Session (37) Artist Talks

We are pleased to welcome our Session 37 Fellows, Armen Davoudian, Nicole Dyer, Azza El Siddique, Duke Riley and Brandon Som, to Fishers Island. They will be in residence from August 27 until October 8, 2019. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming our Fellows to Fishers Island!

*Armen Davoudian grew up in Isfahan, Iran and lives in the Bay Area, where he’s pursuing a PhD in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere. His work has been supported by scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and the Millay Colony. At Lighthouse Works, he will be working on two projects: a first book of poems, and selected translations of Rumi.

Nicole Dyer lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She received a BFA in Drawing from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013, and studied abroad at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland in 2012. Her solo exhibitions include Current Space, Baltimore, MD; Stevenson University, Owings Mills, MD; Casa Corval, Van Nuys, CA; and Annex 2E, Baltimore, MD. She has participated in two-person and group exhibitions including Terrault Gallery, Baltimore, MD; Savery Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; LVL3, Chicago, IL; and Field Projects, New York, NY. Residencies include Glogauair in Berlin, Germany; Lighthouse Works in Fisher Island, NY; Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; ACRE in Steuben, WI; and Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY. She is a recipient of a VSC/Helen Frankenthaler Fellowship, the 2019 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, a 2019 Janet & Walter Sondheim Artscape Prize Semi-finalist and a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields grant. Her work has been featured in Bmoreart, Title Magazine, Fresh Paint Magazine, Art F City, and Work In Progress Publications. Her illustration has been published in novel Fake Like Me, by Barbara Bourland, in 2019.

Azza El Siddique (Khartoum, Sudan) received an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2014. She was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture 2019. Past exhibitions include Let me hear you sweat at Cooper Cole, Toronto and Begin in smoke, end in ashes at Helena Anrather, New York.

Duke Riley is fascinated by maritime history and events around urban waterways. His signature style interweaves historical and contemporary events with elements of fiction and myth to create allegorical histories. His re-imagined narratives comment on a range of issues from the cultural impact of over development and environmental destruction of waterfront communities to contradictions within political ideologies and the role of the artist in society.

Riley has had solo exhibitions at Magnan Metz Gallery, New York City; the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; the Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; and the Havana Biennial (2009 and 2015), among other venues. He has received numerous awards and commissions, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the U.S. State Department’s SmARTpower Program in China and the MTA Arts For Transit commission for the Beach 98th Street Station renovation. In spring of 2016, Riley partnered with Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to produce the public art sensation, ‘Fly By Night’, which was again produced in 2018 by 1418 Now and the London International Festival of Theater. Born in Boston, he received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, before moving to New York, settling in Brooklyn, and earning his M.F.A. from Pratt Institute.

Brandon Som is the author of The Tribute Horse (Nightboat Books), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook Babel’s Moon (Tupelo Press), winner of the Snowbound Prize. He was the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poet-in-Residence at Westminster College, and was awarded fellowships at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Civitella Ranieri. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego*