Kambui Olujimiis a conceptual artist born and raised in Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Smithsonian Institute, Kiasma Musuem of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Poland. His lectures include the Goethe Institute Accra Ghana, Tisch School of the Arts, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has recently been selected for The Fine Art Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. and the International Artspace Kellerberin Australia.

Minako Shirakura studied glass at Edinburgh College of Art, in Scotland, where she received a BA as well as a postgraduate diploma in design and applied arts. She also holds an MFA in sculpture/dimensional studies from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She has exhibited her work in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

Second-year Fellow Nathalie Miebach holds a BA in political science and Chinese from Oberlin College and an MFA in sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art. Originally from Germany and France, Nathalie has spent many years in Southeast Asia and the United States. Her recent awards include the 2006 International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement Award and the Graham Campbell Grant Prize.

Roberta Fleming Jeffries explores the perceptual divide between human beings and nature in visual fantasies of engineering and environment. A native of Washington, D.C., she traveled in Russia, Alaska, and New Mexico, before completing an MFA in printmaking at Rhode Island School of Design.

Janelle Iglesias is a Norwegian-Dominican, originally from Queens, New York. She received a BA in cultural anthropology from Emory University and an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she was awarded a thesis fellowship for her final year. When in New York, she shares a studio with her sister, Lisa, with whom she formed Las Hermanas, a collaborative duo.

Second-year Fellow Steve McClure graduated from the University of South Florida in 1995. In Tampa, he opened (with Eric Breit) the Willie Shaker Gallery, a traveling exhibition space. While living in North Carolina, he produced the experimental noise show CMP, on radio station WXDU. He has an abiding interest in the works of Goethe and the visual history of whales.

Robert Gutierrez’s work integrates Filipino folklore and animism within a larger dystopic mental landscape. He has had solo exhibitions at Ratio3 in San Francisco; Sixtyseven Gallery in New York; and AMT Gallery in Como, Italy. His work is in the permanent collection of the New Museum in New York. In December, a solo exhibition of his work will open at Sister, in Los Angeles.

Meghan Gordon received her BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Her paintings and drawings explore the relationship between curated spaces, period houses, and contemporary painting. She recently obtained a grant to further her research and documentation of historic houses.

Christy Georg’s kinetic sculpture has received awards from the Dairy Barn Southeastern Ohio Cultural Center, the Kinetic Art Organization, and Boston AICA (International Association of Art Critics). Recent solo exhibitions include the Contemporary Artists Center in North Adams, the Roswell Museum, Gettysburg College, and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez of Madison, Wisconsin, received an MFA from Cornell University, and her work has appeared in the Madison Review, Puerto Del Sol, and Speakeasy.

Second-year Fellow Nancy Kathleen Pearson is a Tennessee native and a graduate of George Mason University's MFA program. She has been a finalist for the Walt Whitman award, and her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, the Black Warrior Review, the Cimarron Review, MARGIE, and other journals. Her first book of poems, Two Minutes of Light, is forthcoming from Perugia Press in fall 2008.

Second-year Fellow Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, Australia. Her short fiction has been published and produced for radio in Australia and the United Kingdom. She is currently working on her first novel.

Nadia Kalman of Brooklyn, New York, has published short stories in journals such as the Gettysburg Review and The Walrus, and won an SLS Fellowship to St. Petersburg last summer. She is currently working on a novel about immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

Fiction Fellow Michael Hinken of Washington, Illinois, received an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2004 and has taught writing at the University of Michigan for the past three years. His writing has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, River City, the Tampa Review, and Elysian Fields Quarterly. He is working on a collection of stories and a novel.

Melissa Range of Atlanta, Georgia, is a 2006 Rona Jaffe Award winner and a 2007 "Discovery"/The Nation prize–winner in poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgia Review, the Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, and Image.

Amanda Rea of Marvel, Colorado, received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Green Mountains Review, the Iowa Review, and Indiana Review.

Fiction Fellow Cheri Johnson, of Lake of the Woods County, Minnesota, has an MFA from the University of Minnesota and an MA from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She has won a Bush Artist Fellowship and the Glimmer Train Magazine Fiction Open.

Poetry Fellow Cynthia Lowen of NYC, New York, received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the 2006 winner of the Tin House/Summer Literary Seminars Kenya Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, the Laurel Review, Lumina, Provincetown Arts, and Tin House. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she works on documentary films and as an editor.

Poetry Fellow John Murillo of Los Angeles, California, is a Cave Canem fellow and a recent graduate of New York University's MFA program. He currently lives in the Bronx.