Artists-in-Residence

2026

Tag Christof

Photographer

Tag Christof is a photographer, writer and designer whose work explores topics of texture, obsolescence and American identity in the built environment. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and has worked with dozens of publications ranging from Apartamento to ZEITmagazin. He lives in Los Angeles and works primarily from the road.

Amanda Karkoutly

Writer & Historian

Amanda Karkoutly is a local historian and lecturer who writes the CahuengaPast Instagram and newsletter, offering a unique view of history by studying the grand homes of Los Angeles and their former residents, and examining the intersection of architecture, creativity, crime, and metaphysical elements in Hollywood. Her talks and lectures at The Philosophical Research Society include, “David Lynch’s Los Angeles,” “Space is the Place: Intergalactic Los Angeles,” and “Building Belief: Architecture of the Spiritual Seekers in the Hollywood Hills.”

graham Nystrom

Photographer

Graham Nystrom was born and raised in Southern California and lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has spanned illustration, painting, and design, but photography has been his primary artistic practice for the last decade. He has spent many years traversing the American Southwest, drawn to the resilience of the land and the water cycle that shapes it. He first came to Joshua Tree in the late 90s as a novice climber. It was there that his relationship to the natural world, and to photography itself, slowly evolved. More recently, Nystrom has introduced sculpture into the practice, working in wood to explore the uneasy tension between man’s drive to dominate nature and his desire to find the sacred within it.

Amir Saadiq

Multidisciplinary Aritst

Amir Saadiq is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, moving image, and installation. Drawing from literature, personal narrative, and the American landscape, his work examines memory, visibility, and the lingering presence of history.

Saadiq is a current Tulsa Artist Fellow, an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and holds an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from Howard University.

He is currently developing Brother Don't Sing, an ongoing project inspired in part by Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

Eleanor SchIltz

Oil Painter & Writer

Eleanor Schiltz was born in 1998 in Canton, Ohio, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.  She received a BFA from Boston University’s College of Fine Arts in May of 2021, and has since lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, and again her hometown, before settling in Los Angeles. Schiltz is currently a part of the studio known as “Princess Castle,” located in the heart of LA’s Fashion District. Eleanor’s work illustrates shifting memories of an upbringing in Northeastern Ohio and its quiet reverberations beyond the state’s borders. Her paintings reference a personal photographic practice and transmute collected imagery -of forests, farmland, and their inhabitants- into dream-like narratives. Her understanding of the self as an unreliable narrator allows for a softly surreal and bittersweet remembrance of her Midwestern roots, finding solace in depictions of a hushed environment and allusions to an afterlife. This nostalgia, which is sown in the ever-expanding space between past and present, helps to reconcile a growing tenderness for places which simultaneously raised and rejected us. She’s interested in depictions of flora and fauna which illustrate their innate spiritual power and significance.

Caty Smith

Mixed Media Aritst

Caty Smith is a Tulsa-based visual artist working in photography, design, and mixed media. Her practice examines the relationship between memory, material, and place through tactile, analog methods. Using cyanotypes, Polaroid emulsions, toy cameras, and other alternative processes, her work embraces slowness and physical presence, favoring hand-made processes over digital immediacy. Imperfect prints become new forms through collage, toned papers, and subtle shifts in palette, turning fragments into unexpected, yet thoughtful compositions. Her work invites viewers into a more reflective experience of landscape, architecture, and everyday details, revealing how what we choose to preserve shapes our personal and collective histories.