BREWSTER, N.Y.: SPACE on Ryder Farm has selected residents for the 2022 season. Residency opportunities at SPACE include the Working Farm, Family Residency, Greenhouse Residency, Institutional Residency, Creative Residency, and the inaugural BLKSPACE residency.
Members of the 2022 Working Farm are Emily Gardner Xu Hall, Isaac Gómez, Sanaz Toossi, Noelle Viñas, and Ray Yamanouchi. The Working Farm, curated by playwright Vichet Chum, is SPACE’s resident writers’ group, providing five playwrights, composers, lyricists and/or librettists with a non-consecutive three-week residency and a public reading of their new play in partnership with Playwrights Horizons.
Along with their children, the 2022 Family Residency participants include Eli Bolin, Goussy Celestin, Amy Cutler, Karolina Letunova, Jessamyn Lovell, Deneen Reynolds-Knott, Terrie Samundra, Rachel Somerstein, and Hyeyung Yoon. The Family Residency, founded in association with the Lilly Awards Foundation, is one of the first and only residencies for parent-artists and their children. The program supports working artist-parents with a 10-day residency designed to give parents space to work on their craft while the SPACE staff facilitates creative and nature-focused programming for their children (ages 5-12). The 2022 Family Residency was curated by playwright Sarah Gancher.
Participants in the 2022 BLKSPACE residency are Brittany Brathwaite, Antoinette Cooper, Jasminfire, Eric Lockley, Kareem M. Lucas, Terry Marshall, Ron Ragin, Aisha Shillingford, Eljon Wardally, and Jamila Woods. Led by an all-Black woman team, Interfest producers Kristen Adele Calhoun and Nikki Vera curated BLKSPACE for its inaugural year. BLKSPACE provides Black individual artists, activists, organizers and small groups the opportunity to create and ideate away from everyday life and in the company of other Black people. Time at BLKSPACE is granted to individuals and small groups who lay out a specific need for their residency and whose work forwards Black liberation. BLKSPACE has been underwritten by CCC (Color Conscious Collective).
Participants in the 2022 Greenhouse Residency include Maddie Easley, Rachel K. Godfrey, kanishk pandey, and Nia Akilah Robinson. This season’s Greenhouse Residency was curated by writer, educator, and cultural worker Nissy Aya and offers five aspiring playwrights or theatre writers who have not had access to the professional theatre community through traditional means a fully subsidized weeklong residency at SPACE. During the residency, participants will have time and space to write as well as to participate in workshops with mentorship from Aya and other theatre professionals.
Participants in the 2022 Creative Residency program include Dominic D’Andrea, Paul Hodge, Naomi Iizuka, Emily Kaczmarek, Kristin Marting, Lisa Portes, Jaymes Sanchez, Kamala Sankaram, Zoe Sarnak, Jonathan Spector, and Kate Sullivan. SPACE’s Creative Residency program will support deferred residents of SPACE who applied for the 2020 season, but were not able to attend due to the ongoing pandemic. The Creative Residency serves artists and activists with a wide range of projects and disciplines with one week residencies.
The 2022 Institutional Residents are Bleu Beckford-Burrell and Marvin González De León with Page 73 Productions; Salty Brine, Lama El Homasai, and Roopa Mahadevan with Joe’s Pub; Banna Desta and Michael Shayan with Audible Theater; and Julia Izumi and Jenny Koons with Playwrights Horizons. SPACE’s Institutional Residencies offer 501c(3) organizations and incorporated ensembles time and space for artistic commissions, DEIJ goals, strategic planning, and retreat opportunities.
SPACE also selected Aya Aziz and Riley Mulherkar as the recipients of this year’s Bryan Gallace/Posthumous Prodigy Productions Fellowship, an annual award which offers musicians time and space on Ryder Farm to create new work, as well as financial support to be used for professional growth. Aziz and Mulherkar, both SPACE alums, will each receive $30,000 to record and release a debut album, along with creating supplemental videos and live performances.
For the 2022 season, SPACE introduced the new programming role of curator, helmed by SPACE alumni. Since last November, the curators have been involved in outreach, application review, and interview processes. They helped select the 2022 finalists, composed the cohort for their specific program, and will engage with the residents while they are on Ryder Farm. SPACE sought to eliminate financial barriers in 2017 by fully subsidizing all individual residencies, and pledged to award at least 50 percent of residency opportunities each year to people of color and other underrepresented voices.
“We’re thrilled to announce the 2022 residencies at SPACE, which will begin on August 1st,” said creative director Kate Eminger in a statement. “For the first time, SPACE alumni played a major role in crafting the residency season, and the results couldn’t be more exciting. The ultimate goal is to create a more inclusive, diverse and radically hospitable experience for the SPACE community, hand-in-hand with the curators.”
SPACE on Ryder Farm is a nonprofit residency program and organic farm located on the grounds of a 227-year-old family homestead in Putnam County, just an hour north of New York City. SPACE’s mission is to create an environment singular in its ability to invigorate artists and innovators and their work, and to contribute to the sustainable preservation of one of the oldest organic family farms on the East Coast. SPACE has grown to serve over 1,550 residents since its initial season. As of 2019, SPACE had a budget of approximately $1.2 million.
