 Guest Resident) is an award-winning artist-researcher. Her directing and writing practice is informed by her background in performance, choreography, theatre and installation practice.

Over 25 years she has consistently explored new technologies and the body, initially in relation to their role in live work and most recently in trans-media work The Pan’s People Papers. She is a specialist in adapting and directing dance for the screen and has adapted work by Lea Anderson and Ben Wright. In 2012 she developed the UK’s first choreographic Web App for phones and tablets. Marisa’s film work is regularly screened in festivals, recently her documentary Edits Film adapted from Lea Anderson’s work Edits was shown in July at the Curious? Festival at BALTIC in Newcastle. Marisa will be an artist-in-residence at The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago in October. She is based in the dance department at the University of Chichester. Her practice-led doctoral research argued for screen adaptation as a way of revealing unique thinking by choreographers. Marisa has a long-term collaboration with the editor Ian Ballantyne. She is currently working with composer Matthew Whiteside and Magnetic North on an AV collaboration We Are All Made of Stars.

ATOM-r hosted Zanotti at the Museum as part of an exchange program with the University of Chichester, where they were in residence Summer 2016.

Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz (Fall 2015 Residents) are collaborators that live and work in Chicago. Drawing on their research into prehistoric & ancient art, eroticism, and esoteric traditions, their works synthesize concerns of sex, death, myth, transformation, and alchemy. They view the act of collaboration as the dissolution of individual identities and union of oppositions as a new, harmonized whole.

Learn more about the artists’ capstone exhibition at the Museum here.

Vesna Jovanovic (2013/15 Artist in Resident) is a Chicago-based visual artist who specializes in conceptualizations of the human body. Using spilled ink as groundwork, she creates drawings that often formally resemble medical illustration while concentrating on what is usually left out: how it feels and what it means to have a body as well as how the body is socially constructed and culturally perceived. With drawing as a bodily act and medical illustration as a visual trope, Jovanovic brings embodiment, biopolitics, phenomenology, and various other ideas and theories of the human body into her work.

To learn more about Vesna’s project, please visit her blog here or watch a video of the artist and the Museum’s past Curator here.

Learn more about the artist’s capstone exhibition at the Museum here.

Rebecca Keller (2012 Inaugural Artist in Resident) is an artist, writer as well as the founder of Excavating History. She has exhibited her work widely, and has been honored by two Fulbrights, grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Illinois Arts council. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The 2011/12 exhibition, Excavating History: Artists Take on Historic Sites involved artists Joseph Cruz, Brianna Schwiezer, Amber Ginsberg, Maral Hashimi, Rebecca Hernandez, Elise Goldstein, Meredith Zielke, Erin Obradavitch, Liene Bosque, Kristin Ginger and Annie Heckmann.