Olamina Global Arts 2025 Fall Residents
Kayla Banks
Residency Dates: August 19th - August 25th
As part of the Olamina Residency in Taos, New Mexico, kayla (she/they) is currently an artist-in-residence at the historic Peñasco Theater. kayla is a multidisciplinary artist, dancer, and cultural organizer whose work weaves together Afro-Indigenous lineage, movement, and community healing practices.
kayla will be offering a donation-based community movement workshop (1 hour) on Thursday, August 29th in the evening at the Peñasco Theater. All are welcome — check the theater’s announcements for details.
kayla’s upcoming project, Remembrance, is a site-specific Fall Equinox gathering in Boulder, CO that brings together dance, poetry, food, and ceremony to honor land, water, and ancestral memory.
To support Remembrance and contribute to artist stipends, food, and community offerings, please consider a tax-deductible donation through GiveButter https://givebutter.com/remembranceboulder
Maya Cohen
Residency Dates: September 15th - November 30th
I am an artist, farmer and organizer. For more than a decade, visual art has been my healing and neuroqueer refuge. My art attempts to visualize the entanglement between human bodyminds and ecological bodyminds (centered on trans, mad, disabled, diasporic, afab, multiracial bodyminds because that’s what I am). From the expressive reaching of trees to the river ripples that mirror the patterns behind my eyes, I explore the enmeshment of life through the shared patterns that everyone is made of.
Naomi Johnson
Residency Dates: October 15th - October 26th
Naomi Johnson is an artist & researcher based in Chicago, IL. Through metalsmithing, they explore themes of queerness, belonging, kinship, & cultural (il)legibility at the intersections of race, gender, & sexuality. They started their handmade small batch jewelry business, Metal Petal Jewelry, in February of 2023. Through it, they design and sell ready-to-wear and custom pieces. They also design art objects for display and exhibition. Naomi is influenced by traditional African metalwork and craftsmanship as well as contemporary American jewelry styles. In addition to their creative practice, they co-lead Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts and are invested in reducing the harms of the legal system.
Ashara Ekundayo
Residency Dates: November 20th - November 30th
Ashara Ekundayo is a queer, Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator of contemporary art, visual maker, cultural theologian, arts organizer, and consultant whose creative practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study, creation and maintenance of Black archives.
In the tradition of critical artistic action and dynamic imagination she also conjures collaborative site-responsive ceremony, and utilizes artist-based strategies such as photography, screenprinting, zine-making, installation, and altar-making to illuminate the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora.
Her work explores healing, memory, space, and place and she has worked with Black and Brown communities across borders in support of issues of land, access, and self-determination. She is the Founder, Curator/Executive Creative Director at Artist As First Responder and Principal at AECreative Consulting Partners, LLC.
Marina Stankov-Hodge
Residency Dates: October 13th - November 16th
Marina “Nurse Boogy” Stankov-Hodge is the founder of Marina Astrological Consulting and Music LTD. She is an astrologer, musician, dancer, and registered nurse. In short, she is a multi-media storyteller who has to digest the difficulties of life through the arts. Her astrology practice is informed by both modern and traditional techniques and she draws off her counseling experience as a nurse as well. You can book a reading on her site www.galacticnurseboogz.com . Subscribe to her free moon horoscope for info, educational resources, current astrological transits, as well as events!
She is also currently working on her first album. Her music has been described as “a warm hug”, “unconditional love”, and “a mantra”. She aspires to work more in the music industry curating music for film and editorial playlists. So be sure and let her know if you have a need for this or have any other resources to share towards this end. You can support her music by downloading it and following her at www.nurseboogz.bandcamp.com.
Also follow her on all streaming platforms except Spotify under her artist name “Nurse Boogz” and be on the lookout for more music from her soon. She is also contributing other writings on Medium (@galacticnurseboogz). Her dancing is mostly popping and previously she worked and battled professionally in the US, Brazil, and Europe as a b-girl. She is a Fulbright Arts Alumni as well.
Diatom Deli
Residency Dates: September 15th - October 15th
Diatom Deli is the experimental music project of Delisa (deli) Neblett~Quiles, centering on voice, electronics, and field recordings to create layered soundscapes that move between intimacy and vastness. Her practice explores how sound can hold memory, emotion, and transformation, often weaving together organic textures with digital processing to build dreamlike environments.
Through Diatom Deli, deli is interested in sound as a vessel for storytelling and as a space of connection between inner and outer worlds. This residency offers an opportunity to deepen her exploration of sonic environments, focusing on how composition and performance can open contemplative, immersive experiences for listeners. Without pressure to produce or perform, this time opens the door to experimentation at the intersection of sonic landscapes, ancestral memory, healing, and collective listening.
By engaging with the residency’s ethos of mutual care, re-centering, and anti-hierarchical exchange, deli will expand her practice toward new modes of sonic storytelling prioritizing relationality over presentation and cultivating immersive experiences rooted in connection, rest, and rooted awareness <3.
Jasmine Dillavou
Residency Dates: Oct 1st- October 15th
Jasmine Nicole Maldonado Dillavou is a Boricua artist, performer and educator based out of Colorado. She often employs makeup as her medium as a way to navigate stories around the "femme body". Dillavou seeks to expand her role as a cultural storyteller, using her artworks to pass intergenerational wisdom and honor the voices of her communities. She believes the artist's job is to shift deficit narratives and disrupt unjust systems by imagining a world where everyone is liberated and celebrated.
Layna Lewis
Residency Dates: October 15th - November 29th
Layna is a Black, Afro Indigenous, multiethnic, multicultural, metadimensional TwoSpirit artist, born and raised in Kalapuyaland (cka Portland, Oregon). Layna has been active in the Arts their entire life as a performing and visual artist, director, producer, playwright, sculptor, muralist, art activist, and creative. Becoming the person they desperately needed as a child and young adult is their core practice, their North star.
Layna collaborates with artists and activists in our most vulnerable communities, using social practice strategies to create modern myth and archetypes through narrative, performance and ritual. Activating dance, film, theater, painting, mural & sculpture in carefully curated community spaces, projects, and programs. Layna develops and directs collaborative projects that provide arts access to individuals and communities facing barriers imposed by oppressive systems.
Using expressive arts and embodied practices to create space to process, heal, and release wounds of trauma. Layna's innovative process models ignite the creative force that activate expansion, individually and collectively. Critical excavation of dominance and oppressive systems demystify, decolonize and transform external and internalized systems. The generative process of creative expression actively constructs the world they imagine. Together transforming visions to living things.
Athena Lynch
Residency Dates: October 27 - November 29th
Athena Lynch (b. 1980) is a transdisciplinary artist and community arts organizer based in Portland, Maine. Raised in East Orange, Orange, and Newark, NJ, her creative roots come from a family of makers—her mother a seamstress, her grandfather a cake decorator, and her aunt a carpenter. She is an alumnus of the historic Arts High School in Newark and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Maine College of Art & Design.
Athena Lynch (b. 1980) is a transdisciplinary artist and community arts organizer based in Portland, Maine. Raised in East Orange, Orange, and Newark, NJ, her creative roots come from a family of makers—her mother a seamstress, her grandfather a cake decorator, and her aunt a carpenter. She is an alumnus of the historic Arts High School in Newark and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Maine College of Art & Design.
Athena’s practice encompasses installation, sculpture, video, textiles, and performance, with a focus on centering Black bodies and African diasporic narratives. Guided by the Ghanaian principle of Sankofa, her work reclaims cultural memory and challenges reductive portrayals of Blackness.
She is the founder of Sounds N Sizzle, a Black-centered food and music festival, and has organized Portland’s Juneteenth celebration since 2020. Her work has been shown at Studio Montclair Gallery (NJ), Maine College of Art & Design, and Able Baker Contemporary (ME).
Athena is co-curating SEEN ≠ HEARD with artist Candice Gosta. Her video installation Fit the Description, originally presented in Splay, is reimagined here to address racial profiling and surveillance.
She is a 2024–2025 Leaders of Color Fellow..