Danielle Ezzo is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Danielle’s work has been published in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Tate and exhibited in numerous exhibitions and festivals including the A.C. Institute and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She’s lectured at conferences, companies, and schools about the future of photography. Bylines include The New Inquiry, Magnum Photos, Right Click Save, Fellowship Trust, and Obscura Journal. She is the author of If Not Here, The Where? published by Silent Face Projects in 2023. Danielle graduated from Lesley University in 2015 with an MFA in Photography and Integrated Media. https://www.danielleezzo.com
Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is author of Palm Springs Noir (Akashic). Her stories are in Orange County Noir, Coolest American Stories, 2022, USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series, Rock, and A Hard Place, Dark City Crime Mystery Magazine, and Literary Hatchet. She received a Distinguished Instructors award from UC-Irvine and is adjunct professor of creative writing at Chapman University and Saddleback College. Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within, was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. For the last 24 years she has hosted Writers on Writing. For 23 of those years, the show broadcast on KUCI-FM.
April - June 2024 Residents
Amey Miller has published fiction, non-fiction, and translation in a number of journals, and has received numerous residencies at artists' colonies. In the short story "News," published in The American LIterary Review, she used a number of decorative elements as well as splices of different sources and pieces of story. She has continued in this vein, becoming a collagist of the page. In 2016 composer Miller and Christopher Preissing received an NEA-funded Chicago Artist Residency production grant using Miller's text. In 2020, she published Snakes, the first part of her text + image series Songs of All Other Birds.
Composer and violinist Tommy Dougherty (b. 1990) is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a composer of orchestral, chamber, and solo works. This year, Tommy is in residence at the Winterthur Museum as a Maker-Creator Fellowship Scholar. In 2021, Tommy received a joint commission from the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and Laurel Arts to compose a work as a tribute to the people of Somerset for the 20th Anniversary of September 11th. He has since been commissioned to write a new work for the JSO’s 2022-2023 season finale. Over the past several years, his music has been performed by the American Composers Orchestra, the Modern Violin Ensemble (MoVE), Alarm Will Sound, and Kinetic Ensemble. As a violinist, Tommy currently serves as Acting Section Violin with the San Diego Symphony.
Katherine Saviskas investigates ancestral reconnection, attempting to decolonize U.S. psychology such that time, blood, and traditions emerge as important or disappear, communities form, and radical aliveness flourishes. Through installation, photography, textiles, folk art, ritual, and social practice, she gathers where longing and play meet. In 2023, Katherine was a Rhizomatic Imagination Fellow with the Center for Story-based Strategy. In 2022, she was an Artist in Residence at Picture Berlin, in Germany. She is a Ph.D. candidate of East-West Psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco, where she is pursuing the Creative Dissertation track.
RESIDENTS: 2024
Ruby Peru's 2017 novel Bits of String Too Small to Save was named Distinguished Favorite by the New York Big Book Award. In the same year, Kirkus Reviews named her an "Indie Author to Watch." Her detective novel Untamed Justice, co-written with retired homicide chief Herman Hinton, has received critical acclaim as well. Ruby also ghostwrites memoirs and nonfiction for thought leaders, scientists, titans of business, cult escapees and others with compelling life stories. Learn more about Ruby Peru at www.rubyperu.com.
Kristine L. Schomaker is an Art Historian, Curator, Publisher, Art Manager, and multidisciplinary artist living and working at the Brewery artist complex in Los Angeles, California. She earned her BA in Art History and MA in Studio Art from California State University at Northridge. Kristine’s art practice includes painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance, and conceptual art based focused on body image and society’s perception of beauty. In 2014 Kristine founded Shoebox Arts to support and empower artists while building community and creating new opportunities. Kristine is also the publisher of Art and Cake, a contemporary L.A. Art magazine.
Michael Remson is an accomplished composer, librettist and author who has had works performed across the United States and in Europe. Among the many professional, college and high school groups that have performed his operas, choral and chamber music include Houston Grand Opera’s “Opera to Go” program, Lone Star Lyric Theater Festival, Houston Ballet Academy, Bulgarian Composers Collaborative, The Cameron Museum (Wilmington NC), Museum of Contemporary Craft (Portland OR), Abilene College Opera, Texas Tech Opera, and New York City Opera’ “Showcasing American Composers” series. Dr. Remson has authored two books on American music and has held numerous faculty appointments over his career.
Mailing address: P.O. Box 6, Temecula, CA 92593 ~ Physical Address: 36701 Highway 79 South, Temecula, CA 92592
(951) 302-3837 ~ www.dorlandartscolony.org ~ info@dorlandartscolony.org
A California 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization
Sooltan Madsen (b. Sun Valley, Idaho) received a B.F.A. in painting from The Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA in 2022. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across the United States including galleries in Savannah, Chicago, Laguna Beach, Long Island, and San Diego. Madsen makes colorful portraits surrounding LGBT and Western identity. Her most recent exhibitions that ran simultaneously were, Proud to Be Seen in Tubac, AZ, SCAD Painting Senior Showcase in Savannah, GA, and Proud+ in San Diego, CA. She currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.
Mia Alvar is the author of IN THE COUNTRY, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, One Story, The Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. Mia has been a writer in residence at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Blue Mountain Center for the Arts. She teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Ryan Smith is a musician, educator, and researcher in nanoscale physics. His creative work focuses on making physics ideas accessible to anyone who is curious, engaging with how experiences with music and nature relate to science. Beyond his research, he has published several popular and educational articles about physics, and is currently developing a nonfiction work “Play Outdoors like a Scientist," aiming to inspire deep wonder from seeing the outdoor world through a scientific lens. Ryan was a recent 2021-22 Alexander von Humboldt scholar in Berlin, Germany, and is currently a tenured physics professor at California State University East Bay.
January - March 2024 Residents
JoBeth McDaniel is an author and journalist with work published in LIFE, AARPMagazine, House Beautiful, Veranda, Islands, Reader’s Digest, Newsweek and Business Week. She wrote for LIFE under five managing editors, operating LIFE’s LA bureau. She was a Working Woman columnist for four years, and Investors BusinessDaily columnist for three. Her bestselling biography A Special Kind of Hero (Doubleday, Dell) was named a Library Journal “Best Book” and a Literary Guild selection. JoBeth’s essays appear in several anthologies. Two were selected for college textbooks.
Patsy Phillips has collaborated for thirty years with artists, educators, scholars, and administrators who advocate for the advancement of contemporary Indigenous arts. She is in her sixteenth year as the Director of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA). Before joining MoCNA, Phillips participated in the planning and opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C. in 2004. Phillips holds an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from Harvard University, and BA in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University. Phillips is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.